The state of Israel will soon be history, says Iran's President

The President of Iran further fuelled the flames of confrontation with the West yesterday by saying that the “Zionist regime” in Israel would soon be annihilated. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speech will alarm the US, coming days after he declared that Iran had joined the “nuclear club” by successfully enriching uranium. President Bush has stated that the US would use force to protect Israel from being, in the words of President Ahmadinejad last year, “wiped off the face of the map”. The Iranian leader, appearing at a conference on the Palestinian issue yesterday, said that Israel was “heading towards annihilation”, questioned whether the Holocaust had ever happened, and predicted that the Middle East would “soon be liberated”. He said that the existence of Israel was a threat to the Islamic world, but added that “the Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm”. Even if the Holocaust were true, he said, “why should the people of this region pay the price? Why does the Palestinian nation have to be suppressed?"