Lost in Translation

27 09 2013

bg092413dAPR20130924014512Sometimes what you don’t say speak louder than what you say. This cartoon about the Kenyan Mall terrorist massacre says it all.

Also, I continue to warn about the UN meetings this week. Pray for PM Netanyahu speaking there next Tuesday, that he will speak with moral clarity. Truth needs to cut through all the hypocrisy.

Beware the Bazaar. I continue to see major seduction coming from Iran. Before you fall for the lies and deceit of Iran’s new President Rouhani, you need to know how CNN enabled his deception. This was exposed by Wall Street Journal (full quote below). Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s very liberal Iranian reporter may or may not have known, but it is certainly suspicious.

Holocaust Denial in TranslationWall Street Journal – Reasonableness at last. That was the general reaction Wednesday to the news that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani appeared to acknowledge and condemn the Holocaust during an interview this week with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. Previous President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had rarely missed an opportunity to call the Nazi genocide of six million Jews a “myth.” But Mr. Rouhani has adopted a more tempered tone, and the world longs to see him as someone with whom “we can do business together,” as Margaret Thatcher once said about Mikhail Gorbachev.

One problem: The words attributed to Mr. Rouhani are not what he said.

According to CNN’s translation of Mr. Rouhani’s remarks, the Iranian President insisted that “whatever criminality they [the Nazis] committed against the Jews, we condemn.” Yet as Iran’s semi-official news agency Fars pointed out, Mr. Rouhani never uttered anything approximating those words. Nor, contrary to the CNN version, did he utter the word “Holocaust.” Instead, he spoke about “historical events.” Our independent translation of Mr. Rouhani’s comments confirms that Fars, not CNN, got the Farsi right.

So what did Mr. Rouhani really say? After offering a vague indictment of “the crime committed by the Nazis both against the Jews and the non-Jews,” he insisted that “I am not a history scholar,” and that “the aspects that you talk about, clarification of these aspects is a duty of the historians and researchers.”

Pretending that the facts of the Holocaust are a matter of serious historical dispute is a classic rhetorical evasion. Holocaust deniers commonly acknowledge that Jews were killed by the Nazis while insisting that the number of Jewish victims was relatively small and that there was no systematic effort to wipe them out.

We’ll leave it to CNN to account for its translation, and why it made Mr. Rouhani seem so much more conciliatory than he was. Meantime, points for honesty go to the journalists at Fars, who for reasons that probably range from solidarity to self-preservation aren’t disposed to whitewash their President’s ideological predilections.

(A version of this article appeared September 26, 2013, on page A14 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Holocaust Denial in Translation.)

Justice is turned back,  and righteousness stands afar off;  For truth is fallen in the street,  and equity cannot enter. Isaiah 59:14

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. John 14:6

Les Lawrence, Voice of Christian Zionists       (READ MORE)


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4 10 2013
Seeking Peace | Elisha Vision - Commentary

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