“I think it has to be taken seriously,” Rice said at a news conference with Japanese leaders at the Pentagon.
“When the president of one country says that another country should be wiped off the face of the map, in violation of all of the norms of the United Nations, where they sit together as members, it has to be taken seriously,” she said.
Rice said Ahmadinejad’s statement “only demonstrates why we are working so hard to keep Iran from getting technologies that lead to a nuclear weapon under cover of civilian nuclear power.”
She went on to call Iran “probably the world’s most important state sponsor of terrorism,” whose people live “without freedom and without the prospect of freedom because an unelected few are denying them that.”
The UN Security Council on Friday issued a statement condemning the Iranian president’s remark.
Ahmadinejad made the remark on Wednesday and then defended it on Friday as “right and just” in the face of a storm of international criticism.
