Netanyahu hits back at Iran’s Holocaust claims

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Waving the blueprints for Auschwitz and invoking the memory of his own family members murdered by the Nazis, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered his most passionate and public riposte yet to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s questioning of the Holocaust.

The documents he brought to the podium of the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday also included the protocol of the meeting where the Nazis decided on the Final Solution.

Netanyahu tied the Holocaust issue to Iran’s nuclear program and Ahmadinejad’s rejection of Israel’s right to exist and seemed to tacitly draw a parallel between the world’s treatment of Iran today and its failure to act against Hitler in time to head off World War II and save European Jewry.

The Israeli leader came armed with original documents handed to him last month when he visited Germany and launched into an angry denunciation of Ahmadinejad’s comments on the Holocaust, most recently in a speech in Tehran last week in which he spoke of “twisted propaganda plots” to depict Jews as oppressed and said the Holocaust needed “research ... to clear up facts.”

Six million Jews were killed during World War II, one-third of all world Jewry. In Europe, nearly every family was affected — including Netanyahu’s own.

To those who remained at the General Assembly on Wednesday when Ahmadinejad spoke, he asked: “Have you no shame? Have you no decency?”