Iran pushed Holocaust denial to a new level this week, alleging that Jews were responsible for the mass killing of Christians in Yemen over 1,000 years ago.
Iran's semi-official Fars news agency published an article that managed to simultaneously deny the veracity of the 20th-century Holocaust, including the herding of Jews from far-flung parts of Europe to killing fields and extermination centers predominantly in central and eastern parts of the continent, while claiming that the Jews carried out the "original holocaust" against Christians more than a millennium ago on the border of modern-day Yemen.
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Hossein Shariatmadari, the editor of Kayhan, a conservative Iranian newspaper that originally published the article, claimed that "we referred to undeniable evidence that the Holocaust was falsely claimed by the Zionists and Western governments; but now we seek to show that historical documents refer to a real Holocaust that the Jews of that time, the ancestors of the Zionists, did."
The twin claims about this alleged incident in 524 CE and the apparent inadmissibility of perpetrator and witness testimony of the Nazi Holocaust is confusing.
The argument suggests that those who carried out the sixth-century slaughter are the progenitors of the "Zionists," but are not linked to Jews that the Tehran regime claims to tolerate.
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The timing of the article is not entirely surprising, coming on the heels of the republishing of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in France, and the visibly violent ramifications of free speech in a plural democracy and sections of the Muslim community taking offense at that reality.
"The trend in Iran, Malaysia and other countries run by Islamist governments is to use anti-Semitism as a way to respond to perceived insults against Islam in Europe," i24News cited the Jerusalem Post as saying.
This article was first published by i24NEWS.
