SOURCE: https://www.hoover.org/research/threat-any-language
Iran’s highest political authority is Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who succeeded Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. Khamenei has made statements about Israel similar to Ahmadinejad’s. In a televised sermon on December 15, 2000, he declared, “Iran’s position, which was first expressed by the Imam [Khomeini] and stated several times by those responsible, is that the cancerous tumor called Israel must be uprooted from the region.”
A month later, on January 15, he stated: “It is the mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to erase Israel from the map of the region.” Hossein Shariatmadari, a Khamenei confidant who serves as one of his major mouthpieces, wrote an editorial in the Iranian daily Kayhan on October 30, 2005, in which he argued, “We declare explicitly that we will not be satisfied with anything less than the complete obliteration of the Zionist regime from the political map of the world.”
Ayatollah Ahmad Janati, a member of Ahmadinejad’s inner circle and chairman of the Guardian Council of the Constitution, told reporters during a celebration of the anniversary of the Islamic revolution that every year the crowds are bigger and the slogans more enthusiastic. He added, “The blind enemies should see that the wish of these people is the death of America and Israel.”
