Khatami tells Ahmadinejad, holocaust is a misused reality

In what has been described as a "stinging attack" on the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, his predessessor, Mohammad Khatami, has said:

We should speak out if even a single Jew is killed. Don’t forget that one of the crimes of Hitler, Nazism and German national socialism was the massacre of innocent people, among them many Jews,” the cleric said in comments carried in the Iranian press on Wednesday.

The Holocaust, he asserted, should be recognised “even if this historical reality has been misused and there is enormous pressure on the Palestinian people.”.....

“The persecution of Jews, just like Nazism, is a Western phenomenon. In the east, we have always lived side by side with them. And we follow a religion that states that the death of an innocent person is the death of all of humanity,” Khatami said.

He also argued that it was of little importance “whether the number killed (during the Holocaust) was high or not” -- but at the same time went on to accuse Israel’s leaders as being “victims of fascism and practising fascist policies today”.

Ahmadinejad also came under attack from the prominent and centrist Shargh newspaper, which complained that “the Holocaust has, as wished for by the president, become a topic of our foreign policy”.

“The Jewish question was never a problem for Iran or Islam, and is a Christian-European problem,” the paper argued.

Read the full article in the Khaleej Times.