Ahmadinejad plays innocent: I would never nuke Israel!

By C. J. Refsland on February 17, 2013 • ( 0 )

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday became the first Iranian leader to visit Egypt since Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, and he used the occasion to try and re-brand himself as a pragmatic president who wished no harm to the Jewish state.

Following the Islamic Revolution, Egypt gave sanctuary to Iran’s deposed shah, straining relations between the Cairo and the new Islamic regime in Tehran. The rift was made wider by the fact that Iran was the new epicenter of Shia Islam, while Cairo had long been one of the primary centers of Sunni Islam.

But the two sides have been drawing closer together since the hijacking of Egypt’s pro-democracy revolution by the Muslim Brotherhood.

After appearing hand-in-hand with the clerics who run Cairo’s famed Al-Azhar University, Ahmadinejad told Egyptian media that Iran is already a nuclear power.

“From now on, the world should treat Iran as a nuclear state,” Ahmadinejad told the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram. He refused to say whether or not Iran was building nuclear weapons, or simply possessed the ability to do so.

Whatever the case, Ahmadinejad insisted that his nation was “not planning a military strike” against Israel, but would respond severely if Israel attacked first.

Israelis viewed the Iranian leader’s remarks with much skepticism, considering that on numerous occasions over the past several years he has openly called for the removal of the Jewish state.

On Monday, Ahmadinejad told Lebanon’s Al-Mayadeen TV that “the time of the Zionists is over.”

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