Quote of the week: "Definitely wasn't us Iranians. Must have been the Zionists that bombed the Israelis"

Quote of the week: "Definitely wasn't us Iranians. Must have been the Zionists that bombed the Israelis"

Sober and measured assessments see the terrorist fingerprints of Iran's government all over the lethal attack by a human bomb on a busload of Israeli tourists at Burgas airport in Bulgaria on July 18. But there remains one reliable forum where doubts about Iranian culpability are the norm rather than the exception: the debating halls of the United Nations.

The speaker is His Excellency Mohammad Khazaee, the American-educated Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations since 2007. The remarks below were made in a  UN Security Council debate on the Middle East yesterday:

"It's amazing that just a few minutes after the terrorist attack, Israeli officials announced that Iran was behind it... We have never and will not engage in such a despicable attempt on ... innocent people... Such terrorist operation could only be planned and carried out by the same regime whose short history is full of state terrorism operations and assassinations aimed implicating others for narrow political gains... I could provide... many examples showing that this regime killed its own citizens and innocent Jewish people during the last couple of decades." [Source]

AFP's syndicated version of his statement quotes him saying more explicitly that Israel staged the attack in which five Israelis were killed, along with their Bulgarian driver. The Iranian called this part of a campaign of "state terrorism operations and assassinations aimed at implicating others for narrow political gains." Khazaee said "the representative of the Zionist criminal regime leveled baseless allegations against" his country over the Bulgaria attack. But he made no comment at all about the post-Burgas gloating of his own president, as reported here.

Now could be a good time to review something important and factual we posted here five days ago: "21-Jul-12: How involved in terror against Israelis and Jews are the Iranians?" Maybe also this: "27-Sep-08: Racism - getting to basics".