Capping a day of worldwide condemnation provoked by Tehran’s latest anti-Israel gibes, Mr Bush said that he was “concerned about theocracy that has little transparency, a country whose president has declared the destruction of Israel as part of their foreign policy”. “I called it (Iran) part of the ‘axis of evil’ for a reason,” Mr Bush said. “It’s a real threat.”

The US President first lumped Iran with North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in an “axis of evil” during his 2002 State of the Union speech to the US Congress. His comments last night came amid an escalating war of words with Tehran, whose hardline President Ahmadinejad has stoked outrage abroad by dismissing the Holocaust as a “myth” and saying that Israel should be moved to Europe, the US, Canada or Alaska.

“They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred and place this above God, religions and the prophets,” he said yesterday on live television. Israel responded by flexing its muscle. “We hope that these extremist declarations will make the world wake up to the nature of this regime, especially the fact that Iran’s nuclear programme and its support of international terrorism represents not only a danger for Israel but for the entire Western civilisation, ” Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said. “Thank God Israel has the means at its disposal to bring about the downfall of this extremist regime in Iran. There will be no second ‘final solution’.” (AFP)

Times Recommends

• Rio Tinto four held as China prepares case
• Diplomats must keep heads down and trousers up
• When in Rome should one make like Berlusconi?