New York Times explains away Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's threat to destroy Israel

New York Times explains away Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's threat to destroy Israel

Posted By: Toby Harnden at May 15, 2009 at 21:10:46

Posted in: Foreign Correspondents
Tags:
israel, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, New York Times, pope

There's an unintentionally hilarious piece of editing in a news story headlined "Netanyahu Urges Pope to Speak Out Against Iran" in today's New York Times.

I say "editing" because it can only have been done by the hand of an editor - I can't believe any reporter would have written the sentence in bold below.

After a quotation from the Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu asking the Pope "as a moral figure to make his voice heard loudly and continuously against the declarations coming from Iran about their intentions to destroy the state of Israel", this was inserted into the story:

(In the past, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has called for Israel's destruction, although on at least one occasion last year, he used somewhat less severe language, saying Israel would collapse.)

Got that? Ahmadinejad has called for Israel's destruction "in the past" (to quibble, he can hardly have done so in the future) but it's important to recognise that he subsequently said merely that Israel "would collapse".

Set aside the sheer ponderousness of the sentence and the journalistic crime of shoe-horning it into the third paragraph of a news story.

It's like a lawyer who is defending a client accused of threatening to kill someone saying: "Well, Your Honour, my client did say he intended to murder the victim. But since then he's moderated his intentions considerably, demonstrated by the fact that on at least one occasion he's said merely that the victim will die."

The New York Times seems to think that we should all be mightily reassured that Ahmadinejad doesn't threaten each and every day to wipe the Jewish state off the map.
Israel can rest easy then, I suppose.