Iran’s nuclear programme is the biggest threat to Jews since the Nazi Holocaust, the Israeli government stated on Monday, as the Iranian president renewed his calls for the dissolution of the Jewish state.
As Israel prepared to mark Holocaust memorial day, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President, further stirred international outrage by calling on Israeli Jews to be resettled in Europe.
”Some 60 years have passed since the end of the second world war. Why should the people of Germany and Palestine pay now for a war in which the current generation was not involved?” Ahmadinejad said during a Tehran press conference. ”This fake regime cannot logically continue to live.”
With international tension mounting over Iran’s nuclear plans and its defiance of the United Nations Security Council, the outgoing Israeli Defence Minister, Shaul Mofaz, told a Tel Aviv conference that the world had to act to stop Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. He was speaking following the conclusion of a two-year Israeli government-ordered study of the nuclear threat from Iran, which warned that the existence of an Iranian bomb would trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.
Israel itself is a nuclear power and its refusal to discuss its nuclear options is constantly used by the Iranians to justify their nuclear programmes — though they insist they are purely peaceful.
Ahmadinejad warned for the first time on Monday that Iran could quit the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, clearing the way for it to follow North Korea down the path of building a nuclear bomb without regard for international treaties.
The head of the UN nuclear authority, Mohamed ElBaradei, is to report on Iran’s nuclear projects to the UN Security Council by this Friday, setting the scene for the next escalation in the nuclear dispute. ElBaradei is certain to deliver a negative verdict to New York as Tehran has accelerated its nuclear activities radically in the past month, disregarding repeated demands that it freeze the key activities.
Tehran announced this month that it was effectively a nuclear power as it had managed to enrich uranium — and thus master the basic technologies needed to manufacture the fuel for nuclear reactors and also the fissile material required for nuclear warheads.
The Iranian president clearly timed his remarks to pre-empt the ElBaradei report and to up the ante in the showdown with Washington, where talk of war with Iran gets louder by the week.
”Working in the framework of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty and the [international atomic energy] agency is our concrete policy,” the Iranian leader said. ”But if we see that they are violating our rights, or they don’t want to accept [our rights], well, we will reconsider.”
ElBaradei’s report this week will be crucial to deciding the next international moves on the Iranian nuclear crisis. However, the US push to move swiftly towards punitive sanctions is being stymied by stiff Russian and Chinese opposition in the security council.
While many will find the Iranian leader’s remarks on Israel deeply offensive, some Israeli analysts believe the bellicose rhetoric is aimed mainly at shoring up his own uncertain powerbase.
The US administration has declared Iran under Ahmadinejad its biggest international challenge, and the Israelis are even more alarmed. But Mofaz emphasised the need for diplomatic rather than military action against Iran.
”Of all the threats we face, Iran is the biggest. The world must not wait. It must do everything necessary on a diplomatic level in order to stop its nuclear activity. Since Hitler we have not faced such a threat,” said the Israeli minister, who was himself born in Iran. – Guardian Unlimited Â