Posted by Cleveland Plain Dealer In a body riven by ideology and partisanship, the admittedly symbolic resolution won rare across-the-board support. Its 103 co-sponsors included Democrat Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Cleveland and Republican Steve LaTourette of Concord Township. It passed 411-2. One of the two dissenters was Cleveland's own odd man out, Dennis Kucinich. As reported by Plain Dealer Washington Bureau Chief Steve Koff, Kucinich offered some characteristically tortured logic in defense of his frankly indefensible vote. The resolution, he contended, relied on a worst-case translation of a 2005 speech in which Ahmadinejad, then Iran's newly elected leader, said Israel "should be wiped off the map." Some Iran specialists have suggested that Ahmadinejad did not literally mean he was going to wipe away Israel, because there's no such idiom in Persian; rather, he simply hoped the Israeli government would collapse and go away. Like Kucinich, they suggest that the more provocative translation is designed to rile the West and lay the groundwork for military action against Iran. What poppycock. Ethan Bronner, deputy foreign editor of the New York Times, explored the translation issue more than a year ago and found that all official translations of Ahmadinejad's speech, including his own Web site's, refer to wiping away Israel. So do stories on the al-Jazeera Web site. More telling, the Iranian leader has continued to talk about wiping out Israel - strange behavior if he believed that a misinterpretation was sowing confusion. There's more: During last summer's fighting between Israel and Iranian-backed Hezbollah, Ahmadinejad told a Muslim summit in Malaysia that "the Zionist regime" needed to be destroyed. He welcomed Holocaust deniers to Tehran in December. Just last month, at ceremonies marking the 18th anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini's death, he again said "the Zionist regime" would be destroyed soon. All mistranslations, Congressman? After being criticized for his vote by leaders of Cleveland's Jewish community, Kucinich insisted that, whatever the translation, he finds Ahmadinejad's words "objectionable and outrageous" and fully supports "the people of Israel." He just dislikes saber-rattling. Over the years, we have defended Kucinich as a man of principle, even when we have disagreed with those principles. We watched him drift farther and farther from the mainstream of his party and his district. But has his anti-war, anti-Bush fervor so blinded him to the realities of Iran and its bombastic leader that he now fails to recognize a clear threat to peace when it's standing right in front of him?
on July 15, 2007, 10:39 am
24.165.160.207
On June 20, the House of Representa tives passed a resolution denouncing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a long string of threats against Israel. It urged the United Nations Security Council to censure Ahmadinejad for his remarks and to consider measures to prevent Iran from obtaining the nuclear weapons that might give his bluster some deadly teeth. Finally, it reaffirmed America's long partnership with Israel.
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