Editor’s note: The corporate media pulled the same stunt in 2006 when MEMRI, a Mossad disinfo operation, released a mistranslated text of an Ahmadinejad speech.

Robert Parry
Consortiumnews
September 20, 2009

	Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In a front-page story on Saturday, the Times three times (once in a sub-head and twice in the article) reported that Ahmadinejad called the World War II Holocaust of European Jews a “lie” during an annual “Quds Day” speech showing solidarity with the Palestinian people. But the Times offered no fuller context for the quote.

The White House and other U.S. officials reacted to the “lie” remark, which also was featured in other Western news accounts, with understandable outrage. However, Iran’s Press TV reported that “Ahmadinejad did not deny the Holocaust, but raised some questions about the matter, asking Western powers for a logical answer.”

Press TV quoted Ahmadinejad as saying: “If the Holocaust, as you claim, is true, why don’t you allow a probe into the issue?” Press TV added that Ahmadinejad was “calling the Zionist regime a symbol of lies and deception founded on ‘colonialist’ attitudes. The Iranian president also asked why Palestinians had to pay for the genocide of Jews at the hands of Europeans.”

So what did Ahmadinejad really say?

In the English-language account of the speech published on the official Web site of the Iranian president, Ahmadinejad calls the “pretext” for founding the state of Israel “a lie,” but he doesn’t spell out precisely what he means by “pretext.” In the context, the word seems to refer to the Holocaust, but arguably his reference to “a lie which relies on … a mythical claim” could be about Biblical claims to the land of Palestine that Zionist organizations cite.

As Press TV says, Ahmadinejad frames his skeptical comments about the Holocaust within Western hostility toward the scholarship of some European and American Holocaust skeptics (often called “deniers”) who dispute details such as the estimated number of six million Jews killed by the Nazis.

But some of that supposed scholarship has been widely viewed as an excuse by neo-fascists and anti-Semites to diminish the horror of the Nazi extermination campaign against Jews and other groups considered undesirable by Adolf Hitler and his German Third Reich.

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