U.S. and European media

purposefully and conveniently misquotes President Ahmadinejad to turn the American government and its people against Iran in order to foment more hatred against yet another Muslim country.
--------------------------------------------
Many news sources repeated the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) statement that Ahmadinejad had demanded that "Israel must be wiped off the map", an English idiom which means to "cause a place to stop existing", or to "obliterate totally" or "destroy completely".

Ahmadinejad's phrase was " بايد از صفحه روزگار محو شود " according to the text published on the President's Office's website, and was a quote of Ayatollah Khomeini.

According to Juan Cole, a University of Michigan Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History, Ahmadinejad's statement should be translated as: "this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e eshghalgar-e qods) must vanish from the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)."

According to Cole, "Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to 'wipe Israel off the map' because no such idiom exists in Persian". Instead, "He did say he hoped its regime, i.e., a Jewish-Zionist state occupying Jerusalem, would collapse."

Sources within the Iranian government have also denied that Ahmadinejad issued any sort of threat. On 20 February 2006, Iran's foreign minister denied that Tehran wanted to see Israel "wiped off the map," saying Ahmadinejad had been misunderstood. "Nobody can remove a country from the map. This is a misunderstanding in Europe of what our president mentioned," Manouchehr Mottaki told a news conference, speaking in English, after addressing the European Parliament. "How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. "We do not recognize legally this regime," he said.

Shiraz Dossa, a professor of Political Science at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada who presented a paper at the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust conference in Iran, believes the text is a mistranslation.