Iran’s President: Holocaust Still ‘Big Deception’

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday once again called the Holocaust a “big deception” in his latest denunciations of Israel and its allies.

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 unabashedly kept up his rhetoric and told a gathering of international scholars Wednesday that Israel uses the “big deception of the Holocaust” to sway allies in the West.

In April at the U.N.’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 European Union country in attendance.

The United States and eight other 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 criticizing 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.”

(Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)