[comrade_ogilvy]

Part of the problem here is a matter of conflating people and government.

"Death to America" =/= "Death to Americans"

The better translation is "Regime change in America" -- they want a "better" (in their eyes) gov't in America, and an end to the obnoxious (in their eyes) American foreign policy. (Obviously, chanting does not automatically grant such. But whatever.)

And that works the other way around. "We support regime change in Tehran" translates into "Death to Iran". Iranians understand this. Americans do not.

When an Iranian official says "We believe that the unjust Israeli gov't will eventually fall, and only be a memory in the history books", they may mean exactly that. "Somehow" that gets translated into "Kill all the Jews" in certain Western media.

Of course, "kill all the Jews" is provably wrong, because there are tens of thousands of Jews still living in Iran. (The number has been declining, but the rump of a once thriving populous still endures.) If the Iranian gov't actually believed killing Jews was a positive thing in the eyes of Allah, they could rack up tens of thousands of bonus points in short order. They do not. Their quarrel is with the existing governments of Israel and America, not with the people in general.