Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Thursday that Israel ”one day will vanish” as he ramped up his anti-Western rhetoric in a speech to university students in Jakarta.
”This regime one day will vanish,” the hardline leader said, complaining that when elections were held in the Palestinian territories ”and supported by its people, liberalism did not want to recognise it”.
The Iranian president declared last October that the Jewish state should be ”wiped off the map”. In April he said that Israel ”cannot survive” and that migrants to the Jewish state should go back to where they came from.In April he said that Israel ”cannot survive” and that migrants to the Jewish state should go back to where they came from.
Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres warned on Tuesday that Iran risked its own destruction if it tried to wipe out the Jewish state. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has said the world should not take Ahmadinejad’s threats lightly.
Israel has come to view Tehran as its chief enemy since the 2003 downfall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and has been alarmed by the Iranian leader’s statements as well as his dismissal of the Nazi Holocaust as a myth.
Western nations have accused Iran of trying to obtain nuclear weapons under the disguise of its controversial nuclear programme, but the Islamic state insists that it is only intended for peaceful means. – Sapa-AFP