WEEKLY STANDARD contributing editor Reuel Marc Gerecht sends an email to Jeffrey Goldberg in response to a post that sought to clarify just what Mahmoud Ahmadinejad meant when he threatened to wipe Israel off the map:
It matters not whether it’s from a map or from our memories, it’s the verb that always matters. “Mahve Shodan” is a strong verb. It is in the passive here (“mahve shovad” in the original), but the intent is beyond dispute. One can take some comfort that Ahmadinejad did not use the active voice, but that would be presumptuous even for him. I don’t have at my finger tips the original Persian newspapers celebrating the destruction of the US Marines in Beirut in 1983–I can’t recall reading a mournful account from Iran–but I’m willing to bet large quantities of money that the verbs used to describe the slaughter of the US Marines were not in the active since there was no desire on the part of the regime to take credit even though credit was deserved. The issue was surely not the voice employed, but the explosion. Those who dwell on verb voices and tenses make one deeply suspicious about their intellectual integrity.
