Some stupid with a flare gun

There doesn't seem yet to be any official translation of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's rambling speech to the useless "Durban II" conference in Geneva. But here's a UN summary of a key sentence -- a sentence not referred to in the official news agency (IRNA) coverage --

Following World War Two, many proponents of racism resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless, on the pretext of Jewish sufferings and the ambiguous and dubious question of the holocaust.

"Pretext", "ambiguous", "dubious". Cue the row over how these translate from Farsi. But it doesn't look good.

The only good news is that he could actually lose an election.

UPDATE 21 APRIL: Things get interesting. We relied above on the UN account of what Ahmadinejad said, which in turn relied on their English translator. But it appears that he never spoke the words "ambiguous and dubious". These were in his prepared remarks, but not delivered. This was picked up by the French translation which followed the golden rule ... check against delivery. Of course the likelihood remains that the written speech is what Ahmadinejad believes. Anyway, the result is that the passage we quoted above from the UN account is gone. It now says --

Two, many proponents of racism resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless, on the pretext of Jewish sufferings and the abuse of the question of the holocaust. They sent migrants from Europe, the United States and other parts of the world in order to establish a totally racist government in the occupied Palestine.

Describing Israel's 1947 Jewish population as "migrants from Europe" is, shall we say, an understated description of why they're not in Europe any more --

JERUSALEM – Hanita Leshem's parents handed her over to a Christian family in Ukraine in 1941, when she was just a year old, to save her from the Nazi troops murdering the Jews there.

Leshem, now a 69-year-old grandmother living in Jerusalem, never saw her mother and father again.

On Tuesday, she stood among other child survivors as Israel marked its annual Holocaust Remembrance Day honoring the 6 million Jews who perished at the hands of the Nazis — including her parents.

Leshem was raised by two Christian families and spent some time in a Polish orphanage before she moved at age 7 to what later became Israel, where she was adopted. For decades, she was unable to track down the names of her biological parents. But after exhaustive research and a trip to her hometown near Lvov, she finally learned in 1995 that she was born Isabela Waldbaum, the only child of Ella and Leopold.