Just to make it clear (Ahmadinezhad never said "Israel must be wiped off the map.")

Minister of Intelligence and Atomic Energy Dan Meridor told Al Jazeera that Iran never vowed to "wipe Israel off the map," as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly claimed.

Speaking to the Arab network, Meridor, who also serves as deputy PM, said Iran's leaders "all come basically ideologically, religiously with the statement that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive." However, he added, "They didn't say 'we'll wipe it out,' but (rather) 'it will not survive, it is a cancerous tumor, it should be removed'. They repeatedly said 'Israel is not legitimate, it should not exist'."

[link to www.ynetnews.com]

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In a reminder that Persian rhetoric is not always easy for English-speakers to interpret, a senior Israeli official has acknowledged that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, never actually said that Israel “must be wiped off the map.”

Those words were attributed to Mr. Ahmadinejad in 2005, in English translations of his speech to a “World Without Zionism” conference that October. As my colleague Ethan Bronner reported the next year, one problem was translating a metaphorical turn of phrase in Persian that has no exact English equivalent — there was, for instance, no mention of a map — and there was a heated debate about whether the original statement was a threat or a prediction.

[link to thelede.blogs.nytimes.com]

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4 things we should know about Iran :

1. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never said that Israel should be "wiped off the map."
2. Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons.
3. Iran has a legitimate need for more energy, which is driving its nuclear efforts.
4. The US and Israel both say Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program.

Explanation 1 :

Arash Norouzi of the Mossadegh Project noted in 2007 that Ahmadinejad "never... uttered the words 'map,' 'wipe out,' or even 'Israel'" in his statement. Rather, he argued, the translation should have been that "this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." (Both The Washington Post and The Atlantic came up with similarly variant translations.)

Explanation 2 :

Whatever words Ahmadinejad used to describe his attitude towards Israel, it is undeniable that he is not the true leader of Iran. That role is filled by the country's supreme leader and foremost religious figure, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Mr. Khamenei's words are highly influential among religious Shiites –thus making his 2005 fatwa against nuclear weapons a significant factor in discussing Iran's nuclear program.

Explanation 3 :

While Iran is a major supplier of both oil – it is the fourth largest producer in the world according to the CIA's World Factbook – it is also a major consumer. The Green Party of Iran (an environmental party not to be confused with the Green Movement behind the 2009 presidential protests) estimated in 2000 that Iran ranked second only to the US in gasoline consumption. But despite Iran's huge oil production, it lacks the facilities to refine it into gasoline, forcing it to import a barrel of oil for every eight it exports. According to Majd, some Iranians blame their lack of refining infrastructure on Western sanctions.

Explanation 4 :

National Intelligence Agency Director James Clapper wrote in a report to the Senate Armed Services Committee that "Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons... should it choose to do so. We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons."

When asked in a hearing by Sen. Carl Levin (D) of Michigan to confirm that "Iran has not yet decided to develop nuclear weapons," Mr. Clapper did so, saying “That is the intelligence community’s assessment …," and he reiterated that he has doubts about whether Iran is attempting to create a nuclear weapon when pressed further by Sen. Lindsay Graham (R) of South Carolina. Gen. Roland Burgess of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who also appeared at the hearing, agreed with Clapper's assessment.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta made statements even more to the point than Clapper's in January. In the January 8 edition of CBS's Face the Nation, Mr. Panetta said flat out, "Are they [Iran] trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No."

Israeli intelligence also does not believe that Iran is currently pursuing a nuclear weapon. In January, Haaretz reported that Israel believes Iran "has not yet decided whether to translate [its efforts to improve its nuclear power] capabilities into a nuclear weapon - or, more specifically, a nuclear warhead mounted atop a missile." That same month, Israeli military intelligence chief Gen. Aviv Kochavi told a Knesset hearing that Iran is not working on building a nuclear bomb, reported Agence France-Presse.