Another Important Reason to Stop Iran from Developing Nukes

From Yahoo and the Associated Press [h/t to Jack]:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared Wednesday that Israel is a "disgraceful blot" that should be "wiped off the map" — fiery words that Washington said underscores its concern over Iran's nuclear program.

... Referring to Palestinian suicide bomb attacks in Israel, Ahmadinejad said: "there is no doubt that the new wave in Palestine will soon wipe off this disgraceful blot from the face of the Islamic world."

Ahmadinejad's speech came hours before a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in the Israeli town of Hadera, killing five people. Iran aids several militant Palestinian groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, with support and training through proxies among Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas.

Does the world really want a guy like this to have his finger on the button? His anti-Semitism is appalling (though expected), but his confirmation that many Muslims want Israel anhilated should serve as a warning to everyone else.

Update: Melanie Phillips has considerable detail in her insightful response.

With its customary hypocrisy, the alleged civilised world has recoiled in horror at the declaration by Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Israel should be ‘wiped off the map’. So he’s a genocidal, Jew-hating maniac. So what’s new? Iran has never made any secret of its intention to annihilate Israel. It exports demented anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hatred to the Muslim world, it funds terrorists to murder as many Jews as possible (see the most recent victims this week in Hadera) and it is racing to build a nuclear weapon so that it can expeditiously carry out its professed aim to eradicate the Jewish nation state.

All this the world has known; and yet it has sat on its hands, occasionally extricating them to be wrung over Iran’s accelerating nuclear programme before resorting to the tried and tested strategy of maximum uselessness, diplomacy through the United Nations — fresh from that organisation’s triumph in disarming (not) that other threat to the world, Saddam Hussein; for which failure the head of its nuclear watchdog, Mohamed al Baradei, was doubtless awarded the Nobel Prize by a grateful Swedish establishment and wider world for whom America, not Iran, appears to be the greatest enemy of civilisation.

So Iran continues merrily on its diabolical way, murdering Israelis here, murdering Iraqis there, serenely building its apparatus of mass destruction while the alleged civilised world looks at Iraq and looks at President Bush and sucks its teeth and settles down to wait for the new Jewish holocaust wrapped in the mantle of sanctimonious opposition to pre-emptive action.