The other day Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu tweeted that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani denies the Holocaust.
Just last week,
@HassanRouhani, like Ahmadinejad before him, refused to recognize the#Holocaust as an historical fact
But Rouhani specifically acknowledges the Holocaust, per CNN, covering the president’s interview with Christiane Amanpour:
Iran’s new president has acknowledged the Holocaust, furthering the stark contrast between himself and his predecessor.
“Any crime that happens in history against humanity, including the crime the Nazis committed towards the Jews as well as non-Jews, was reprehensible and condemnable,” President Hassan Rouhani said in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
“Whatever criminality they committed against the Jews we condemn. The taking of human life is contemptible. It makes no difference whether that life is a Jewish life, Christian or Muslim.”
He followed with an apparent reference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying it’s not acceptable to “usurp the land of another group and occupy it.” He called for “an even-handed discussion.”
NBC’s Andrea Mitchell also reports similar statements from Rouhani yesterday:
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani repudiated his predecessor’s Holocaust denials on Wednesday, saying the Nazis “committed a crime against Jews” but that the question of “scale” should be left to historians.
“The Nazis carried out a massacre that cannot be denied, especially against the Jewish people,” he said in an informal conversation with a small group of U.S. reporters, including NBC News.
The Emergency Committee for Israel has also stated that Rouhani is a Holocaust denier. Shouldn’t it retract this statement?
The Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman issued a statement accepting Rouhani’s acknowledgement of the Holocaust but going on to say he was creating a false equivalence between Jewish and Palestinian suffering.
“But in practically the same breath President Rouhani engaged in the more subtle form of Holocaust revisionism, minimizing it by accusing the Jewish survivors of taking vengeance on the Palestinians in fulfilling their 2,000-year-old dream of returning to their homeland, Israel. This was a gratuitous swipe at the survivors.
“There is no moral equivalency between the slaughter of 6 million Jews and millions of other innocent men, women and children in the Nazi gas chambers and the plight of the Palestinian people living in the West Bank and Gaza. The Iranians, apparently, are willing to come only so far.”
This is a form of Nakba denial. Though he mentions the Palestinian “plight,” Foxman completely ignores what Rouhani meant by saying Israel usurps others’ lands: the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians expelled from their lands and homes so that Israel could establish a majority-Jewish state. It’s a wonder that Foxman is the go-to guy for the media on talking points on anti discrimination when he denies these crimes, and does so as a partisan for Israel.
“There is no moral equivalency between the slaughter of 6 million Jews and millions of other innocent men, women and children in the Nazi gas chambers and the plight of the Palestinian people living in the West Bank and Gaza.”
Bullshit. Apartheid sucks and the fact that Jews run it under the cover of Holocaust sympathy makes it suck even more.
Foxman’s warning to the Ukrainian Prime Minister not to put the mass murder of Ukrainians by Stalin in the 1930s on a par with the Shoah showed what a sleazebag he is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fm8-yTBs964
36 minutes
Holocaust denial apparently has some traction inside Iran.
Now the editor of their official news agency says that CNN mistranslated him:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4433602,00.html
The key detail in the story was that the translator was picked by the Iranians, so it’s likely that Rouhani does indeed not endorse Holocaust denial but that there’s ample room for bigots who do in the Iranian discourse back home, which is why he wanted to avoid getting embroiled in the controversy in the first place.
He seems to have understood that to remain passive in such questions would undermine Iran’s ability to project itself as turning a new page and took the plunge, but it’s also important to remember that significant parts of the establishment still do not want to admit the Holocaust happened. This speaks well of Rouhani, but it also casts doubt on how moderate the rest of the leadership is, and how well he would be able to push through a major change of direction. I’d say he’s probably a lot like Rabin. He’s not as liberal as many seem to think, but he is still evolving. But like Rabin his domestic contemporaries could be his undoing. I don’t think it’ll go as far as assassination, of course.
Well, yes (in my view), these silly people should be publicly shamed for claiming that
Rouhani is a H-denier, especially if they do not include a reliable quote to show [a] what he said and [b] why the saying of the same constitutes “denial”. DO NOT LET THEM GET AWAY WITHOUT QUOTES!
Some (many?) of the Holocaust-anti-denial cabal regard ANY SUGGESTION that the truth is not PRECISELY the story that they champion as a variant on DENIAL. If someone foolishly says that “only 5 million Jews perished”, then such an one is likely to be treated as a denier (even if he clearly acknowledges most of the other descriptions of the Holocaust).
This is a dangerous business, because some nations have made it a CIVIL or CRIMINAL offence to deny the Holocaust. (Scarier still: such laws do not, so far as I know, trouble themselves to say explicitly what is not to be said and/or not to be denied.)
I’m not sure the Holocaust-anti-deniers ever make a full and complete statement of what the not-ever-ever-to-be-denied “facts” are: it’s almost as if they are saying that THEY ALONE (WHO ALONE?) should be permitted even to discuss the “facts”. Indeed, it is almost as if they are saying that the “facts” of the Holocaust are irrelevant, and secondary (no, not even secondary) to the Holocaust-assertions of the privileged folks who — alone — are allowed (by themselves) to describe the H and/or to condemn alleged instances of “denial”.
Abe’s a slippery old fellow. Thanks for Abe’s statement. “Plight” is nameless, “Nakba” is concrete.
Side note: Wonder how Kerry’s talk with his Iranian counterpart will go today?
Will be getting a lot of slyly conflicting statements about whatever transpires, eh?
Bringing it all back to the Shoah is about controlling the narrative. Israel didn’t kill 6 million so it’s entitled to do as it pleases with the Palestinians.
And of course the goys will pay for the refugees who are nothing to do with Israel
http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/1.549081
“On the ground, the Syrian conflict has increased the plight of Palestinian refugees who live in 12 camps in Syria. “Seven are not accessible to us because of fighting,” Grandi said. “More than half of 530,000 refugees in Syria, are displaced inside Syria and I would say 70,000 have left the country. These people are already refugees from before the (Syrian crisis) and they become refugees again.”
But the agency is not limiting its outreach to Arab nations and Western states, reflecting a change in the field of global humanitarian aid. “After New York, I am going to Brazil. Brazil is becoming an important donor. At this meeting on Thursday we have invited other donors such as Turkey,” he explained adding that roughly 80% of the aid agency’s funding comes from the United States, the European Union, Japan and Australia”
BTW well done to Rouhani for bringing up the subject of Israel’s nukes and the Non Proliferation Treaty.