Oliver, honestly, how the hell is the "regime" of Israel supposed to disappear?
Why did you quote an article which again makes clear that Ahmadinejad is talking about the regime?
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=080602124328.f6eyi8y1&show_article=1
"I must announce that the Zionist regime (Israel), with a 60-year record of genocide, plunder, invasion and betrayal is about to die and will soon be erased from the geographical scene," he said.
As to how... It is precisely because Israel claims to be a democracy.
Olmert has gone on record as saying that "Israel is done for" if there is no two state solution. You cannot have apartheid and call yourself a democracy. Israel's control of the West Bank and Gaza -- the seperation (apartheid) fence -- is an injustice that more and more people are taking issue with.
Carter's book "Peace not apartheid" brought the wider issue to the attention of many. The lives of Palestinians are being controlled by a government they cannot vote for.
Olmert's words:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/929439.html
Haaretz said:
"If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Haaretz Wednesday, the day the Annapolis conference ended in an agreement to try to reach a Mideast peace settlement by the end of 2008.
"The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us," Olmert said, "because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents."
So even Olmert says that Israel is at risk.
Do you think the two-state solution will ever come to pass? I don't. So I see Olmert's warning as a weaker version of Ahmadinejad's: the state of Israel will disappear.
And why the rhetoric of "wiping off the map" or "destroying Israel".
The "wipe of the map" line is from a translation by an Iranian agency. The phrase translated does not have the same warlike meaning as the English phrase.
The USSR was wiped out: "Just as the Soviet Union was wiped out and today does not exist, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out." (See later link)
So the USSR has been wiped out, has disappeared, vanished from the page of time. It is no more. Thanks to Gorbachev for pulling the trigger, dropping the hammer or otherwise beginning the destruction and annihilation of the political entity once (but no more) known as the USSR.
No genocide.
No war.
No military attack.
That is the language used by Ahmadinejad. Read the experts. Look at the context which is even given by sites like Jihadwatch -- they know that mentioning "regime" and comparisons to the USSR makes no difference to the people who are determined to believe that Ahmadinejad is the next Hitler.
http://jihadwatch.org/archives/014390.php
"Just as the Soviet Union was wiped out and today does not exist, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out"
ETA: there is quite a bit of analysis here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel