Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Photo: Wiki Commons.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was caught in a lie by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, when he tried to cover for Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei for saying the “myth of the Jewish slaughter known as the Holocaust,” which Zarif, on American television, denied ever happened.

MEMRI published its findings on the question of Iran’s Supreme Leader denying the Holocaust on Monday, Holocaust Memorial Day.

Last September, Zarif had told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that reports of Khamenei denying the Holocaust were, themselves, a myth, and were a result of “bad translation” and comments taken “out of context.”

According to MEMRI, Zarif told Stephanopoulos: “The Holocaust is not a myth. Nobody’s talking about [it as] a myth… If it’s there [in Khamenei’s website]… it’s a bad translation, and it’s translated out of context… This is the problem when you translate something from Persian to English, you may lose something, as the film goes, ‘Lost in Translation,’ you may lose some of the meaning.”

Stephanopoulos was referring to a 2006 essay posted to Khamenei’s website, which MEMRI has analyzed in both English and Farsi, concluding that Khamenei does, in fact, refer to the systemic murder of six million Jews by the Nazis as a myth, and claims it to be an example of how Jews are quashing free speech, a crime for which his own regime is guilty.

MEMRI, providing a copy of  the original Persian, translated the offending quote from Khamenei as, “A more important topic is one that shames Western culture in terms of freedom of speech… This same freedom of speech – which they [i.e. the West] constantly champion – does not permit anyone to question the topic of the myth of the Jewish slaughter known as the Holocaust. On this topic there is no freedom of speech!”