In his address to President Putin, Richard Prasquier said,:
"I am speaking to you as a member of a family which was exterminated by the Nazis during the war. I would not have been born if, in 1944, the Red Army had not liberated the Polish town where my parents were hiding.
Why were these members of my family, including children and old people, killed along with millions of other Jews?
There was no military advantage in it, quite the contrary, in fact, because their assassination used some of the means that could have been used to fight the Soviet Army.
Hitler was not following any rational logic. He was driven by his dream – for all of us a nightmare – of racial supremacy. The Jews were the top of the list of people to be killed off, and the Slavs came next, probably to be followed by others.
Today I live in dread, because other leaders are driven by dreams, and give themselves the military strength for the dreams to become a nightmare for us all. I’m talking about the Iranian leaders, of course. President Ahmadinejad talked about a halo of light that encircled him when he addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations. He said that the coming of the Messiah, the Mahdi, would be accelerated by a cataclysm such as a nuclear war, and that no price was too high to pay for that. In the past, the Iranian leaders have shown how little they cared about the lives of their children, when they sent them out to walk in minefields, carrying the keys to heaven....For us, this behaviour is not rational, it follows reasoning that is not like ours. If these leaders were able to exercise nuclear blackmail, our world would be in terrifying danger.
With men who reason in the same way, it is possible to negotiate and reach political or economic compromises. But with men who dream of imposing their expansionist or eschatological ideas, whatever the consequences, the rules of the game are different. Accommodating such men reinforces their desire for power and the fear of reprisals doesn’t work. I’m afraid, Mr. President, I’m afraid, not because I’m Jewish, not because I’m close to Israel, but because my personal history forces me to be lucid. It forces me to refuse a world where religious fanatics impose their desire to kill, and refuse it before it’s too late. We must constantly bear in mind the lessons of the Europe of seventy years ago.
Your role, Mr. President, is immense. We have confidence in you.”
According to Richard Prasquier, in his response, President Putin said that there was no formal evidence that the Iranians were seeking to develop nuclear weapons: maybe they only want to show that they are capable of doing it. This is why the information provided by the IAEA is so useful and why it is necessary to continue to give it the resources required for fulfilling its task. However, indications are that the Iranians are very close to producing fissile material in sufficient quantity to make a bomb, so that, with or without economic sanctions, we will find it difficult to stop them. The fact that delivery of Russian fuel to the Busheir plant has resumed is therefore of no consequence. However, Russia is firmly opposed to Iran possessing nuclear weapons, if for no other reason that certain Russian cities are also within range of existing Iranian missiles.
Concerning anti-Semitism, President Putin expressed his disgust for such behaviour, which should be punished with utmost severity. To all intents and purposes, he exonerated the Russians for such practices, saying “they are too often persecuted by their neighbouring countries”, and went on to violently attack the Baltic States (in particular the Latvians), the Ukrainians of the Orange revolution and the Muslim former Soviet republics, stating they were far too complacent with the resurgence of this scourge. To illustrate how widespread this phenomenon is, he referred, to our shame, to the Israeli neo-nazis (omitting however to mention that for the most part they are of Russian origin…), concluded Richard Prasquier
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