Via translation error, Syria admits nuclear facility
Arabic is an extremely difficult language to translate, but this is a pretty huge mistake. A U.N. document misquoted a Syrian official as admitting that Israel struck a Syrian nuclear facility rather than an unused military building. Furious at the error, the Syrians convinced the United Nations to correct the transcript: At U.N. headquarters, the ...
Arabic is an extremely difficult language to translate, but this is a pretty huge mistake. A U.N. document misquoted a Syrian official as admitting that Israel struck a Syrian nuclear facility rather than an unused military building. Furious at the error, the Syrians convinced the United Nations to correct the transcript:
Arabic is an extremely difficult language to translate, but this is a pretty huge mistake. A U.N. document misquoted a Syrian official as admitting that Israel struck a Syrian nuclear facility rather than an unused military building. Furious at the error, the Syrians convinced the United Nations to correct the transcript:
At U.N. headquarters, the spokesman's office said the Syrian representative spoke to the disarmament committee in Arabic.
[U.N. associate spokesman Farhan] Haq said the exact words of the English interpreter were: "An entity that is the fourth largest exporter of weapons of mass destruction in the world, an entity that violates other countries' airspace, and that takes action against nuclear facilities, including the attack on 6 July this year on a nuclear facility in my country _ that entity has no right to lie, which it has done consistently."
After studying the Arabic comments, U.N. officials released a corrected English translation late Wednesday afternoon.
According to the new text, the Syrian delegate said: "… the (entity) that is ranking number four among the exporters of lethal weapons in the world; that which violates the airspace of sovereign states and carries out military aggression against them, like what happened on Sept. 6 against my country, such entity with all those characteristics and even more, has no right for its representative to go on lying without shame."
In case you're wondering, "the entity" or "the Zionist entity" is how countries like Syria that don't recognize Israel refer to the Jewish state.
What continues to be strange about this episode is that neither the Syrians nor the Israelis have produced hard evidence that there either was or was not such a facility. First, the Syrians said there was no attack and that their air defenses repelled Israeli war planes, then President Bashar al-Assad told the BBC there was an attack on an unused military facility, and then Syrian officials showed journalists the place where, according to some reports, the purported attack occurred. There have been plenty of anonymous quotes from American officials confirming that Israel struck a suspected nuclear facility, but again, no evidence. So why not send in inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to clear things up?
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