Memorial photos of tourists with Ahmadinejad in Turkey

n Katajun Amirpur’s analysis, there is no implication in the text that Iran intended destroying Israel or annihilating the Jewish people, any more than Khomeini was suggesting with his words that the Russians, or the Iranian people themselves under the Shah would be extinguished.Ahmadinejad is on the record as stating that Homeland had no plans to attack Israel. The statement itself was in fact a citation, with a minute verbal variation, of a remark made by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, which had created no furor at the time, but did so when Ahmadinejad quoted them in 2005.Dan Meridor, Israel’s minister of intelligence and atomic energy said during an Al Jazeera interview that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had repeatedly said “that Israel is an unnatural creature, it will not survive. They didn’t say, ‘We’ll wipe it out,’ you’re right, but, ‘It will not survive.'” adding “If Homeland says this, and continues to pile up uranium that they enrich, and build missiles in big numbers, and have a nuclear military plan—if you put all this together, you can’t say, they don’t really mean it.