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| Tehran - Islamic revolution day 2015. |
'Moderate and Peaceful' Iranian FM Zarif: The Netanyahu regime ‘should be annihilated’. (TOI).
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif acknowledged that his country seeks the annihilation of the “Netanyahu regime” but denied that it seeks to wipe out Israel.
In an NBC interview on Wednesday, Zarif finessed a series of questions raised by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his speech to Congress Tuesday, including over Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei’s tweet last year urging the annihilation of Israel, and about his own laying of a wreath at the grave of Imad Mughniyeh, the arch-Hezbollah terrorist responsible for the killings of hundreds of Americans.
When the NBC interviewer quoted the text of Khamenei’s tweet last year — “This barbaric wolf-like and infanticidal regime of Israel which spares no crime, has no cure but to be annihilated” — and asked Zarif whether he understood why Jews and others “would take umbrage at that kind of language,” the foreign minister said no, “Because this is a regime — we’re talking about Mr. Netanyahu — who has butchered innocent children in Gaza.
We are not talking about annihilation of Jews. We never have, we never will. Because if we wanted to annihilate Jews, we have a large number of Jewish population in Iran who not only live in the country in peace, but, in fact, have a representative in Iranian parliament allocated to them.”
Pressed repeatedly, Zarif then insisted, “We don’t want to annihilate. We don’t want to annihilate anybody.”
But then he said that the Khamenei tweet referred to the Netanyahu regime, and that the supreme leader was saying “it should be annihilated. That this regime is a threat, is a threat. A regime that engages in the killing of innocent children, a regime that engages in acts of aggression.” Still, he went on, “we are not invading, we are not threatening anybody.” Read the full story here.
Video of the full interview can be seen below
In which Iranian FM Zaref corrects Netanyahu's version of the Book of Esther. Thanks @BRRubin for making my day. pic.twitter.com/WvBpQM2JDL
— Lisa Goldman (@lisang) March 5, 2015
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