Irani President Hassan Rouhani at the United Nations. Photo: Screenshot.

JNS.org – Iranian-Jewish leaders in the U.S. have rejected an invitation to meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani during his visit to the United Nations General Assembly this week.

“The impetus of our decision was that when the president had a chance to redeem himself on the question of the Holocaust, he did not do that,” a member of the Iranian American Jewish Federation (IAJF) in New York said, referring to Rouhani’s failure to respond to a journalists’s question on whether the Holocaust happened, the New York Jewish Week reported.

According to Sam Kermanian, a senior adviser to the IAJF in Los Angeles, Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was asked a similar question about the Holocaust, and responded that Iran condemned all murder, including “the murder of Palestinians by Israelis.”

“To compare accidental deaths to systematic murder shows that they [Iranian leaders] don’t understand the world’s sensitivities to such a horrific event,” Kermanian said, the International Business Times reported.

Rouhani’s predecessor as president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was known for his public Holocaust denials.