NEW YORK (VINnews) — In his first western media interview since assuming the Iranian presidency last year, Iran’s leader Ebrahim Raisi cast doubt on whether the Holocaust ever happened and called Israel a “false regime.”
Join our WhatsApp groupSubscribe to our Daily Roundup Email
Speaking with veteran US reporter Lesley Stahl on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Raisi said he couldn’t trust the United States as a negotiator in the stalled nuclear talks and termed Washington’s sanctions “tyrannical.”
During the interview, which took place last Tuesday, Stahl wore a headscarf and maintained the conduct she had been asked to demonstrate, but despite this, a member of Raisi’s staff blocked the cameramen from shooting goodbyes and one of the cameramen’s phones was confiscated for two hours by Raisi’s security detail.
During the interview, Stahl asked Raisi: “Do you believe the Holocaust happened? That 6 million Jews were slaughtered?”
Raisi answered that “historical events should be investigated by researchers and historians. There are some signs that it happened. If so, they should allow it to be investigated and researched.”
Stahl then said: “So you’re not sure, I’m getting that you’re not sure.” Raisi didn’t challenge that conclusion.
Iranian leaders have a long history of Holocaust denial and Holocaust revisionism, with former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said during a 2013 farewell ceremony that publicizing his Holocaust denial was a “major achievement of his presidency.”
Asked whether he supports Israel’s right to exist, Raisi said: “You see, the people of Palestine are the reality. This is the right of the people of Palestine who were forced to leave their houses and motherland. The Americans are supporting this false regime there to take root and to be established there.”
Asked about the Abraham Accords, which have seen multiple Arab nations normalize their ties with Jerusalem, the Iranian president replied: “If a state shakes hands with the Zionist regime, then they are also an accomplice to their crimes. And they are stabbing the very idea of Palestine in the back.”
Raisi rejected the notion of a potential face-to-face meeting with US President Joe Biden during the UN General Assembly which he is set to attend next week, stating that it wouldn’t be “beneficial.”
Commenting on the stalled talks on potentially signing a new nuclear deal after Trump in 2018 withdrew from the original 2015 accord, Raisi said: “The Americans broke their promises. They did it unilaterally. They said, ‘I am out of the deal.’ Now making promises is becoming meaningless.
“We cannot trust the Americans because of the behavior that we have already seen from them. That is why if there is no guarantee, there is no trust.”
“The sanctions are very tyrannical. This is a tyranny against the people of Iran. It is important to us to have the sanctions lifted,” Raisi said.
Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid, himself the son of a Holocaust survivor, bitterly mocked Raisi’s Holocaust remark, with a tweet that read: “Some signs,” alongside images taken of the genocide.
Some signs https://t.co/FhntllRxq5 pic.twitter.com/RgmjJmeJO3
— יאיר לפיד – Yair Lapid (@yairlapid) September 19, 2022
On Monday morning, Israel’s UN envoy Gilad Erdan tweeted that Raisi’s remarks about the Holocaust were “shocking,” urging UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres to “deny that Holocaust denier a world stage to spread antisemitism and hatred.
“The UN will reach a new low if they give the Butcher of Tehran a platform,” he said, in a reference to Raisi’s past authorization of thousands of executions of political dissidents when he headed the judiciary.
I’m surprised he even admitted there were signs. He went off message.
There are also some signs that the earth is round, that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and that the force of gravity may be real
I’m wondering if the President of Iran knew that Leslie Stahl is Jewish?