Who is Hiding Something, AP or Ahmadinejad?
The story of the quote “invite your ancestors from hell”, which AP believes Ahmadinejad has said, is getting more complicated (for the background see this). This morning I recieved an email from AP which says,
We doublechecked the quote. The translation in the AP story is correct. “Agar hameh-ye-shoma jam’ shaveed va ajdaad-e-khod raa neez az Jahannam faraa bekhaaneed…” is in the Farsi version of the specific IRNA report we referenced in our story.
I doublecheked the source too. IRNA has carried the regarding report in two pieces (1) (2). The first report, third paragraph, seems to be the source of AP. However, there is no hell in that sentence, at least not now,
The President addressed the enemies of the Iranian nation and asked “what are you looking for? Today, the Iranian nation owns the complete nuclear fuel cycle and if you all gather, you won’t be able to stop the Iranian nation’s movement”.
The page unfortunately is not cached in Google, so I can’t tell if the original version has been tampered with. There is another source which has republished IRNA and has been cached in Google. That source is the spokesman of the Government of IR and does now show any trace of the AP sentence. There is nothing either in a feed aggregator which has copied the IRNA text.
To be frank, I found one Persian blog which carries the text as AP has quoted it. It does seem like another version of the same speech and does include the “hell” sentence. I am communicating with the author of the post to know where he has found the text. I will also try to talk to AP to ask them for their source.
For the time being, searching the AP-provided sentence, only one entry shows up in Google (the blog I mentioned earlier). Parseek and Ghatreh
(the Persian news search engines) are not able to find the sentence.
p.s. Mr. Ahmadinejad you owe me.
