Israel On Sidelines As World Rushes To Embrace Iran's Rouhani

[former9thward]

44. He is still denying it.

Rouhani: I’ve said before that I am not a historian and that when it comes to speaking of the dimensions of the Holocaust, it is the historians that should reflect on it. But in general I can tell you that any crime that happens in history against humanity, including the crime that Nazis committed towards the Jews as well as non-Jews is reprehensible and condemnable. Whatever criminality they committed against the Jews, we condemn, the taking of human life is contemptible, it makes no difference whether that life is Jewish life, Christian or Muslim, for us it is the same, but taking the human life is something our religion rejects but this doesn’t mean that on the other hand you can say Nazis committed crime against a group now therefore, they must usurp the land of another group and occupy it. This too is an act that should be condemned. There should be an even-handed discussion.



This is not Holocaust acknowledgment. It is Holocaust denial. The Holocaust is a specific set of historically verifiable—indeed, historically verified—events. It involved the Nazi murder of somewhere between 5.5 million and 6 million Jews, because they were Jews, as part of an effort whose eventual goal was to exterminate all of Europe’s Jews. Much of it took place in camps organized explicitly to kill people on an industrial scale; at the extreme end, Auschwitz could incinerate almost 5,000 corpses per day. To say that it remains a question for historians is dishonest. To speak of it as continuous with the “crime” the Nazis committed toward non-Jews is disingenuous, and suggests a desire to rob the Holocaust of its central feature, which was its mission, increasingly accepted and then finally codified in January 1942, to kill all of Europe’s Jews.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114855/iranian-president-rouhani-still-holocaust-denier