In a speech for Quds Day last month, a top Iranian general said that an Islamic army was “awaiting orders to eradicate the evil regime,” referring to Israel, according to a translation of the entire speech published last week by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
While English accounts appearing in the Iranian media reported on the speech given by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) deputy commander Hossein Salami, they did not include the implied threat against Israel.
The Tehran Times quoted Salami as boasting that Hezbollah has 100,000 missiles aimed at Israel, and saying, “It has been 70 years that a poisonous dagger (Israeli regime) has gone deep into the flank of the Islamic Ummah (community), and all the tragedies of the Islamic world are due to the existence of the fake and rootless regime of Israel.”
Tasnim News Agency quoted Salami as charging that backing from the United States and Europe is what empowers Israel.
In addition to highlighting the threat posed by the Islamic army against Israel, Salami also threatened the West by saying that Iran controls the world’s energy supplies, according to the MEMRI translation.
In a veiled threat, Salami said, “Does today’s world know that [its] energy is under Iranian security control? They must know that if their industry flourishes thanks to Persian Gulf energy, they owe this to Iran, and they must not annoy Iran. Their life’s vein is in our hands. The security of their interests is in our hands. So far, we have been modest, because we did not want to be a source of problems in the world. We want to be the problem solvers. But there is a limit to Iran’s patience.”
Similarly, last week, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told a group of Iranians who reside in Switzerland that “they do not understand what it means, because it would be totally nonsense that Iran’s oil is not exported while at the same time the region’s oil is exported.”
Rouhani’s threat was seconded by IRGC-Quds Force commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who praised Rouhani’s remarks and added more explicitly, “Iran’s oil is not allowed to be exported, then there will be no guarantee that other countries in the region would be able to export theirs.”
Salami is not new to threatening Israel’s destruction. For example, in April he said that if war broke out between Israel and Iran, “you can be assured that it will result in wiping you off, the smallest target is your existence, there is no smaller target than that.”
[Photo: Tasnim News ]