VIENNA —‘’Calls to destroy Israel are totally unacceptable,’’ said Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz as he received Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani in Vienna.
“Israel’s concerns have to be taken seriously,” Kurz said during a joint press conference in the Austrian capital. “It is absolutely unacceptable if Israel’s right to exist is being questioned or if there is a call for the destruction of the State of Israel.”
Kurz , who made recently a visit to Israel, also spoke out against denying the Holocaust, which Iranian leaders and others such as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas have openly embraced.
“In this memorial year in which we are particularly aware of our historic responsibility, I want to clearly emphasize that we condemn in the strongest possible terms any form of anti-Semitism and any downplaying or even denial of the Holocaust.”
The president of the Jewish community of Vienna, Oskar Deutsch, criticized Kurz and the country’s president, Alexander Van der Bellen, for the honor guard that greeted Rouhani when he arrived in Vienna.
“No agreement, neither an oil business nor an atomic deal, is more important than human life,” Oskar Deutsch said. “Decades of diplomatic mediation attempts have not led Tehran to relinquish its terrorist support, and the threat of annihilation against Israel has even increased, and then a top representative of this hatred regime will be received in the city from which an assassination of opposition forces in Europe is planned.”
‘’President Rouhani is part of the problem, not the solution. Teheran is responsible for terror throughout the world – receiving Rouhani with military honors in Vienna is the wrong way,’’ Deutsch stressed in his statement.