Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Israel’s demise would benefit everyone, especially the United States.
“The regime resembles an airplane that has lost its engine and is kind of going down. And no one can help it,” the Iranian president said in an interview published Tuesday in the Los Angeles Times. “This will benefit everyone,” Ahmadinejad said.
Ahmadinejad is in New York for the opening of the U.N. General Assembly. He will speak there Tuesday.
Ahmadinejad told the Times that Israel has “actually displaced over 5 million people from their own lands and collected other people elsewhere from the world and has put them in their place. How is it possible to recognize a state that has come about as such?”
While not backtracking on his previous statements denying the Holocaust, Ahmadinejad said that the Palestinians are paying for the Jews’ victimization.
“If we agree and accept that certain events had occurred during World War II, well, where did they indeed happen? In Germany, in Poland and in Great Britain,” he said. “Now what does this exactly have to do with Palestine? Why is it that the Palestinian people should pay for it?”
Ahmadinejad said he believed that Iran and the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, had resolved all the issues between them last year. There is an impasse now, he said, because the United States provided forged documents to the agency providing misinformation about certain operations.
“Of course, we don’t expect any better from the U.S. administration because they have declared that they are our enemy and we are theirs,” he said.
