It is now well known that Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never said Israel should be wiped off the map. His real statement was that the Zionist regime should be removed from history as were his examples the USSR, the Shah's regime in Iran and Hussein's regime. His real statement is just as offensive to supporters of Israel, but not as demonizing.
But I often see formulations such as "I can't support Ahmadinejad because he is a Holocaust denier but he never called for the physical destruction of Israel". The second part is true. The first part, not so much.
The origin is a statement Ahmadinejad made, if my memory serves, in December 2006 about Western Holocaust-denial laws: They have taken this myth and elevated it even over the word of God. A person can be imprisoned for questioning it. [Edit: My memory didn't serve, it was December 2005, thanks Ziad.]
The word here being translated as myth is likely more neutrally translated as "story". But even the word myth in this context would not be used as an assertion of untruth. He is talking about the status given to the story itself. His point does not require an assertion that the story is not true and he didn't make an assertion that the story, or even myth, is not true.
The assertion of the sentence is not that the Holocaust story is false, but that it has been put into a sacred category of stories whose questioning can lead to physical punishment at the hands of the state. His point is that the West is more crass than the Muslim world, because while the Muslim world will punish people for blaspheming God or what they consider the word of God, the West ignores blasphemy against God but punishes public doubters of the Holocaust story.
Ahmadinejad has been asked about this essentially in every interview of any length since. He has consistently made the following points in response:
- He does not support Hitler, whom he considers a criminal.
- He is against Hitler's or any killing of innocents, including Jews and also including Muslims killed by Israel and the United States more recently.
- He opposes giving Jews a special place in what, according to him, is the nearly 60 million civilian victims of World War II.
- He opposes using the story of the Holocaust to support the dispossession and continuing oppresion of the Palestinians.
- He believes the protected status of the Holocaust story is illogical and connected to the story's use as justification for crimes against the Palestinians
- He considers Zionism an evil, non-religious, political movement that he opposes though he does not oppose Judaism, which is separate, as a religion.
In these interviews and other speeches that have mentioned the Holocaust, he has never expressed sympathy for Hitler, the Nazis or their beliefs. He has never presented any number of victims of the Holocaust as true or untrue. He has never expressed any doubt in the story. His only points have been that it should be possible to study and to revise the story without government censure, as every other story in the West can be studied and revised, and the story should not be used to punish the Palestinians.
Ahmadinejad has only brought up the story of the Holocaust to protest its use to harm Palestinians and to criticize what he sees as Western hypocrisy in disputing the status Iran gives the story of God, while extending a similar status to the story of the Holocaust.
An actual denial of the Holocaust made by Ahmadinejad does not exist. There has been no statement of the form: "the Holocaust did not happen", "only x million Jews were killed by Hitler" or "the amount of Jews commonly claimed to have been killed is false."
Ahmadinejad does oppose Zionism though, and that puts him onto unstable emotional terrain in the West. Supporters of Israel feel a strong emotional need to demonize him as much as they can. As hard as it has been to relent on the claim that he called for the physical destruction of Israel it will be just as hard and take just as long for supporters of Israel to admit Ahmadinejad has not actually denied the Holocaust.
