It’s not the first time the Los Angeles Times has published pure, unvarnished propaganda from enemies of the US, and it won’t be the last. This time the article is by “special correspondent” Ramin Mostaghim in Tehran, and staff writer Borzou Daragahi in Beirut; oh yeah, I trust them to give me an unbiased report: Iranian president lashes out at Israel.

TEHRAN — The Iranian president delivered fiery remarks today about Israel and his country’s nuclear program on the occasion of Qods Day, the annual commemoration of the Palestinian fight against the Jewish state.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad used the annual occasion marking the Palestinian struggle to criticize Israel’s policies and the West’s taboos on questioning the Holocaust. He repeated his suggestion that the West relocate Israel’s Jews to “somewhere in Canada or Alaska.”

“Taboos on questioning the Holocaust.” Take a moment to savor the foul reek of that statement.

It would be shocking to see such blatant mainstreaming of Holocaust denial, previously the domain of neo-Nazis and other lunatics—except that nothing the LA Times does shocks me any more.

And get a load of this complete hogwash, straight from the Juan Cole school of genocide apologetics:

The controversial president and other officials often repeat an old slogan from Khomeini that Israel should be “eliminated from the pages of time,” which has been incorrectly translated as calling for wiping Israel off the map.

Oh well. That’s much better, isn’t it? He just wants Israel “eliminated,” not wiped off the map. He’s a fuzzy teddy bear at heart, quoting that other fuzzy teddy bear, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

And leave it to the LA Times to promote a now-standard leftist line of garbage that even Reuters has debunked: Feedback from Reuters readers:

You continue to report that “Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be ”wiped off the map“” even though many Mideast experts have stated that the interpretation of what Ahmadinejad actually said was that the “Zionist regime will not last.”

In other words, rather than calling for ethnic cleansing, as your news stories imply, Iranian officials are calling for regime change—a common enough phrase these days. Are your reporters and editors deliberately misinforming the public?

Jan

We actually had access to this speech, and heard the president’s words verbatim from our own TV footage. We stand behind our translation. In this case, he used the word “mahv,” which in Farsi means “wiped off”: Editor