Iranian Threats against Israel

Jeffrey Goldberg has listed a number of times that officials in the Iranian government have called for the destruction of Israel or of the Jewish People here:

July, 2006: "Nations in the region will be more furious every day. It won't take long before the wrath of the people turns into a terrible explosion that will wipe the Zionist entity off the map...The basic problem in the Islamic world is the existence of the Zionist regime, and the Islamic world and the region must mobilize to remove this problem. It is a usurper that our enemies made and imposed on the Muslim world, a regime that prevented the progress of the region's nations, a regime that all Muslims must join hands in isolating worldwide."

October, 2006: "This regime (Israel) will be gone, definitely..."You (the Western powers) should know that any government that stands by the Zionist regime from now on will not see any result but the hatred of the people...The wrath of the region's people is boiling... You should not complain that we did not give a warning. We are saying this explicitly now..."

January, 2008: "I advise you to abandon the filthy Zionist entity which has reached the end of the line... It has lost its reason to be and will sooner or later fall. The ones who still support the criminal Zionists should know that the occupiers' days are numbered." 

February, 2008: "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.

There is another argument floating across the Internets, that Ahmadinejad's words don't matter, that he is not the one in charge of the nuclear program, and that his anti-Semitism is far more extreme than that of other regime leaders.  Well, here is the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, speaking a couple of days ago:  'The Zionist regime is a cancerous tumor that should be removed and will be removed, God willing.'

Of course, a few of you may be thinking, 'Well, words are words.  It's not like Iran is parading Shahab-3 missiles down the streets of Tehran with banners and posters talking about the destruction of Israel, right?'
 


The banner on this missile says: 'Israel must be uprooted and erased from history.'

This banner even included a translation: