The execution last weekend of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is a warning to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi said in Sydney this week. “It’s a message for the next one to the president of Iran,” Rabbi Yona Metzger said.

“If he plans to kill innocent people, only because they are Jewish and Israeli, it’s a message for him that even his nation, his people, will hang him.”

He said a perpetrator of crimes against humanity must be punished.

“He [Saddam] was a murderer, he killed so many people. He had to have punishment.

“It’s a message to everyone who is a potential murderer: Saddam Hussein, now Bin Laden and Ahmadinejad.”

Rabbi Metzger was on a private week-long visit to Sydney, but changed his plans to attend the funeral of murdered Holocaust survivor Katherine Schweitzer.

Rabbi Metzger said he had written to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to urge him to bar Neturei Karta members from entering Israel following their participation in the Holocaust-denial conference in Iran last month.

“If someone from Hamas wants to come to Israel, Israel would welcome him?” he asked.

“They [Neturei Karta] are like Hamas today they shook hands with our enemy. The result is they are our enemy.”

Rabbi Metzger immediately called on their rabbis to excommunicate Neturei Karta members following the conference in Tehran.

“What was new here was that for the first time Jewish people were speaking against the Holocaust, not against Israel, but against our history.”

AJN