REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, UNITED NATIONS - Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday tried to shift the spotlight away from the Islamic State militant group and back to Iran. Netanyahu warned the United Nations that a nuclear-armed Tehran would pose a far greater threat than "militant Islamists on pickup trucks."

Netanyahu referred mockingly to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's speech to the assembly last week, in which he accused the West and its allies of nurturing the group.

"Iran's President Rouhani stood here last week and shed crocodile tears over what he called the globalization of terrorism. Maybe he should spare us these phony tears and have a word instead with Iran's Revolutionary Guards," he said.

Islamic State's seizure of large swaths of Syria and Iraq and its killings of civilians and soldiers have dominated discussions during five days of speeches at the United Nations General Assembly podium and on the sidelines.

But Netanyahu described Iran, Islamic State and the militant group Hamas that controls the Gaza Strip as part of a single team, comparing them all to Germany's Nazis, who killed six million Jews in World War Two.

"The Nazis believed in a master race; the militant Islamists believe in a master faith," Netanyahu said in his speech at the annual gathering of the 193-nation assembly in New York. "They just disagree who among them will be the master of the master faith."

Referring 'Islamic State of Iran'

"Make no mistake, ISIS (Islamic State) must be defeated," Netanyahu added. "But to defeat ISIS and leave Iran as a threshold nuclear power is to win the battle and lose the war."

"It's one thing to confront militant Islamists on pickup trucks armed with Kalashnikov rifles. It's another thing to confront militant Islamists armed with weapons of mass destruction," Netanyahu said.

Iran rejects allegations by Western powers and their allies that it is developing the capability to produce atomic weapons and wants economic sanctions lifted as part of any nuclear deal with six countries negotiating with Tehran.

"Iran's nuclear military capabilities must be fully dismantled," Netanyahu said. 

He added that the goal of a charm offensive by Iran's "smooth talking president and foreign minister" was to get international sanctions lifted "and remove the obstacles to Iran's path to the bomb."

"The question before us is whether militant Islam will have the power to realize its unbridled ambitions. There is one place where that could soon happen – the Islamic State of Iran."

He twice referred to the "Islamic State of Iran," which would appear to be a deliberate play on the country's official name - the Islamic Republic of Iran - and Islamic State, which is often referred to as ISIL or ISIS.

After Monday's speeches, an Iranian delegate took the floor to respond to Netanyahu's "laughable" speech, saying he "tried in vain to wash his hands of this most recent bloodbath in Gaza," wrongfully equating the Muslim world "with the ISIS terrorist group and propagating Iranophobia and Islamophobia."

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