AFP: Iran's hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is seeking a second term in office, reiterated on Wednesday his anti-Israel stance by calling the Holocaust a "big deception".
TEHRAN (AFP) — Iran's hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is seeking a second term in office, reiterated on Wednesday his anti-Israel stance by calling the Holocaust a "big deception".
Ahmadinejad also said liberal democracies of the world have degraded "human values," the Iranian state television news website quoted him as saying.
"The identity of the liberal democracy has been exposed to the world by its protection of the most criminal regime in the history of humanity, the Zionist regime, by using the big deception of the Holocaust."
"There is no doubt that the only way to replace the liberal thought is to go back to the teachings of the divine prophets," Ahmadinejad said.
"The thoughts and the system of liberal regimes have lowered the benchmarks for human perfection … The liberal regimes cannot solve the simplest of the political issues in the world," he said.
Ahmadinejad was speaking to a gathering of 600 international scholars who have arrived in Tehran to mark the 20th anniversary of the death of the founder of the Islamic republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which falls on Thursday.
He hopes to win another four-year term in the June 12 election.
Ahmadinejad's presidency has been marred by anti-Israel tirades.
Soon after he took office in 2005, he said Israel was "doomed to be wiped off the map," a statement that enraged global powers that was followed by another diatribe saying the Holocaust was a "myth."
