Which should come as a surprise to exactly no one.
Via The Commentator:
You can barely get into conversation with a Western peacenik or an Iranian diplomat on the subject of Iran without them trying to wriggle out of the extreme threats the regime has made to wipe out Israel or its vicious anti-Semitism by saying that this is all a mistranslation or it’s been taken out of context.
This matters enormously because the premise of the latest moves in Western policy towards the Islamic repubic is that we can take Iran at its word. If a) all they’re doing is lying to us and/or b) all the most damning charges against Iranian threats and rhetoric turn out to be true, we’re heading into the abyss.
As many countries and international institutions mark Holocaust Memorial Day on Monday, it is perhaps fitting that one of those “mistranslation” dragons can now be slain.
It has now been definitively established that Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is a Holocaust denier and that Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who charmed everyone at Davos a couple of days ago, has been lying through his teeth in saying that he is not.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) did the hard work that Western media organisations have not done and on Sunday exposed Zarif for what he and his ultimate boss really are.
Zarif had told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last September that reports Khamenei had openly denied the Holocaust were as a result of “bad translation” and were taken “out of context.”
According to MEMRI:
“Despite Zarif’s claim that Khamenei’s statements had been mistranslated from the Persian, MEMRI found that not only does Khamenei’s original Persian statement appear on his Persian-language website, but that the English version on his English-language website is indeed an accurate translation – he did indeed refer to the “myth of the Jewish slaughter known as the Holocaust”.