'Divine mission' driving Iran's new leader - Telegraph
Some of his more famous sayings that sets the world on edge
1. "We don't shy away from declaring that Islam is ready to rule the world."
2. "The wave of the Islamist revolution will soon reach the entire world."
3. "Our revolution's main mission is to pave the way for the reappearance of the Twelfth Imam, the Mahdi."
4. "Soon Islam will become the dominating force in the world, occupying first place in the number of followers amongst all other religions."
5. "Is there a craft more beautiful, more sublime, more divine, than the craft of giving yourself to martyrdom and becoming holy? Do not doubt, Allah will prevail, and Islam will conquer mountain tops of the entire world."
6. "What is important is that they have shown the way to martyrdom which we must follow.'' 6 [President Ahmadinejad's comments on an aircraft crash in Tehran that killed 108 people in December 2005].
7. Ahmadinejad praises Iran for being able to recruit thousands of suicide bombers a day. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad praised his country's ability to recruit "hundreds of suicide bombers a day," saying "suicide is an invincible weapon. Suicide bombers in this land showed us the way, and they enlighten our future. Amadinejad said the will to commit suicide was "one of the best ways of life."
8. "This regime (Israel) will one day disappear."
9. "The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm.
10. Israel is "a disgraceful stain on the Islamic world"
11.
Israel is doomed to be "wiped from the map" in "a war of destiny."
12. Ahmadinejad said that
"the countdown for the destruction of Israel" has begun.
13. Zionists are "the personification of Satan."
14. "In the case of any unwise move by the fake regime of Israel, Iran's response will be so destructive and quick that this regime will regret its move for ever."
15. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared that the Holocaust is a "myth."
16. "Them (the West) invented the myth of the massacre of the Jews and placed it above Allah, religions and prophets."
Iran, its nuclear ambitions and sanctions:
1. "By the grace of Allah, we (will be) a nuclear power."
2. Ahmadinejad fired off a fresh barrage of warnings to the United Nations, saying Iran did "not give a damn" about demands to freeze sensitive nuclear work.
3. "Iran does not give a damn about resolutions."
4. "The Islamic republic of Iran has the capacity to quickly become a world superpower. If we believe in ourselves... no other power can be compared to us."
5. "Iran's enemies know your courage, faith and commitment to Islam and the land of Iran has created a powerful army that can powerfully defend the political borders and the integrity of the Iranian nation and cut off the hand of any aggressor and place the sign of disgrace on their forehead."
6. "Our enemies should know that they are unable to even slightly hurt our nation and they cannot create the tiniest obstacle on its glorious and progressive way."
7. "In parallel to the official political war there is a hidden war going on and the Islamic states should benefit from their economic potential to cut off the hands of the enemies."
"1. "There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies? Not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbours here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy."
Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post,
May 10, 2001
2. "The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more".
... Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000
3. "[The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs."
Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the Beasts". New Statesman, 25 June 1982.
4. "The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls."
Israeli Prime Minister (at the time) in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988
5. "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle."
Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.
6. "How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to."
Golda Meir, March 8, 1969.
7. "There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed."
Golda Maier Israeli Prime Minister June 15, 1969
8. "The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war."
Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, 19 March 1972.
9. "If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti - Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault ? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?"
David Ben Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.
9a. Ben Gurion also warned in 1948 : "We must do everything to insure they ( the Palestinians) never do return....The old will die and the young will forget."
10. "We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves."
Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983.
11.
"Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We the Jewish people, control America and the Americans know it."
- Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, speaking to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio.
12. "We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours."
Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces - Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot 13 April 1983, New York Times 14 April 1983.
13.
"We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return."
David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar's Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.
15.
"We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai."
David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.
16. "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."
Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, April 4, 1969.
17. "We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, what is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'"
Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs,
published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.
18.
"We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters"
Rabin's description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet. Uri Lubrani, PM Ben-Gurion's special adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960. From "The Arabs in Israel" by Sabri Jiryas.
19. "There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant.
tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument:...the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish...with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary."
Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department. From Israel: an Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p.5.
20. "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don't grab will go to them."
Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.
21. "Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."
Theodor Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine, Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry.
22. "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail"
-- Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994
[Source: N.Y. Times, Feb. 28, 1994, p. 1]"