Iranian president calls Holocaust a ‘big deception’
The comments come amid a fierce election campaign in which his firebrand style, including regular denunciations of Israel and the West, has come under attack from his challengers.
Ahmadinejad’s main pro-reform rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi, said the president’s constant questioning of the Holocaust has undermined Iran’s international standing.
With just over a week until the June 12 elections, Ahmadinejad has kept up his rhetoric and told a gathering of international scholars yesterday that Israel uses the “big deception of the Holocaust” to sway allies in the West.
In April at the UN’s conference against racism in Geneva, the Iranian president accused the West of using the Holocaust as a “pretext” for aggression against Palestinians, provoking walkouts by delegates, including every Eu country in attendance.
The US and eight Western countries had already boycotted the event that started on the eve of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, because of concerns Muslim countries would drown out all other issues with calls to denounce Israel and restrict free speech when it comes to criticising Islam.
The Iranian president repeated his previous anti-Israel comments in September, calling the Holocaust by Nazi Germany during World War II a “fake” and saying that Israel is perpetrating a holocaust on the Palestinian people.
Ahmadinejad, known for virulent anti-Israeli rhetoric, said in 2005 that Israel should be “wiped off the map” and later called the Holocaust a “myth.” Most recently, he described the Jewish state as a “germ of corruption.”
“The identity of the liberal democracy has been exposed to the world by its protection of the most criminal regime in the history of humanity, the Zionist regime, by using the big deception of the Holocaust,” he said yesterday
