The BBC reports:
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has courted further controversy by explicitly calling the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry a "myth". "They have created a myth today that they call the massacre of Jews and they consider it a principle above God, religions and the prophets," he said.I expect a number of European commentators will rush to "contextualize" Ahmadinejad's remarks, explaining to us simple folk why we shouldn't be alarmed - though, somewhat surprisingly, Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian says he's not going to play that game anymore.
On live TV, he called for Europe or North America - even Alaska - to host a Jewish state, not the Middle East.
[E]veryone has their limits and last week I reached mine. On Thursday the president of Iran chose to stand with the cranks, neo-fascists and racists who deny the factual truth of the Holocaust.
"Some European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces," said Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. "Although we don't accept this claim..."
Suddenly, the usual apologetics won't work. No one can say Iran's president was really complaining about Israel or Zionism, rather than Jews. No one can say he was talking about the west's colonial crimes. He was peddling, instead, one of the defining tropes of the racist hard right: Holocaust denial. It is a stance that seeks to deny Jews their history, their suffering, almost their very being. Like denying that African-Americans were ever slaves, it is a move made by those who wish only harm.
