President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu have bandied thousands of words in their dispute over an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites. For a time, their argument muffled the abiding ambition of the Islamic Republic to destroy Israel – come what may.
However, the message roared by Iranian leaders over last weekend – before and after Al Quds Day – was quite simply this: Israel must be destroyed, irrespective of whether or not it attacks the Islamic Republic
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was cheered by half a million demonstrators in Tehran shouting: Death to Israel! Death to America! when he declared Israel is a “cancerous tumor” that will soon be finished off in the new Middle East. He called “the Zionist regime’s existence an insult to all humanity.”
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said: “The fake Zionist (regime) will disappear from the landscape of geography,”
And although both were severely rebuked by world leaders for their violent invective, it continued to pour out of Tehran in a comment by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force Chief, Brig. Gen. Amir Hajizadeh who said an Israeli attack would be welcome “as a pretext to get rid of Israel for good.”
Israel’s new Home Defense Minister Avi Dichter laid it out in plain language: While Syria, Lebanon and Gaza confront Israel with a strategic threat, Iran imperils our very existence.”
