Ahmadinejad wants 'all Palestine liberated'

TEHRAN: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad vowed on Friday Iran would work until 'all of Palestine is liberated' from Israel's hands and repeated his deeply controversial questioning of the Holocaust.   

"The Palestinian people are standing firm. The Iranian people and other peoples will not stop until all of Palestinian territory is liberated," Ahmadinejad said in a speech broadcast on state radio to mark Quds day.   

"They (world powers) should not think that the Iranian nation and other nations in the region will take off their hands off the throat of the Zionists and their supporters." Ahmadinejad provoked an international outcry shortly after his election in 2005 when he called for Israel to be 'wiped from the map' and also described the Holocaust as a 'myth'.   

In his speech at Tehran University, the culmination of Iran's annual day in support of the Palestinians, the president also repeated his questioning of the scale of the Holocaust. "The Iranian nation hates killing and considers Hitler and the executioners of the World War II as black and dark figures," he said. "But the Iranian nation has a question and as long as there is no clear and reasonable response to this question, it will remain."   

Ahmadinejad also reaffirmed his opinion that 'Zionists' should move to empty lands in Europe or North America and out of the Middle East entirely.  "Europeans can not tolerate the Zionists in their region and country, but they want to impose them on the people of the region... Give these vast lands of Canada and Alaska to them to create a country for themselves."   

Israel, widely believed to be the only nuclear armed power in the Middle East, has expressed alarm over Iran's nuclear drive, which the Jewish state and its main ally the United States believe is aimed at making an atomic bomb.   

The Islamic republic however insists that its nuclear programme is solely aimed at generating electricity for a growing population whose giant oil and gas reserves will eventually run out. Israel was an ally of the imperial regime of last Iranian shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, developing close military and economic ties, but all this changed when he was ousted by the Islamic revolution in 1979.   

Iranian officials however insist they would never initiate any military attack and say their policy has always been to let all the occupants of 'Palestine' -- including refugees -- decide their future in a referendum.