No, he's not talking about that Holocaust in which six million Jews were slaughtered; Ahmadinejad is talking about the ongoing "holocaust" in Gaza where over 300 Palestinians have died. And what's amazing isn't the Iranian president's moxie, it's that the Western media reports this without comment. The anti-Semities in the Islamic world love to talk about the "genocide" of the Palestinians while sporting placards equating "Zionism = Nazism," usually indicated with the swastika symbol.
The first time I heard someone accuse the Isarelis of "genocide" against the Palestinians was about 1970 or 1971 when I was an undergraduate. In 1967, in the wake of the Six Day War, there were about 1 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Today, forty years later, there are about 3.8 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, and that's not including the Palestinians of the diaspora.
Do the math! After forty years of "genocide," the Palestinian population had increased nearly 400%. During the same forty-year-span, the U.S. population has gone from about 200 million to 300 million, and increase of 50%. By comparison, in 1939 there were about 8.9 million Jews in Europe. Six years later at the end of the Second World War there were under three million still living.
That's what the terms "holocaust" and "genocide" mean in their modern usage. And for the Iranian president and other opponents of Israeli policy to bandy about such terms is both ludicrous and obscene. It was one thing for someone to charge Israel with "genocide" back in 1970, but after forty years and a Palestinian population increase of 400% how can anyone be expected to take the genocide charge seriously?
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