Friday’s deadline for a nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 world powers (US, UK, Germany, France, China, Russia) falls on the same day that the viciously anti-Israel al-Quds Day is celebrated in Tehran, where Iranian leaders often call for Israel’s destruction.
Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Day is celebrated annually in Iran as a means to supposedly show solidarity with the Palestinian people.
The day was conceived in 1979 when Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, fresh off of a revolution that turned Iran into an Islamic Republic, displayed a much more hostile view towards Israel than former Iranian leaders had. On the first al-Quds Day, Khomeini declared that the “liberation of Quds” was to be a religious duty for all Muslims.
“I ask all the Muslims of the world and the Muslim governments to join together to sever the hand of this usurper and its supporters,” Khomeini said at the time.
In 2013, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Iran’s proxy terror group Hezbollah, pledged to “destroy” Israel “without giving it the opportunity to surrender.”
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has said on the annual commemoration day, according to Iranian state-media: “The Zionist regime is a wound that has sat on the body of the Muslim world for years and needs to be removed.”
Meanwhile, Israeli officials have told Haaretz that the American negotiating team in Vienna has kept them completely in the dark over developments concerning the nuclear talks.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke against the upcoming Western powers’s nuclear deal with the state-sponsor of terror on Tuesday.
“Iran is the greatest threat to world peace,” said Netanyahu. “The capitulation agreement that Iran is about to get from world powers is paving the way for it to arm itself with nuclear weapons and to carry them further with the missiles that it continues to develop, and of course to spread terror,” he added.