NY Times Hides the Iranian Threat to Israel – Again

The New York Times reports:

In Tehran, the speech by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, made during Friday Prayer and broadcast live to the nation, came amid deepening American concern about a possible military strike on Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites by Israel, whose leaders delivered blunt new warnings on Thursday about what they called the need to stop Iran’s nuclear program. Israel considers a nuclear-armed Iran a threat to its existence. (Robert F. Worth and David E. Sanger, “U.N. Nuclear Inspectors’ Visit to Iran Is a Failure, West Says,” New York Times, February 3, 2012.)

Now why, pray tell, might Israel “consider” a nuclear-armed Iran a threat to its existence?

The Times doesn’t get into specifics, and indeed leaves out a key part of Khamenei’s speech, reported by the Ahlul Bayt (“Holy Household”) Islamic News Agency:

“The Zionist regime is truly a cancerous tumor in the region and it must be, and will be, cut off.”

Why did the Times leave out that key statement, and present this very real threat to Israel as a mere concern?

This is just another one of the many, many patterns of bias the New York Times is perpetrating against Israel. In reporting on Ahmadinejad’s horrific threat that Israel “must be wiped off the map,” the Times has cleverly re-translated the original Farsi into the far milder wish that Israel should “vanish from the pages of time.” (Ethan Bronner, “Just How Far Did They Go, Those Words Against Israel?”, New York Times, June 11, 2006)

Of course, the Times’ mistranslation ignores the fact that the Iranian government has erected billboards with the phrase “Israel should be wiped out of the face of the world” in plain English, and the slogan is painted on Iranian ballistic missiles.

The English section of Ahmadinejad’s own website quotes him as saying that Israel “will be wiped off the map.” (“President Says Zionist Regime of Israel Faces Deadend,” June 3, 2008) And Dariush Rezaiinejad, chief commander of Iran’s Basij militia, has stated clearly: “We have no option but to have the Zionist regime wiped off the map.” (“IRGC Basij: No Choice But to Wipe Out Israel,” Home Daily News – Iran, July 27, 2011)

But all of this has been erased from the New York Times, the increasingly-questionable “newspaper of record.”