Iran, France clash over Sarkozy rebuke

TEHRAN, Dec. 12 (UPI) -- Iran has protested French President Nicolas Sarkozy's "extreme" public rebuke of Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry warned the French ambassador in Tehran "about the repercussion on bilateral relations of any repetition of such ill-considered remarks."

In addition to scathing remarks directed at the Iranian president over Israel and the Holocaust, Sarkozy refused at a United Nations dinner to shake hands with or sit at the same table as Ahmadinejad, The Persian Journal said Friday.

"I can't sit at a table -- after what the Shoah was, after what the 20th century was -- with a man who dared say Israel should to be wiped off the map," the French leader said in a speech commemorating the 60th anniversary of the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.

Sarkozy said it was a "shame" that the Iranian people should "be represented by certain leaders."