re: #101 Decatur Deb

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif: Holocaust a ‘Heinous Crime’ and a ‘Genocide’

Buried in the media noise.

abcnews.go.com

Meh, it’s an old gimmick. Say one thing in English to the Western press while saying something completely different back home. From your article…

In an exclusive interview this morning on “This Week,” Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif condemned the Holocaust as a “heinous crime” and a “genocide,” dismissing as a poor translation the appearance of the word “myth” about the Holocaust on the Iranian Supreme Leader’s English website.

Iran has been criticized in recent years for the words of its former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who often denied the existence of the Holocaust, while the phrase “the myth of the massacre of Jews” appears in a translation of a speech from February 2006 by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamanei.

“The Holocaust is not a myth. Nobody’s talking about a myth,” Zarif told George Stephanopoulos on “This Week” Sunday when asked about the quote. “If it’s there … it’s a bad translation, and it’s translated out of context… This is the problem when you translate something from Persian to English, you may lose something, as the film goes, ‘Lost in Translation,’ you may lose some of the meaning.”

That’s obviously bullshit. It’s neither a translation error nor an out of context quote. Here’s the speech

The more important issue is the outrageous affront to the Holy Prophet of Islam (peace be upon him and his infallible household), which brings disgrace to Western civilization with regard to the freedom of expression. Such offensive acts discredit and bring shame upon liberal democracy, the banner of which has been raised by Western countries and in which these countries take pride, with respect to the freedom of expression.

Western countries allow no freedom of expression, which they claim to advocate, with regard to the myth of the massacre of Jews known as the holocaust, and nobody in the West enjoys the freedom of expression to deny it or raise doubts about it.

There are many individuals in European countries, including scientists, scholars, historians and journalists, who do not dare to express their doubts about this issue. There are also some who believe that the whole issue is a lie, but they do not dare to say so because they have seen that whoever has said so has been punished, prosecuted and imprisoned and has been deprived of his rights.

However, affronting the sanctities of about 1.5 billion Muslims - without any reasons or the existence of any quarrels between the two or any affronts on the part of Muslims to their sanctities - is permissible in the West and benefits from the freedom of expression!