Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Tuesday called the Holocaust a “reprehensible” crime committed by the Nazis against the Jewish people but said it was up to historians to determine the scale of what happened.
“I am not a historian and when it comes to speaking of the dimensions of the Holocaust it is the historians that should reflect,” Rouhani told CNN when asked whether or not he believed, as did his hardline predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that the Holocaust was a myth.
“But in general I can tell you that any crime that happens in history against humanity, including the crime the Nazis created towards the Jews, is reprehensible and condemnable,” he said, according to CNN’s translation of his comments, during a visit to New York to address the United Nations General Assembly.
Israeli officials had sharply criticized Rouhani, a moderate cleric who has made diplomatic overtures to the West, for failing to renounce Ahmadinejad’s denial of the Holocaust, which killed 6 million Jews. Rouhani had dodged the same question in an interview last week with NBC.
