Iranian Official: We “Reject the Existence of Any Israeli on This Earth”
by TheTower.org Staff | 08.21.15 1:45 pm
Hussein Sheikholeslam, a senior adviser to Iran’s Speaker of Parliament, told the Hamas-affiliated newspaper al-Resalah that Tehran “reject[s] the existence of any Israeli on this earth,” a position he says Iran relayed to the P5+1 powers during the nuclear negotiations, The Times of Israel reported Wednesday. According to Sheikholeslam, Iran “will do everything to renew” its support for Hamas, which Tehran lessened in retaliation to the Sunni group’s opposition to the regime of Bashar al-Assad after the outbreak of the Syrian civil war.
Sheikholeslam’s comments are the latest in a series of threats issued against Israel by Iran since the Islamic Republic signed a nuclear agreement with the P5+1 powers last month.
A video posted on a website linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), titled “Preparation of the complete destruction of Israel by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Islamic Revolution in Iran,” called for Israel’s “erasure from the annals of history,” according to another report in The Times of Israel on Wednesday. The clip depicts an invasion of Jerusalemby an Islamic army that includes Hamas and Hezbollah among its ranks.
Earlier this week, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on his English-language Twitter account that Iran will “take all possible means to support anyone who fights Israel, is against the Zionist regime and supports resistance.”
Khamenei has often taken to Twitter to issue threats against Israel and the United States. Last month, the Supreme Leader tweeted a graphic depicting President Barack Obama with a gun to his head and deriding the “aggressive and criminal U.S.” This past November, also on Twitter, Khamenei called for arming Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and shared his nine-point plan for the “elimination of Israel.”
In a speech delivered only four days after Iran signed the nuclear accord with the P5+1 powers and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Khamenei emphasized Iran’s ongoing hostility towards Israel and the United States, saying, “The slogans of the Iranian nation on Al-Qods Day show what its position is. The slogans ‘Death to Israel’ and ‘Death to America’ have resounded throughout the country, and are not limited to Tehran and the other large cities. The entire country is under the umbrella of this great movement.”
This past Sunday, Lt. Col. (ret.) Michael Segall, a senior analyst at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA), documented Iran’s ongoing agitation against the Jewish state and argued that it is an expression of one of the Islamic Republic’s founding principles:
Sixteen years after his death, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s founding vision — that the eradication of Zionism is an inevitable precondition for redeeming contemporary Islam — keeps guiding the current generation of Iran’s religious, political and military establishment. To him the destruction of Zionism was an axiom never to be questioned or strayed from and an objective to be perpetually and actively pursued. According to this vision, Israel should be fought as part of a protracted global struggle between Islam and the West, which “planted intentionally the Zionist Entity in the heart of Islamic World.” […]
The Iranian religious, political, intellectual and military elite support and repeat Khamenei’s messages. Members of the Iranian Army high command (as opposed to the Revolutionary Guards) have even declared their willingness and capability to destroy Israel, once the leader’s order is given. Practically speaking, the regime’s intelligence and international subversion agencies, mostly the Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, massively support anti-Israel terror groups and stage repeated conferences in Iran dedicated to denial of the Holocaust and to the deligitimization of Israel’s right to exist. […]
Accepting Iran as a nuclear threshold state capable of launching a military nuclear program, should it decide to, will allow it to intensify its direct anti-Israel aggression and its subversive activity against moderate Arab states, such as Egypt and the Gulf states, now under a nuclear umbrella.
After Assad’s regime launched a chemical attack that killed hundreds of civilians in a suburb of Damascus two years ago, Sheikholeslam threatened that Israel would be the “first victim” of any punitive strike on Syria. A year and a half ago he was reported to boast that Hezbollah has tens of thousands of missiles aimed at Israel.
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