Or call him a "Holocaust denier".
When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said of the Holocaust: "If you (Europeans) committed this big crime, then why should the oppressed Palestinian nation pay the price?", most of us in the U.S. didn't hear anything beyond the initial "if". We heard that "if", and immediately launched into a cacophony of "If? What does he mean 'If'? Is he saying it never happened? He's a Holocaust denier!".
But of course Ahmadinejad didn't just say, "If it happened...". He said "If......, then why.....?". If Europeans did it, why are Palestinians paying? If Europeans were responsible for the Holocaust of the Jews, and the Holocaust is justification for a Jewish state, then why isn't that state in Europe? And that's a different issue altogether than simply denying the Holocaust took place.
I came across an essay (via here, then here and here [PDF] by the late British historian, Arnold J Toynbee, which I think articulates the point Ahmadinejad is trying to make:
I can understand the Jews demanding, after their experience at Nazi hands, that they should be given some piece of territory somewhere in the world, where they would be masters in their own house and where there would be an asylum for any Jews who, in future might be threatened with a repetition of what the Nazis did.
But, if the Jews had a claim to be given a piece of territory, this should have been done at the expense of the Western nation that had done its worst to exterminate the Jews..
If the creation of a new state of Israel was judged to be a legitimate form of compensation to the surviving Jews, the territory for this state should have been taken from the Europeans, not from the Arabs.
The new Israel should not have been carved out of Arab Palestine; it should have been carved out of Central Europe.
This point seems to me to be simple and obvious. But, once, when I made it in a lecture in a Western country, (not Germany, not Britain), it was received with shouts of laughter.
The people who laughed were not Jews; they were non-Jewish Westerners, and the country was one that has been traditionally opposed to colonialism.
Yet, they laughed because it seemed to them preposterous that a Western nation should be made to pay for its own crimes with its own territory, when the West's moral debt to the Jews could, so it seemed to these Westerners, be settled by giving the Jews the territory of a non-Western people that committed no crime at all against the Jews.
This laughter shocked me because it revealed to me what seems to me a shocking persistence of the colonialist attitude of mind. A guilty Western people's territory was to be sacrosanct, because, though guilty, they were Westerners.
An innocent non-Western people's territory could, it was held, legitimately be given away to the Jews by the victorious Western powers.This amounts to the declaration of the inequality of the Western and the non-Western sections of the human race.
It is a claim that Westerners are privileged, however guilty they may be. It is a denial of those universal human rights that, in truth, are possessed by every man, woman, and child in the world, irrespective of differences in civilization; religion, nationality and race.
-- Arnold Toynbee, Two Aspects of the Palestine Question, in Arnold Toynbee, Importance of the Arab World (1962).
That, I think, is what the Iranian President is saying, and what we cannot hear - perhaps are not meant to hear - because of the hysterical chorus that breaks out every time he opens his mouth, from people who may or may not really believe he is the new Hitler, but who are undoubtedly itching for an excuse to attack his country and liberate its oil.
Cartoon: "The Palestinian's Burden". By Malcolm Evans, for the New Zealand Herald