HAARETZ: Holocaust teaches that murderers must be stopped before they act, says PM in apparent reference to Iran.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told dignitaries gathered at the Auschwitz extermination camp on Wednesday that the world must learn from the Holocaust to unite against new threats.
In what was apparently a thinly veiled reference to Iran, Netanyahu called on the international community to come together to confront "impending dangers".
Israel believes Iran to be building a nuclear bomb and views the Islamic Republic as an existential threat. Iran insists its nuclear program is purely for civilian purposes.
"We must warn of the impending danger to the rest of the world and at the same time to be ready to defend ourselves," Netanyahu said. "The most important lesson from the Shoah is that murderous evil must be stopped as soon as possible, before it can realize its schemes."
"We the Jewish people learned the lesson [of the Holocaust] well after we lost one-third of our people," Netanyahu said, adding that a strong state of Israel with a powerful army was the only guarantee of preventing a second Holocaust.
"I pledge as prime minister that we will never let the hand of evil harm our people and our state, never again," he said.
Netanyahu added: "All enlightened nations must absorb this lesson," pledging that as the head of the state of he would not to allow a "new Amalek" to threaten again to destroy the Jewish nation - a reference to a biblical king who waged war against the Jews.
Earlier on Wednesday, Pope Benedict XVI recalled the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, and event which revealed "the unprecedented cruelty," of the Nazi Holocaust.
The 82-year-old pontiff made the remarks in his native German during his weekly general audience.
"On 27 January 1945, the gates of the Nazi concentration camp near the Polish city of Oswiecim, better known by its German name of Auschwitz, were opened and the few survivors freed," Benedict said.
"That event, and the testimony of those who survived, revealed to the world the horror of the crimes of unprecedented cruelty committed in the extermination camps created by Nazi Germany," added the pope, who as a teenager - like most others at the time - had been a member of the Hitler Youth in the waning days of the war.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day which is being marked in several European nations, serves, according to Benedict, to recall "the planned annihilation of the Jews, and to honor those who, at the risk of their own lives, protected the persecuted and sought to oppose the murderous insanity." >>> Cnaan Liphshiz, Haaretz Correspondent, Haaretz Service, and News Agencies | Wednesday, January 27, 2010
