Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s latest Holocaust denial has pushed the buttons of one columnist at The Guardian. Jonathan Freedland writes:
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….
Well, now I’m done with the charitable explanations. A man who refuses to believe the historic truth is capable of anything. This is not an Arabic cable TV station or an obscure Egyptian newspaper. This is a head of government, the leader of a nation of 70 million – a country that aspires to lead the Muslim world. And, lest we forget, Iran has nuclear ambitions. So now it’s not paranoid to worry about a president with annihilationist dreams – it’s smart.
