'Iran incites against Israel like Goebbels' propaganda did'

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman reacted strongly to anti-Semitic remarks by Iranian Vice President Mohammad-Reza Rahimi on Tuesday, comparing the remarks to Nazi propaganda.

Speaking at a U.N.-sponsored international anti-drug conference in Tehran, Rahimi accused Israel of being responsible for the global distribution of illegal drugs and claimed that the Talmud "teaches them how to destroy non-Jews so as to protect an embryo in the womb of a Jewish mother," according to excerpts published by the Fars news agency.

"This man [Rahimi] incites against the State of Israel like only [Nazi propaganda minister Joseph] Goebbels' newspapers could, back in the day," Lieberman told reporters at a press conference in southern Israel on Wednesday.

"People dismiss this talk as nonsense, saying they [Iran] aren't serious, and that they don't mean it — but they do mean it," Lieberman said. "If the Iranians — that same vice president who spoke the way he did against Israel — if he should procure a nuclear bomb, we can only imagine what the implications will be. A nuclear Iran is exactly like what would have happened if Hitler had had nuclear capability."

Meanwhile Wednesday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also criticized Iran's vice president. "The secretary-general has on many occasions called on Iranian officials to refrain from these kinds of anti-Semitic statements. He does so again in response to these latest reported comments," said UN spokesman Martin Nesirky.

"He believes it is the responsibility of leaders to promote harmony and understanding and he deeply regrets expressions of hatred and religious intolerance," Nesirky added.

A third round of talks between world powers and Iran ten days ago failed to resolve the stalemate over Iran's controversial nuclear program. With that process seemingly close to collapse, Israel renewed veiled threats of military action against Iranian nuclear production sites, which it deems a mortal threat.

While Iran and Israel have traded hostile rhetoric for years, Rahimi's remarks seemed unusually inflammatory to Western delegates.

The New York Times, which covered the anti-drug conference, held on a U.N.-sponsored International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, further quoted Rahimi as saying Zionists ordered gynecologists to kill black babies and that the Russian Revolution of 1917 was started by Jews — although none, he was also quoted as saying, died in it.

The speech, for which at least ten Western diplomats were present, drew furious condemnation from Israel, which has been angered in the past by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's description of the Nazi Holocaust as a lie.

Iran's government, Lieberman said in a statement, is "made up not of madmen but of fanatical, anti-Semitic people with an agenda, who have a detailed global plan including, as they say openly and forthrightly, the destruction of the State of Israel."

He said the Islamic Republic, and any failure by the international community to curb its nuclear work, would be "a sure recipe for disaster and a threat to world peace."

The European Union's foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who leads nuclear talks with Iran on behalf of six world powers, said Rahimi's speech was anti-Semitic and "unacceptable."

"[Ashton] is deeply disturbed by racist and anti-Semitic statements made by Iranian First Vice President Mohammad-Reza Rahimi," spokeswoman Maja Kocijanic said.

"Such statements are unacceptable and should not be tolerated," she said.

A Western diplomat who was at the conference said Rahimi's 10-minute address left him "really shocked and surprised."

"We've heard speeches like this before but this was so much worse than the usual rhetoric. This wasn't about drugs. It seems the Iranians want to create an issue and are deliberately looking to stir things up," the diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Israel reacted to the latest fruitless nuclear talks between six world powers and Iran with a well-seasoned message — sanctions must be intensified while the clocks ticks counting down to a possible military action.

Alun Jones, spokesman for the Vienna-based United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said UNODC attended the Tehran conference as well as related events across the world on Tuesday, as mandated by the U.N. General Assembly, and that it could not anticipate what the Iranian hosts would say.

Jones added: "The drug trade is motivated by business and profit, not by ideological considerations, and also drug addiction is a health challenge which affects all people, of all kinds, of all race, of all creed and it is a health challenge that affects people in the same way."

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