Reuters reported: U.S. President George W. Bush on Thursday decried his critics’ calls for negotiations with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as comparable to the “appeasement” of Adolf Hitler before World War Two.

Bush used his speech to the Israeli Knesset to ratchet up his rhetoric against Iran, saying Washington stood by the Jewish state in opposing Tehran’s “nuclear weapons ambitions.”

Bush, who has refused any contact with Ahmadinejad, said the Iranian president “dreams of returning the Middle East to the Middle Ages and calls for Israel to be wiped off the map,” and lumped him together in an anti-Israel camp with Hamas, Hezbollah and Osama bin Laden.

“Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before,” Bush said.

“As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ’Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history,” he added.