Iran’s president is mining a vein of very deep, anti-rational obsession with this statement: Ahmadinejad compares Israel to Hitler.

TEHRAN (AFP) - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad compared Israel’s military strikes on Gaza and Lebanon to tactics used by Adolf Hitler against Jews during World War II.

“Their methods resemble Hitler’s. When Hitler wanted to launch an attack, he came up with a pretext,” Ahmadinejad said during a speech in Tehran. “Zionists say they are Hitler’s victims, but they have the same nature as Hitler,” he said.

The ultraconservative president has already called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” and described the Holocaust of six million Jews as “a myth.”

“We have two solutions for the crisis. One of them, which is a logical one, is that as you (Western nations) who imposed this regime by fabricating stories, you put an end to it and take it with you,” he said.

Ahmadinejad’s second solution was to have a referendum in which only the “true Palestinians,” decide their fate.

On Friday, Ahmadinejad boasted that Israel is not powerful enough to take on Iran after warning the Jewish state not to attack regional ally Syria. “Thanks be to God, despite its criminal and savage nature, the Zionist regime and its supporters in the West do not have the power to look in the same way towards Iran,” he said.