Kuwait Times

Published Date: June 04, 2007

TEHRAN: Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yesterday said the world would witness the destruction of Israel soon, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported. Ahmadinejad said last summer's war between Israel and Hezbollah showed for the first time that the "hegemony of the occupier regime (Israel) had collapsed, and the Lebanese nation pushed the button to begin counting the days until the destruction of the Zionist regime," IRNA quoted him as saying.

"God willing, in the near future we will witness the destruction of the corrupt occupier regime," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying during a speech to foreign guests who attended ceremonies marking the 18th anniversary of the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who is known as the father of Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution.  Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has lost public support after Israel failed to achieve its goals during last summer's 34-day war with Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon -freeing two captured soldiers and crushing the militant group.

The war was sparked after two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped by Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hezbollah militants in a cross-border raid. The fighting ended with a UN-brokered cease-fire that called for deployment of UN peacekeepers and Lebanese troops in southern Lebanon along the border with Israel. Ahmadinejad has made anti-Israel comments in the past.  In October 2005, he caused outrage in the West when he said in a speech that Israel's "Zionist regime should be wiped off the map." His supporters have argued Ahmadinejad's words were mistranslated and should have been better translated as "vanish from the pages of time"- implying Israel would vanish on its own rather be destroyed.

In another development, Iran's hard-line interior minister has sparked a controversy in this traditionally conservative country, saying he supports the idea of temporary marriage as a way to help stem what some say is an increase in extramarital sex, state media reported.  The phrase "temporary marriage" refers to a Shiite-only tradition -albeit not very common in the Shiite-dominated Iran -under which a man and a woman sign a contract, called a sigheh, that allows them to be "married" for any length of time, sometimes less than 24 hours.  Now, some Iranians are advocating institutionalizing the tradition, saying it would help fight "illicit" sex. But others see it as a license for prostitution in a country where sexual relations outside of marriage are banned under Islamic law. "Temporary marriage is God's rule. We must aggressively encourage that," Interior Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi was quoted as saying on state-run television. 

The interior minister, who made his comments on Thursday, was the first Iranian official to support the disputed practice in more than a decade. Former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani raised the issue in the early 1990s, but met with strong opposition from the country's hard-line clerics. "We have to find a solution to meet the sexual desire of the youth who have no possibility of marriage," Pourmohammadi was quoted as saying in local newspapers.  Half of Iran's population of 70 million is under 30.  Taxi driver Reza Sarabi, 23, expressed the frustration many young Iranian men feel who can't afford to buy a house and get married.

"I have no money to set up a matrimonial life. I don't want prostitutes. What should I do with my sexual needs?" he said. Critics of the practice believe it will exacerbate prostitution and undermine the country's values. "It will damage the foundation of the family," said lawyer Nemat Ahmadi, who argues it gives wealthy men religious cover to have affairs. "This will only promote prostitution." Prostitution was banned in Iran after the 1979 Islamic revolution but has increased in recent years. There are no official statistics available in Iran on the number of prostitutes, but unofficial figures published by some media outlets put the number at several hundred thousand. - Agencies