Ahmadinejad, who was president of the Islamic Republic from 2005-2013, is not known as an environmentalist but rather for his extreme Islamist, anti-US, Israel and Holocaust-denying views. He was one of the proponents of Iran's nuclear program and banned UN inspectors from visiting the country's nuclear facilities. During his presidency, the situation of human rights and minorities in Iran also deteriorated dramatically. In 2005, in a speech praising Iranian Islamic revolutionary Ayatollah Khomeini, who served as the first supreme leader of Iran from 1979, Ahmadinejad announced that "Israel must be wiped off the map".
