President Ahmadinejad has repeatedly called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” In his address to world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly on September 23rd, he said Israel “is on a definite slope to collapse, and there is no way for it to get out of the cesspool created by itself and its supporters.”
In language similar to the Nazi propaganda that paved the way for the murder of more than six million Jews during World War Two, Mr. Ahmadinejad also said that Zionists were manipulating the world’s financial, monetary and political centers “in a deceitful, complex and furtive manner.”
At a meeting of the UN Security Council on September 26th, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “I do not believe that the Iranian people as a whole hold these views, but their president has said that another member of ... the United Nations should be wiped from the face of the map, should be destroyed and should not exist. That,” said Ms. Rice, “is simply unacceptable.” She asked the Security Council “to convene again to take up the matter of one member of the United Nations calling for the destruction of another member of the United Nations, in a way that simply should not be allowed.”
Secretary of State Rice was not alone in expressing outrage at the Iranian president’s remarks. Germany’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said, “The blatant anti-Semitism of [Mr. Ahmadinejad’s] speech this year was intolerable and demands our mutual condemnation.” British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said, “We all ... must deplore the egregiously offensive comments of President Ahmadinejad.”
In a television interview, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that the way Mr. Ahmadinejad talks about Israel “reminds us of the nature of the regime.” The Iranian government, said Ms. Rice, poses a serious threat to the entire international community through its support for terrorism, its pursuit of nuclear weapons technology, and its destabilizing activity throughout the Middle East.