Iranian President: If Holocaust Happened, Why Must Palestinians Pay?

By Ha'aretz

In an address before students and faculty at Columbia University in New York on Monday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that if the Holocaust really happened, the Palestinian people mustn't be forced to pay the price.

The Iranian leader defended his calls for more research into the Holocaust, saying that the Nazi genocide of the Jews in World War 2 was abused as a justification for Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians "Why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price for an event they had nothing to do with?" Ahmadinejad asked.

"You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated," Columbia President Lee Bollinger told Ahmadinejad about his Holocaust denial. "Will you cease this outrage?"

The Iranian leader also ducked a question about his previous calls for the destruction of the State of Israel, declining to give a direct "yes or no" answer. "We love all nations," Ahmadinejad said in response to the first query. "We are friends with the Jewish people; there are many Jews in Iran living peacefully with security."

He described the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a "60-year-old problem," which can only be resolved by allowing "the people of Palestine" - Jews, Muslims and Christians - to decide their own fate, without international intervention.

Introducing Ahmadinejad, whose address at the campus sparked widespread protests, Bollinger compared him to a "petty and cruel dictator." The university president also took aim at Ahmadinejad's previous calls for Israel's destruction, asking: "We have ties with Israel, do you plan to wipe us off the map too?"

With Ahmadinejad sitting next to him on the platform, Bollinger also demanded that the Iranian leader explain his country's recent execution of human rights activists and even children, about its support of violent insurgency in Iraq and its oppression of women, homosexuals and followers of the Bahai religion.

Ahmadinejad seemed taken aback by the harsh words from Bollinger. "Many parts of his speech, there were many insults and claims that were incorrect, regretfully. Of course, I think that he was affected by the press, the media, and the political, sort of, mainstream line that you read here that goes against the very grain of the need for peace and stability in the world around us," he said.