20 February 2008
Israel plans to lodge a complaint with the United Nations about threatening language used by a top Iranian official. Israel's Foreign Ministry announced it was lodging a formal complaint with the United Nations after Mohammad Ali Jafari, chief of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, predicted in an open letter that Hezbollah would soon destroy the "cancerous" Jewish state. Jafari made his remarks in response to last week's assassination in Damascus of Imad Mughniyeh, a notorious Hezbollah leader, suspected of having masterminded terrorist attacks around the world.
Israel's Foreign Ministry denounced Jafari's threat as "an anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic and racist statement of the worst kind." Mohammad Ali Jafari figures on the United States’ most-wanted list.
Meanwhile, Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has launched a new diatribe against Israel, describing it as a "dirty microbe" and a "savage animal". "World powers have created a black and dirty microbe named the Zionist regime and have unleashed it like a savage animal on the nations of the region," he told a rally in the southern city of Bandar Abbas, which was broadcast on state television. Ahmadinejad also boasted that Iran had defeated world powers in the stand-off over its nuclear drive and would never give up its right to an atomic program. "With the help of God, the Iranian nation with its unity, faith and determination stood and defeated the world powers and brought them to their knees," he told the rally, adding: "World powers should know the Iranian nation considers nuclear energy its undeniable and definite right and will not accept any imposition or any additional cruel rules.”
