Iran threat as bad as Nazi Germany: Benjamin Netanyahu

Israel and the US have called for action against Iran, comparing it to the threat once posed by Nazi Germany.

Benjamin Netanyahu, centre front row, alongside world leaders at the World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem on Thursday. Picture: AP

Israel and the US have called for action against Iran, comparing it with the threat once posed by Nazi Germany, as world leaders marked 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz.

“There will not be another Holocaust,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Jerusalem gathering of more than 40 heads of state and government on Thursday night (Friday AEDT), slamming what he called “the ­tyrants of Tehran”.

He lamented that “we have yet to see a unified and resolute stance against the most anti-Semitic ­regime on the planet, a regime that openly seeks to develop nuclear weapons and annihilate the one and only Jewish state”.

In a similar vein, US Vice-President Mike Pence urged the international community to “stand strong” against Iran, calling it the sole country where Holocaust ­denial is “state policy”.

Tehran denies it is trying to produce a nuclear bomb and rejects accusations of anti-Semitism, insisting that while it opposes the Jewish state and supports the Palestinian cause, it has no problem with Jewish people — including its own Jewish minority.

Mr Pence and other leaders from dozens of countries were at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial centre for the biggest inter­national diplomatic gathering ever held in Israel to remember the liberation of Auschwitz.

Russian President Vladimir Putin told the meeting that the victors of World War II, which became the five permanent UN Security Council members, “hold a special responsibility to save civilisation”. Mr Putin, who has promoted Russia as a global powerbroker, proposed a 2020 summit of those countries’ leaders to “defend peace” in the face of ­global instability.

It was Russia’s Red Army that liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, but the Jerusalem gathering has aggravated a heated debate between Moscow and Warsaw over wartime history.

Poland’s President Andrzej Duda stayed away after being denied an opportunity to address the event, organised by Moshe Kan­tor, a billionaire close to the Kremlin. Last month, Mr Putin provoked an outcry by falsely claiming Poland had colluded with Adolf Hitler. Poland sees Moscow as rewriting history and ignoring its own 1939 non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany.

French President Emmanuel Macron, without mentioning any of the conflicts on display, told the Jerusalem gathering “no one has the right to invoke their dead to justify division or contemporary hatred”.

Mr Netanyahu, in his address to leaders and 100 Holocaust survivors, said while for many “Auschwitz is the ultimate symbol of evil … it is also the ultimate symbol of Jewish powerlessness”.

The main lesson of the Holocaust was that “Israel will do whatever it must do to defend our state, defend our people, and defend the Jewish future … I call on all governments to join the vital effort of confronting Iran”.

Israel opposed a 2015 deal between Iran and world powers to offer Tehran sanctions relief in return for curbs to prevent it acquiring nuclear weapons, and applauded when US President Donald Trump in 2018 pulled out of the accord.

Mr Netanyahu said on Thursday Israel “salutes” Mr Trump “for confronting the ­tyrants of Tehran that … threaten the peace and security of the entire world”.

The broader theme of the commemorations was the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe and North America, and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said he bowed “in deepest sorrow” at the memory of “the industrial mass murder of six million Jews, the worst crime in the history of humanity … committed by my countrymen”. Referring to extremism in Germany and elsewhere, he said: “Our age is a different age. The words are not the same. The perpetrators are not the same. But it is the same evil.”

AFP