Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Photo: Wikipedia.

Jewish leaders in France invited the Iranian president to attend a ceremony commemorating the Holocaust, Israel’s Channel 2 reported on Wednesday.

Hassan Rouhani – whose state visit to France coincided with International Holocaust Memorial Day – received the invitation from the American Jewish Committee’s office in Paris.

According to Channel 2, the organization hoped Rouhani would mark the day with the local Jewish community to signal official Iranian recognition of the Shoah and to demonstrate a genuine desire to reconcile with the West.

The Iranian government has engaged in Holocaust denial and revisionism since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. In recent years, the regime has even hosted conferences and sponsored cartoon competitions aimed at minimizing the scale of the Nazi genocide.