Iran will eliminate Israel if it launches a military attack on the Islamic state, a senior army commander was quoted as saying yesterday.
Army Deputy Commander-in-Chief Mohammad Reza Ashtiani was echoing Iran’s late founder of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who said Israel should be wiped off the map.
“If Israel wants to take any action against the Islamic republic, we will eliminate Israel from the scene of the universe,” Iran’s semi-official Mehr news agency quoted Ashtiani as saying. “Our answer to any military attack against Iran will be strong.”
Support for the Palestinian cause is a central pillar of the Islamic Republic, which officially has refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist since the Islamic Revolution.
Tehran denies accusations it trains and arms Palestinian militant groups, saying it only offers only moral support.
Some analysts have said Israel might attack Iran to stop Tehran’s nuclear activities.
On Monday, Washington denied a British press report of back-channel talks between Washington and Iran on its nuclear program.
In London, the Independent newspaper reported on Monday that a group of former US diplomats and foreign policy experts had been holding talks for the past five years with Iranian academics and policy advisers, in hopes of reaching a breakthrough on the diplomatic impasse.
But a White House official on Monday, speaking anonymously, said “clear channels” exist for communication with Iran and that the approach described in the Independent article “isn’t one of them.”
The daily quoted former US undersecretary of state Thomas Pickering as saying that the US had pursued five years of talks with Iran, despite decades of tense relations publicly, and amid continuing strife over the Islamic Republic’s failure to heed international ultimatums that it suspend uranium enrichment.
The US State Department was equally emphatic that the talks described in the article were “not a government activity,” but instead “a set of private discussions.”
POLITICAL PATRIARCHS: Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia are driven by an escalating feud between rival political families, analysts say The dispute over Thailand and Cambodia’s contested border, which dates back more than a century to disagreements over colonial-era maps, has broken into conflict before. However, the most recent clashes, which erupted on Thursday, have been fueled by another factor: a bitter feud between two powerful political patriarchs. Cambodian Senate President and former prime minister Hun Sen, 72, and former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, 76, were once such close friends that they reportedly called one another brothers. Hun Sen has, over the years, supported Thaksin’s family during their long-running power struggle with Thailand’s military. Thaksin and his sister Yingluck stayed
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
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