Tzipi Livni pushes China to break with Iran

      Livni's visit is the direct continuation of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's recent visits to Moscow, Paris and London, and is part of a comprehensive Israeli diplomatic effort against Iran's nuclearization. China, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, is staunchly opposed to stepping up the sanctions against Iran, an important trading partner. Countries must unite in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons technology, even if that clashes with their own narrow economic interests, Israel's foreign minister said Monday. "Extremism manifests itself in many ways. The threat can evolve from state actors or other forms. As a state actor - we witness how a state, a member of the United Nations, like Iran, seeks weapons of mass destruction, violates Security Council's resolutions, supports terrorism world wide, and at the same time calls for the destruction of Israel, a fellow member of the United Nations. Behind almost every conflict that we have in the Middle East, one can see the long arms and shadow of Iran - the cause for the domestic instability in Lebanon is Hizbullah, the terror organization which is Iran's proxy; in the Palestinian territories Hamas and other terrorist organizations are being supported by Iran, and in Iraq - all of these areas carry Iran's finger prints all over them - in financing, training and arming terrorist organizations. If this dangerous regime, that wants to dictate its extreme religious ideology to others, masters the technology of developing nuclear weapons - the fragile stability that we are trying to build in the Middle East will vanish. A "domino effect" of nuclear arms race by states and radical elements will begin, and the pragmatic regimes in the region will be undermined."(15,25)