Vice President Parviz Davoodi said Iran wants peace but he's warned what he dubbed “expansionists” against aggression.
He said Iran's lions are so powerful they can strike the enemy like lightning and destroy it.
His comments during a major army parade come at a time of mounting tension over Tehran's nuclear program.
Ahmadinejad cleans up image
Iran's president says that talks on his country's nuclear program were "on the right path" and that Tehran did not need a nuclear weapon.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he was "at a loss" as to what more he could do to prove that his country wasn’t interested in nuclear weapons.
Mr Ahmadinejad said his country has not hidden anything and was working within the framework of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty.
"The bottom line is we do not need a bomb," he said at a news conference on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
The EU and US disputed Iran’s nuclear activities which they was Tehran to suspend.
Diplomats said they are not willing to wait much longer for a response to a package of incentives offered to Tehran in exchange for Iran suspending uranium enrichment.
Ahmedinejad targets ‘Zionists’
Responding to Western criticism of his questioning of the Holocaust and his earlier call for Israel to be “wiped off the map”, Mr Ahmadinejad said his quarrel was with Zionists and not Jews.
But Mr Ahmadinejad did not respond directly when asked if he had been correctly translated as saying last year he sought the elimination of the Jewish state.
He said Zionists were aggressors and murderers who had driven Palestinians from their home to set up the Jewish state and then occupied Palestinian lands.
"We love everyone around the world. Jews, Christians, Muslims, non-Muslims, non-Jews, non-Christians. We have no problem with people," he told a news conference on the sidelines of a UN General Assembly meeting.
"Zionists are Zionists, period. They are not Jews, they are not Christians, and they are not Muslims," he said.
"They are a power group, a power party, and we oppose the oppression and the aggression that any party that seeks pure raw power goes after."
Distinction dismissed
Zionism is the name of the movement to establish a Jewish homeland that led to the creation of the state of Israel nearly 60 years ago.
Mr Ahmadinejad says he favours a return of Palestinians to the land now called Israel, and a referendum "with the participation of everyone" to determine its fate.
Felice Gaer, director of the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, dismissed the president's distinction between Jews and Zionists.
"Ahmadinejad's desire to rid the world of Israel is the transference of the classical bigoted treatment of the Jew to the state of the Jews," she said.
"There is an inextricable historic Jewish connection with the land of Israel. As Martin Luther King said, 'When people criticise Zionists, they mean Jews.'"