Hey, Brian & Mary, go online and do a little research: “The translation presented by the official Islamic Republic News Agency has been challenged by Arash Norouzi, who says the statement “wiped off the map” was never made and that Ahmadinejad did not refer to the nation or land mass of Israel, but to the “regime occupying Jerusalem”. Norouzi translated the original Persian to English, with the result, “the Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”[11] Juan Cole, a University of Michigan Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History, agrees that Ahmadinejad’s statement should be translated as, “the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e eshghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad).[12] According to Cole, “Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to ‘wipe Israel off the map’ because no such idiom exists in Persian.” Instead, “he did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse.”[13] The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) translated the phrase similarly, as “this regime” must be “eliminated from the pages of history.”[14]

Israel can take care of themselves, they actually have hundreds of nuclear weapons. Quit being Israel first proponents. Think about our soldiers dying in the Middle East and our economy for a change.

Great research, Eddy. That is a key question, is Israel our 51st state? It is immoral to confiscate money from us to fund the defense of another nation, one that many of us would not choose to support! These neocons really talk as if we owe all the blood and wealth we have to the defense of the Jewish state.

I don’t much care what the Israeli’s do, but I resent their tremendous influence inside our government!