Israel equates criticism of Israel with genocide to put Israeli genocide beyond criticism

Tel Aviv has compared Iran's criticism of Israeli discrimination against the Palestinians to Nazi Germany's killings during World War II.

"What Iran is trying to do right now is not far away at all from what Hitler did to the Jewish people just 65 years ago," Israeli deputy prime minister Silvan Shalom said at the Auschwitz concentration camp on Tuesday.

One day after Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Israel 'a totally racist government' formed on the back of 'military aggression', Tel Aviv launched an extensive smear campaign, in an effort to diverge international attention from the real situation in the occupied territories.

In 2003, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights concluded that the "excessive emphasis upon Israel as a 'Jewish State' encourages discrimination and accords a second-class status to its non-Jewish citizens."

Read What the United Nations had to say

In 2002, the Committee on the Rights of the Child noticed a "large gap between the needs and services provided to disabled Jewish and Israeli Arab children."

Read the concluding observations of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child with regard to Israel

"Yesterday in Geneva and today here in Auschwitz are showing us unfortunately... the world still has to fight back against those enemies of peace, those enemies of living one with the other," Shalom told reporters.

While Iran has not attacked a foreign country in 200 years, Israel has in the past two years been responsible for two deadly attacks on neighboring Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, killing more than 1,500 in 55 days.

Shalom also touched on another area of concern, a possible warming of relations between Iran and the United States.

The Obama administration's pledge to untangle 30 years of enmity toward Iran and engage the country with diplomacy over its long-disputed nuclear case has become a cause for distress in Tel Aviv.

"Israel can never live with the idea that Iran will hold a nuclear bomb because we have heard what the president of Iran and other leaders there have said: that Israel has no right to exist and that Israel should be wiped off the map and that they will do everything to destroy Israel," Shalom added.

Israel, believed to have up to 200 nuclear warheads in its arsenal, accuses Iran of pursuing a military nuclear program.

Iran, however, says it enriches uranium for civilian applications and that it has a right to the technology already in the hands of many others.

Under its policy of 'strategic ambiguity', Israel has neither admitted nor denied possessing nuclear weapons.

Tel Aviv's policy of deliberate ambiguity first became known when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in late 2006 said,"Can you say that this is the same level when they [Iran] are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?"

An Israeli spokesman later said Olmert had not mean to say Israel has nuclear weapons, but instead had meant to describe America, France, Israel and Russia as democracies.

In May 2008, former US president Jimmy Carter also confirmed that Tel Aviv is the sole possessor of a nuclear arsenal in the Middle East.