Iran Never Threatened to ‘Wipe Israel Off the Map’

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Iran Never Threatened to ‘Wipe Israel Off the Map’
A view of civilian areas damaged in recent U.S.-Israeli strikes in Tehran, Iran. (Fatemeh Bahrami )

The “wipe Israel off the map” quote is a deliberate mistranslation—one the media has used for decades to manufacture hostility toward Iran.

By Jeremy R. Hammond, reposted from Jeremy R. Hammond.com, June 2, 2026

It has often been claimed by the Western news media, usually in the context of Iran’s nuclear program, that Iran has threatened to “wipe Israel off the map”. Specifically, the quote is attributed to former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The implication is that Iran has threatened to wage horrific acts of war against Israel to physically destroy the country and the Israeli people.

The New York Times, for example, repeated the claim in a report last month about how Israel and the US launched their joint war on Iran at the end of February with a plan for regime change.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was assassinated during the initial joint strikes on Iran on February 28, when the US and Israel launched their illegal war of aggression against the country.

Chosen to replace Khamenei, according to the Times report, was none other than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose criticisms of the Iranian government had resulted in him being placed under house arrest.

According to the Times,

Mr. Ahmadinejad was injured on the war’s first day by an Israeli strike at his home in Tehran that had been designed to free him from house arrest, the American officials and an associate of Mr. Ahmadinejad said. He survived the strike, they said, but after the near miss he became disillusioned with the regime change plan.

He has not been seen publicly since then and his current whereabouts and condition are unknown.

To say that Mr. Ahmadinejad was an unusual choice would be a vast understatement. While he had increasingly clashed with the regime’s leaders and had been placed under close watch by the Iranian authorities, he was known during his term as president, from 2005 to 2013, for his calls to “wipe Israel off the map.” He was a strong supporter of Iran’s nuclear program, a fierce critic of the United States and known for violently cracking down on internal dissent. [Emphasis added.]

It goes without saying that Iran’s former president supported Iran’s right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to enrich uranium for civilian purposes. So, specifying that Ahmadinejad was a “supporter of Iran’s nuclear program” is the Times’ way of gratuitously associating the “wipe Israel off the map” quote with the threat of nuclear weapons against Israel.

The Times also knows that this is a misquote from Ahmadinejad but uses it anyway.

I’m not kidding.

In 2006, Times reporter Ethan Bronner—whose propagandistic work for the Times I methodically dismantle in my book Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict—wrote an article essentially explaining why the “wipe Israel off the map” quote is inaccurate, but why the Times would go on using it anyway.

The quote is said to come from a speech Ahmadinejad gave in October 2005 at a “World Without Zionism” conference, a partial transcript of which was provided at the time, in Farsi, by the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA).

The key sentence is:

Ű§Ù…Ű§Ù… ŰčŰČيŰČ Ù…Ű§ ÙŰ±Ù…ÙˆŰŻÙ†ŰŻ كه Ű§ÙŠÙ† Ű±Ú˜ÙŠÙ… ۧێŰșŰ§Ù„ÚŻŰ± Ù‚ŰŻŰł ŰšŰ§ÙŠŰŻ ۧŰČ Ű”ÙŰ­Ù‡ Ű±ÙˆŰČگۧ۱ Ù…Ű­Ùˆ ŰŽÙˆŰŻ

An English translation was provided at the time by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

In his speech, Ahmadinejad referred to the dictatorial regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, whose power was consolidated in 1953 because of a CIA-backed coup to replace Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. The US supported the Shah’s regime, even helping Iran to build its nuclear program, until he was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The revolution was led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who died in 1989 and was succeeded by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. After Khamenei’s assassination on February 28, 2026, his son Mojtaba Khamenei was selected for the role of Iran’s Supreme Leader.

Here is the fuller context of Ahmadinejad’s statement (with the oft-misquoted sentence in bold emphasis):

When the dear Imam [Khomeini] said that [the Shah’s] regime must go, and that we demand a world without dependent governments, many people who claimed to have political and other knowledge [asked], “Is it possible [that the Shah’s regime can be toppled]?”

That day, when Imam [Khomeini] began his movement, all the powers supported [the Shah’s] corrupt regime
 and said it was not possible. However, our nation stood firm, and by now we have, for 27 years, been living without a government dependent on America. Imam [Khomeini] said: “The rule of the East [U.S.S.R.] and of the West [U.S.] should be ended.” But the weak people who saw only the tiny world near them did not believe it.

Nobody believed that we would one day witness the collapse of the Eastern Imperialism [i.e. the U.S.S.R], and said it was an iron regime. But in our short lifetime we have witnessed how this regime collapsed in such a way that we must look for it in libraries, and we can find no literature about it.

Imam [Khomeini] said that Saddam [Hussein] must go, and that he would be humiliated in a way that was unprecedented. And what do you see today? A man who, 10 years ago, spoke as proudly as if he would live for eternity is today chained by the feet, and is now being tried in his own country…

Imam [Khomeini] said: “This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history.” This sentence is very wise. The issue of Palestine is not an issue on which we can compromise.

Here are a few key points about the context of the statement to keep in mind:

  1. Ahmadinejad’s speech was about the need to end oppressive regimes.
  2. His references to the US-backed regime of Iran’s former Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and the Soviet Union make clear that he was not speaking in terms of militarily destroying a country—even if that were a possible interpretation to of the reference to the dictator Saddam Hussein, who was overthrown in the US government’s illegal war of aggression against Iraq, which like Trump’s war on Iran was waged on false pretexts.
  3. In the key sentence, Ahmadinejad was quoting something previously said by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
  4. The quote speaks of the need to end the regime occupying Jerusalem, which aligns with the will of the international community.

Indeed, in July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip and West Bank, including East Jerusalem, violates international law and amounts to the crime of apartheid.

In his 2006 defense of the mistranslation “wipe Israel off the map”, Ethan Bronner admitted that Ahmadinejad had said “occupying regime of Jerusalem”, not “Israel”.

The significance is that the Iranian president was talking about the need to end Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people—as opposed to simply hating Israel for being a self-described “Jewish” state.

Bronner defended the “Israel” version, anyway, on the grounds that it represented “the depth of the Iranian president’s rejection of a Jewish state in the Middle East”.

Thus, the Times insisted on taking a fundamentally anti-Zionist statement and deliberately re-rendering it to be inherently anti-Semitic.

Bronner also defended “wipe off” instead of “vanish” or “be eliminated from”, even though this shifts the verb phrase to active from passive voice. The Western media’s preferred version has Iran as the subject actively doing the wiping, whereas Ahmadinejad’s actual statement merely had the oppressive Zionist regime being appropriately ended.

Bronner similarly defended “the map” instead of “pages of history” on the grounds that Ahmadinejad had misquoted Khomeini.

I am, again, not kidding.

As Bronner explained, Ahmadinejad had said “safheh roozgar”, which admittedly does mean “pages of time or history”; but Khomeini had originally said “sahneh roozgar”, which was less specific and had oft been interpreted as “map”—even though it, too, could be interpreted as something more like “book of countries”, which idiom admittedly didn’t have an equivalent metaphor in the English language.

So, now you can understand what I mean when I say, “The Times also knows that this is a misquote from Ahmadinejad but uses it anyway.”

I mean that the mainstream media, as epitomized by America’s “newspaper of record”, deliberately misrepresent cited sources for the transparent purpose of engineering consent for US foreign policy in the Middle East.

Bronner’s twisted reasoning led to this conclusion:

So did Iran’s president call for Israel to be wiped off the map? It certainly seems so. Did that amount to a call for war? That remains an open question.

Of course, the question only remained “open” because of the misquotation that Ahmadinejad called “for Israel to be wiped off the map”, which he literally did not say.

The US government’s narrative that Iran was a threat because it had threatened to militarily “wipe Israel off the map” had to be sustained, so the Times has dutifully accommodated it for all these years.

It’s a useful illustration of how the Times fulfills its propaganda function as a standard bearer of what passes for journalism.

Another example is how the Times editorial board narrowly criticized Donald Trump’s war on Iran for being poorly planned and executed instead of for violating the US Constitution and international law and for being waged on false pretexts.

Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence, after all, had just a short time before reiterated the US intelligence community’s longstanding assessment that Iran had no active nuclear weapons program.

And while claiming his war was to stop Iran from having a nuclear weapon within two weeks, Trump himself self-contradictorily insisted that Iran’s nuclear program remained “obliterated” from “Operation Midnight Hammer” in June 2025, when the US similarly joined Israel in bombing the country.

Both times the US launched its bombing campaigns, the Iranians were negotiating a resolution to the nuclear issue, insisting on their right under the NPT to enrich uranium for civilian purposes while offering a strict safeguards regime under the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

In response to Iran’s good-faith efforts to resolve the matter diplomatically, the Trump administration issued ultimatums to demand they surrender the right under threat of force, which itself violates the UN Charter, while actual use of force constitutes aggression—”the supreme international crime” as defined at Nuremberg.

Iran’s alleged threat to “wipe Israel off the map”, therefore, serves as a sufficient pretext for the US and Israel’s real criminal violence against Iran, in the mainstream narrative.

Iran’s hypothetical future violence makes it a US “adversary” while Israel’s genocide in Gaza has received the full bipartisan support of both Biden and Trump administrations.

We’re told to fear Islamic extremists while Jewish extremists perpetrate genocide and Christian extremists view Trump as a messiah-like figure waging a religious conflict to bring about the “end times” war of Armageddon.

When Iran releases AI-generated videos of Lego characters and scenes to condemn the US government’s criminal violence, with a message of peace and solidarity between Iranians and the American people, the content must be banned, and we are told by the Times to be very concerned about Iran “trolling” the US and “advancing their interests at our expense”—as though the US war on Iran were in the interests of We the People (and not only corrupt politicians and the military industrial complex).

Never mind if Iran’s videos speak just as well for peace-loving Americans who oppose their government’s criminal violence as for the Iranian people.

Sure, the high gasoline prices resulting from Trump’s war are a cause for partisan criticism, a key example of Trump bungling the war’s execution, with “the Republicans” having “proved to be poor shepherds of the national interest”.

But the focus remains narrowly on the economic impact on Americans, with no consideration for the suffering of Iranians or for how waging illegal wars on false pretexts harms US national security interests, including by undermining the rule of law and the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Americans are simply not supposed to view Iran as a country with which it is possible to have peaceful relations. Iran is too independent, too insubordinate to Washington, DC, and its goal of global hegemony. Hence, Iran must be portrayed as an “enemy” and “adversary” to be defeated.

Hence, Iran’s people must be collectively punished through crippling sanctions under a “maximum pressure” campaign—and the Iranian regime must be, shall we say, wiped off the map, just as the US-backed government of Israel has sought for its entire existence to wipe Palestine off the map.

The hypocrisy has no bounds, and the mainstream media serve the necessary propaganda function of manipulating public opinion by narrowing the range of criticism to Americans having to pay more at the pump while dutifully excusing the criminal nature of Washington’s own violence.

*Editor’s note: Bronner’s son served in the Israeli military

Jeremy R. Hammond is an independent journalist dedicated to exposing state propaganda designed to manufacture consent for criminal government policies.

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