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Mike Pence, Netanyahu Lambast Iran For Anti-Semitism


U.S. Vice President Mike Pence at World Holocaust Forum at Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial centre in Jerusalem. January 23, 2020.
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence at World Holocaust Forum at Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial centre in Jerusalem. January 23, 2020.

Addressing world leaders on Thursday during the World Holocaust Forum in Jerusalem, the U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said the world should stand strong against Iran as the "leading state purveyor of anti-Semitism" while the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saluted the U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President Pence for confronting "the tyrants of Tehran".

Netanyahu compared what he considers the threat from Iranian leaders who he said "subjugate their own people and threaten the peace and security of the entire world" to Nazi Germany and said: "There will not be another Holocaust".

"We have yet to see a unified and resolute stance against the most anti-Semitic regime on the planet, a regime that openly seeks to develop nuclear weapons and annihilate the one and only Jewish state," he said and called on the world leaders who have gathered at Yad Vashem Memorial Institute to mark 75 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp, to "join the vital efforts of confronting Iran".

In his speech in the forum on Thursday Mike Pence who spoke shortly after the Israeli Prime Minister called Iran's nuclear program "a threat to all nations, not just Israel".

"We must also stand strong against the leading state purveyor of anti-Semitism, against the one government in the world that denies the Holocaust as a matter of state policy and threatens to wipe Israel off the map. The world must stand strong against the Islamic Republic of Iran," Pence said.

Iranian officials have yet not reacted to these statements. Tehran denies anti-Semitism and claims it has no problem with Judaism as a religion, which is one of the four religions other than Islam recognized by the Iranian Constitution, and the Jewish people, including tens of thousands of Jews who still live in Iran.

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