What Is This World Coming To?

Iran is trying to replicate Nazi Germany’s treatment of the Jewish people, Israeli deputy prime minister Silvan Shalom said Tuesday ahead of a Holocaust ceremony at a former death camp.

“What Iran is trying to do right now is not far away at all from what Hitler did to the Jewish people just 65 years ago,” Shalom told reporters before a ceremony at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp.

Shalom spoke one day after Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel to be wiped off the map and described the Holocaust as a “myth”, verbally attacked Israel at a UN anti-racism conference in Geneva.

“Yesterday in Geneva and today here in Auschwitz are showing us unfortunately… the world still has to fight back against those enemies of peace, those enemies of living one with the other,” said Shalom.

Ahmadinejad’s speech, in which he called Israel “the most cruel and racist regime,” sparked a walkout by European Union delegates at the anti-racism conference, which was already boycotted by the United States and Israel.

Shalom also called for US President Barack Obama to impose a deadline on Iran over its nuclear programme, which Israel and Western powers fear is aimed at building an atomic bomb. Tehran insists its aims are peaceful.

“I think that if the American administration — and first and foremost President Obama — is willing to open dialogue with Iran, I think it should be with a deadline and not dialogue that can last for years that will only enable them to end the programme and to have a nuclear bomb,” he said.

“Israel can never live with the idea that Iran will hold a nuclear bomb because we have heard what the president of Iran and other leaders there have said: that Israel has no right to exist and that Israel should be wiped off the map and that they will do everything to destroy Israel,” he added.

Shalom was speaking ahead of the annual March of the Living, which commemorates the more than one million Jews who perished at the camp in German-occupied Poland during World War II.