Ahmadinejad

That Ahmadinejad over in Iran sure is frightening, what with his widely quoted statement "Israel must be wiped off the map". Only now blogotopia is all frothy with word that Juan Cole, who actually knows Farsi, has translated Ahmadinejad's speech and found that:

"...[Ahmadinejad] made an analogy to Khomeini's determination and success in getting rid of the Shah's government, which Khomeini had said "must go" (az bain bayad berad). Then Ahmadinejad defined Zionism not as an Arabi-Israeli national struggle but as a Western plot to divide the world of Islam with Israel as the pivot of this plan. The phrase he then used as I read it is "The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] from the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)." Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope-- that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah's government. Whatever this quotation from a decades-old speech of Khomeini may have meant, Ahmadinejad did not say that "Israel must be wiped off the map" with the implication that phrase has of Nazi-style extermination of a people. He said that the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time."

Not that Ahmadinejad is a nice guy - far from it - but he apparently is not currently being as scary as he's reported to be in the US media. Compare to R. Reagan in a speech to the British parliament in 1982:

In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis — a crisis where the demands of the economic order are colliding directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union.... [Communism will be] left on the ash heap of history.

Might one have concluded from that comment, combined with the nuclear buildup of the early 1980s, that Reagan actually intended to reduce the Soviet Union to rubble? Heavens no, you need to read the quotation in context. Wait a minute, is this the context?

"My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." [August 1984]