Israeli president takes swipe at Iran's nuclear program

Israel's President Shimon Peres speaks at the opening ceremony of Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day in the Warsaw Ghetto Square at Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, Wednesday, April 30, 2008. Israel's annual Holocaust Heroes and Martyrs Remembrance Day for 6 million Jews who were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators in World War II begins Wednesday at sundown. (AP Photo/Debbie Hill, Pool)

JERUSALEM—Israel's president took a veiled swipe at Iran and its disputed nuclear program Wednesday, using his Holocaust Memorial Day speech to talk about the danger the world would have faced if Adolf Hitler had succeeded in his quest to build atomic bombs.

Although Shimon Peres did not refer specifically to either Iran or its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, his aides said afterward that he was alluding to them when he talked about Hitler and the Nazi regime in Germany.

Despite Iranian insistence its nuclear program is peaceful, Israel, the U.S. and others believe Iran is trying to build atomic weapons, and Ahmadinejad has called repeatedly for the Jewish state's destruction.

"My heart shudders when I recall that there was a possibility that Hitler could acquire nuclear weapons," Peres said. "A leader who plans mass destruction, together with weapons of mass destruction. What would have been left of our world?"

Peres spokeswoman Ayelet Frisch said he meant his comments to be taken as a comparison of the damage done by Hitler and Nazi Germany to the threat posed by Ahmadinejad and the Islamic regime in Iran.

"We will act on our responsibilities. The world must act on its responsibilities without delay," Peres said, in what aides said was another reference to Iran.

His warning came during a ceremony at Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial and research center in Jerusalem, on the annual memorial day for the 6 million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust of World War II.

Hundreds of Holocaust survivors and other Israelis filled the main plaza on a cool evening to listen to speeches, prayers and music, including a children's harmonica band founded by Shmuel Gogol, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto.

Restaurants and places of entertainment closed throughout the country Wednesday evening. After a memorial air raid siren early Thursday, further ceremonies were to include the public reading of names of Holocaust victims at sites around the country, including the parliament.

Speakers at Wednesday's ceremony repeatedly referred to Israel's military strength, asserting that it could prevent another mass catastrophe from befalling the Jewish people.

Peres, 84, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 and serves now as Israel's ceremonial head of state, observed that the Jewish people were too late in setting up their state to rescue the Jews of Europe from the Holocaust.

Saying the world woke up too late to eliminate the threat of Hitler before he started a war that killed 60 million people, Peres said the world must not let that happen again. "In history, it is forbidden to be late," he said.

He criticized the German people of the 1930s for electing and venerating a "crazy person," Hitler. "How is it possible that a people does not rise up in the face of murder in the streets, an army rolling on tank treads to destroy neighbors of yesterday and friends of the day before?"

About 270,000 Holocaust survivors live in Israel, of whom about 80,000 survived Nazi death camps, said Zeev Factor, chairman of a commission working on benefits for them. Many survivors live in poverty, and Factor said that despite Israeli government promises to increase their support payments, "nothing has been implemented yet."

In his speech at Yad Vashem, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert conceded that the country has "not always paid our debt to the survivors."

The body that deals with German reparations and restitution, known as the Claims Conference, said it distributed or allocated $737 million to survivors in 2007. Some survivors charge that the body spends too much on education and research projects and not enough to help destitute survivors.