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Holocaust Denial in Translation

(Wall Street Journal) Editorial - According to CNN's translation of Rouhani's remarks, the Iranian president insisted that "whatever criminality they [the Nazis] committed against the Jews, we condemn." Yet as Iran's semi-official news agency Fars pointed out, Rouhani never uttered anything approximating those words. Nor, contrary to the CNN version, did he utter the word "Holocaust." Instead, he spoke about "historical events." Our independent translation of Rouhani's comments confirms that Fars, not CNN, got the Farsi [Persian] right. Rouhani insisted that "I am not a history scholar," and that "clarification of these aspects is a duty of the historians and researchers." Pretending that the facts of the Holocaust are a matter of serious historical dispute is a classic rhetorical evasion. Holocaust deniers commonly acknowledge that Jews were killed by the Nazis while insisting that the number of Jewish victims was relatively small and that there was no systematic effort to wipe them out.
2013-09-27 00:00:00
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