Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman on Wednesday condemned Iranian first Vice
President Mohammad Reza Rahimi for a speech he gave at a UN conference in Tehran
on Tuesday in which he blamed Jews for controlling the international drug
trade.
“Hitler also said crazy things and succeeded in carrying out his
plan,” Liberman stated, adding that the world has not yet fully come to
understand the danger that Iran poses.
In his address to a UN-sponsored
conference marking International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking
in Tehran, Rahimi blamed Judaism for the spread of illegal drugs around the
world, during a speech Tuesday at an international drug conference in Iran, a
New York Times correspondent reported from Tehran.
In the speech
described by the Times as “baldly anti-Semitic,” Rahimi said that the Talmud
teaches to “destroy everyone who opposes the Jews,” according to the
report.
He went on to assert that there are no drug addicts who are
Zionists: “The Islamic Republic of Iran will pay for anybody who can research
and find one single Zionist who is an addict. They do not exist. This is the
proof of their involvement in drugs trade,” the Times quoted Rahimi as
saying.
Moving to another issue, Rahimi reportedly said that the Talmud
teaches Jews that they are a superior race, saying: “They think God has created
the world so that all other nations can serve them.”
Diplomats present at
the conference criticized the speech, but remained for the rest of the
event.
Liberman responded that “The Iranian regime is not composed of
crazy people, but of anti-Semitic fanatics,who have a detailed worldwide plan,
part of which, as they admit openly, is the destruction of the State of
Israel.”
The foreign minister added that “the fact that UN
representatives and representatives of European nations are still participating
in conferences held in Tehran, in which the worst kind of anti-Semitics remarks
are made, legitimizes the the regime of the Ayatollahs.”
The
Anti-Defamation League on Wednesday called on UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
to condemn the speech.
“To all those who thought that anti-Semitism is a
thing of the past, certainly this makes it very clear that it is alive and well
again. What makes it more sinister and dangerous is the fact that it comes from
a leader of a country that has vowed to destroy the Jewish state, and is making
efforts to obtain the means to do it,” ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman
said.
He added: “Before now, good people in the world either ignored
Iran’s anti- Semitism or did not take it seriously. One would hope that this
resurgence of dangerous anti-Semitic themes at a UN conference in Tehran would
shake up the moral, political, religious leadership to condemn it with a strong
voice. We begin by calling on Ban Ki-moon to speak out and to make clear that
these views are not only objectionable, but repugnant to the entire
international community.”