'The new Hitler speaks Persian'

Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin sent a message to heads of parliament around the world Tuesday in which he compared Iranian President Mahhoud Ahmadinejad to Adolf Hitler.

"The hate expressed by the President of Iran is a warning to all humanity: We risk seeing a repetition of the Holocaust and it will be brought about by people like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad," Rivlin wrote.

Referring to Ahmadinejad's anti-Israel speech at the Durban II UN conference on racism in Switzerland, Rivlin wrote that "73 years after the Berlin Olympics, yesterday the world witnessed the return of Adolf Hitler."

"This time he has a beard and speaks Persian...But the words are the same words and the aspirations are the same aspirations and the determination to find the weapons to achieve those aspirations is the same menacing determination. Unfortunately, just as at that shameful Olympic event, the world has again given him a platform," he said.

"If there is one lesson to be learned from the destruction and devastation the first Hitler brought to the world, it is to be found in the realization that anyone who remains silent, anyone who ignores evil, anyone who deals with the devil - he too in the final analyses pays the price," Rivlin cautioned.

"I therefore call upon you, my colleagues around the world, not to remain silent, not to turn away and above all not to think for one moment that Ahmadinejad is not a threat to you too," he concluded.

	Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin.
	Photo by: (Tes Shaflen)