Iran's hard-line president ramped up his rhetoric against the West on Thursday, labelling Israel a "cancer" that will "one day vanish" as he shrugged off the threat of war and sanctions over Tehran's disputed nuclear programme.
In speeches to university students in the capital of Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also accused the West of peddling lies and oppression.
"This regime one day will vanish," he said of Israel.
"We believe that a government such as this one will not last long because it is built on tyranny and tyranny will not last long," he said.
The Iranian president declared last October that the Jewish state should be "wiped off the map". In April he said that Israel "cannot survive" and that migrants to the Jewish state should go back to where they came from.
Ahmadinejad, who has already dismissed the Holocaust as a myth, again questioned its veracity.
"Is it logical if (after) the annihilation of Jews by the West, the territory belonging to the Palestine people is taken and occupied for the building of a new nation and its people?" he asked the students.
"Is it logical to give compensation in the Middle East for an incident that occurred in Europe, if this incident is indeed true... by murdering thousands of local Palestinians and making millions of Palestinian refugees?"
Ahmadinejad said the West had built Israel for its own interests.
"But at the moment, continuously, on a daily basis, Israel is moving backwards and can no longer put pressure on countries in the region, and has become a cancer that is continuously swallowing funds from the West."
Ahmadinejad, who is on a five-day visit to Indonesia, earlier told Metro TV in an interview that any military action against Iran would hurt the nations launching hostilities more than Tehran.
The United States has refused to exclude possible military action against Iran over its nuclear enrichment activities, which Tehran insists is peaceful but which Western nations fear may be a cover for developing an atomic bomb.
"The idea of going to war is a joke, it's like a joke. Why should there be a war?" he said.
"They do know that any mistreatment of the Iranian people will actually cause more losses to them than for us. They need us more than we do actually need them."
Ahmadinejad also said that Iranians would rise to the challenge of sanctions if they were imposed.
"Many of our scientists and experts will be more than happy to hear that we are put under sanctions by the West because this will motivate a great leap in our industrial and economic progress," he said.
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who met Ahmadinejad on Wednesday, backed Tehran's claim that its nuclear programme was peaceful and also offered to help mediate in a bid to reduce rising tensions over the program.
But on Thursday Indonesia appeared to back down from the proposal, with Foreign Minister Hassan Wirayuda saying that "we did not claim that we offer mediation on Iran's nuclear issue."