Iranian President Blasted for Questioning if Holocaust Was Real

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi is facing online criticism following his response to an interview question asking if he believed the Holocaust happened.

Speaking to CBS' Lesley Stahl in a 60 Minutes interview that aired Sunday, Raisi responded that there are "some signs" that it happened. He did not definitively say that he believes the Holocaust occurred, instead calling for the matter to be looked into further.

"If so, they should allow it to be investigated and researched," he added.

"So you're not sure. I'm getting that you're not sure," Stahl responded, and Raisi did not correct her before she moved onto her next question.

The response prompted outrage and condemnation on social media. Responding to a clip from the interview, Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid shared several graphic photos from the Holocaust and captioned the post: "Some signs."

Writer Yair Rosenberg, who pens The Atlantic's Deep Shtetl newsletter, tweeted: "The president of Iran just needs more evidence before he believes that the Holocaust happened. For the rest of us, the continued existence of people with views like his is proof enough."

The Holocaust, as defined by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, was the state-sponsored persecution and murder of about 6 million Jews by the Nazi regime and its allies. Millions of others, such as people with disabilities, gay people, Gypsies and Jehovah's Witnesses, were also targeted and murdered, according to the Holocaust Museum Houston.

While decades have passed, polls show that antisemitic attitudes continue to be harbored throughout the world. The U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) defines antisemitism as "belief or behavior hostile toward Jews just because they are Jewish." This can include prejudiced or stereotyped views about Jewish people, political efforts to isolate or oppress them and religious teachings that "proclaim the inferiority of Jews."

A global antisemitism in 2019 commissioned by the ADL found that about one in four Europeans polled had what it described as "pernicious and pervasive attitudes toward Jews."

Several U.S. officials have also weighed in to criticize Raisi's response. Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, tweeted that the Iranian president's "call for 'research' to determine whether the Holocaust happened is ludicrous and dangerous."

"His statement is a form of Holocaust denial and a form of antisemitism," Lipstadt added.

The ADL defines Holocaust denial as "a type of anti-Semitic propaganda that emerged after World War II and which uses pseudo-history to deny the reality of the systematic mass murder of six million Jews by the Nazis and their allies during World War II."

U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan tweeted that Raisi's statement "is outrageous and should be universally condemned."

Newsweek reached out to the Iranian Foreign Ministry for comment.