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It’s not new that an Iranian leader has openly discussed wiping Israel off the map, but the leader of Iran’s powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) on Monday said it’s no longer just an idea, but “an achievable goal.” The Tasnim News Agency quoted Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami as saying Israel “must be wiped off from the world geography in the second step (of the Islamic Revolution), and this is not an aspiration or dream anymore, but an achievable goal.”
Salami’s comments to a conference of IRGC commanders were condemned the next day by Germany, a nation who knows all too well the dangers of Holocaust rhetoric. “We condemn the recent threats by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps against Israel in the strongest possible terms,” a Federal Foreign Office Spokesman said in a press release on Tuesday.
“Such anti-Israel rhetoric is completely unacceptable. Israel’s right to exist is not negotiable. We urge Iran to commit to maintaining peaceful relations with all states in the region and to take practical steps to de-escalate tensions.”
Yet rather than back down from the violent comments, Iran doubled down on Wednesday, responding to Germany’s comments with yet another threat.
Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Abbas Mousavi was paraphrased by the regime’s IRNA news website as saying the path to calm in the Middle East was to “seriously confront” what Mousavi called Israel’s “destructive” actions.
Furthermore, Salami was at it again on Wednesday, with a separate IRNA report paraphrasing him as saying that “any mistake” by Israel would lead to it’s being wiped off the political map.
The comments come as Iran and the United States are in a tense standoff over the Iranian nuclear program and US sanctions. Iran has retaliated by attacking the Middle East oil industry and shipping, downing a US drone, and escalating their nuclear program. The US and Israel have repeatedly accused Iran of seeking nuclear weapons, which could enable Salami’s apocalyptic visions of Israel.
Salami isn’t just wiping away Israel’s future in his comments. He’s also denying its Biblical history. In an interview with Iran’s PressTV on Monday, Salami said Israel has “neither a land of its own, nor population, nor even an established [political] system [recognized] in the world’s history.”
He claimed Israel’s actions had incited Islamic armed groups and militaries against it and there are a number of enemies who want Israel’s “elimination from the political geography” and as a result, “this will happen naturally.”
(By Joshua Spurlock, www.themideastupdate.com, October 2, 2019)