Say Anything Blog

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denounced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel to be “wiped off the map” as a violation of all United Nations norms.

“I think it has to be taken seriously,” Rice said at a news conference with Japanese leaders at the Pentagon.

“When the president of one country says that another country should be wiped off the face of the map, in violation of all of the norms of the United Nations, where they sit together as members, it has to be taken seriously,” she said.

Rice said Ahmadinejad’s statement “only demonstrates why we are working so hard to keep Iran from getting technologies that lead to a nuclear weapon under cover of civilian nuclear power.”

She went on to call Iran “probably the world’s most important state sponsor of terrorism,” whose people live “without freedom and without the prospect of freedom because an unelected few are denying them that.”