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. Israel unable to take on Iran: Ahmadinejad
TEHRAN, July 14 (AFP) Jul 14, 2006
President Mahmud Ahmadinejad boasted Friday that Israel is not powerful enough to take on Iran, currently at loggerheads with the international community over its nuclear programme, the official IRNA news agency said.

"Thanks be to God, despite its criminal and savage nature, the Zionist regime and its supporters in the West do not have the power to look in the same way towards Iran," the ultra-conservative president said in a speech in the provinces.

He was speaking as Israel continued its offensive on Lebanon sparked by the capture Wednesday by Iranian-backed Hezbollah militiamen of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of eight others.

"Attacks by the Zionist regime against its neighbours, notably Lebanon, Syria and its threats against other countries in the region are due to the fact that this puppet regime cannot live normally," IRNA reported Ahmadinejad as saying.

"This situation cannot last, and one day the protectors of the Zionist regime -- the US in particular -- will have to explain themselves and be judged by the conscience of humanity," he added.

On Thursday Ahmadinejad warned Israel against attacking Syria, during a telephone call with President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, Iranian state television reported.

"If Israel commits another act of idiocy and aggresses Syria, this will be the same as an aggression against the entire Islamic world and it will receive a stinging response," the president said.

"The Israeli aggressions are a result of the weakness of a puppet regime that is on its way towards disappearing."

Ahmadinejad also said the "Zionists and their protectors are the people held in most contempt by humanity" and promised their "rapid downfall".

"The more their crimes increase, the harder their fall will be," he said.

On Saturday Ahmadinejad called for the "removal of the Zionist regime", and last October he caused an international outcry by saying the Jewish state should "be wiped off the map".

In his speech on Friday, Ahmadinejad again questioned the Holocaust, saying "the Zionist regime prevented historians and researchers from investigating it".

"There are still questions... maybe in your so-called Holocaust more than six million Jews were massacred (during World War II), so why do you not allow people to undertake new research?" he asked.

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