Despite his "moderate reputation," Iranian President Hassan Rowhani has announced the appointment of Mohammad Javad Zarif—a Holocaust denier—as his foreign minister.
In 2006, Zarif spoke at Columbia University and took questions, including one about the Holocaust, the Wall Street Journal reports:
At the Columbia event, student Jordan Hirsch, a former Bartley Fellow at The Wall Street Journal, asked Mr. Zarif, "Do you personally believe that six million Jews died in the Holocaust?" "Well," answered the ambassador, "I believe a great atrocity was committed in the Second World War. The question that needs to be asked is, What is the crime committed by the Palestinians in that atrocity?"
The audience immediately started mocking his reply. "I answered the question," he insisted. "I said a great atrocity was committed." When the students continued to voice their disapproval, the Islamic Republic's representative invoked the First Amendment. "Do I have a right to freedom of expression? I'm answering," he said. "If you want to stifle the right of people to freedom of expression, then that's your problem, not mine."
Mr. Zarif continued: "A large number of people died, were murdered, in the Second World War. A large number of them were Jews. That's a crime. Any crime against humanity must be rejected, and we reject any crime. Genocide is a major crime and we reject it. But this is the question that you do not want me to answer: What was the role of the Palestinians in that? . . . Palestinians have been suffering because of that without having any role in it."
Zarif previously served as Iran's diplomat to the United Nations from 2002 to 2007.