Iran wants Israel's destruction

Netanyahu - "Iran Is Committed to Israel's Destruction" - Von Andrea Seibel, Clemens Wergin and Michael Borgstede (Welt am Sonntag-Germany)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in an interview:

• "I think what [Gunter] Grass says is an absolute outrage....What Grass has said shows a collapse of moral clarity. He has created a perfect moral inversion where the aggressor becomes the victim and the victim becomes the aggressor. Where those who try to defend themselves against the threat of annihilation become the threat to world peace. And where the firefighter and not the arsonist is the real danger."
• "Here is a simple fact that apparently has eluded Mister Grass: Israel doesn't seek to destroy Iran, Iran seeks to destroy Israel and openly calls for it and works for it by building atomic bombs for that expressed purpose....Those now who agree with Gunter Grass about the Jewish state should ask themselves if they wouldn't have agreed with the slanders against the Jewish people in the time of the Holocaust....I am glad that Germany's leadership has responded clearly."
• "There is no question they [Iranian leaders] are committed to our destruction....Look at what they're doing without nuclear weapons: They've engulfed us with two poisonous tentacles: Hamas in Gaza and Hizbullah in Lebanon. They're supplying them with tens of thousands of rockets, thousands of which have already been fired on our cities, our homes. They're putting in more and more sophisticated weapons there and are developing more and more deadly weapons in Iran. And they're quite open about their express purpose of wiping Israel off the face of the earth. They also say this is the first stop. We are the small Satan, America is the great Satan."
• "The great scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis from Princeton, has said...that for Iran's radical clerical leadership the possibility of mutually assured destruction is not a deterrent but an inducement. They have a peculiar and bizarre belief that the hidden Imam, a religious leader who disappeared a thousand years ago, would come back just about now in a hail of fire where a catastrophic exchange is required for his reappearance. And I would not bet on the rationality of this regime."