JERUSALEM: Israeli officials yesterday brushed aside Iranian President Hassan Rowhani’s condemnation of the Holocaust as insufficient, saying he ought also to have condemned those who deny the Nazi genocide.
Rowhani told CNN, after addressing the UN General Assembly late on Tuesday, that the extermination of Jews in World War II was “reprehensible,” in a new sign of a radical change by the Tehran government. Rowhani’s predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a strident critic of Israel and repeatedly questioned the Holocaust.
“It’s true that (Rowhani) didn’t deny the Holocaust, but he didn’t condemn those who have denied it, such as his predecessor and other Iranian leaders,” Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz told Israeli public radio.
Rowhani told CNN that “any crime that happens in history against humanity, including the crime the Nazis created toward the Jews, is reprehensible and condemnable”. “Whatever criminality they committed against the Jews we condemn. The taking of human life is contemptible,” he said, according to the US broadcaster’s translation. “It makes no difference whether that life is Christian, Jewish or Muslim. For us it is the same,” added Rowhani.
AFP
