Iranians 'least anti-Semitic in Mid-East'

A perhaps surprising result emerged from a recent opinion poll by an international organisation that fights anti-Semitism - that Iranians are the least anti-Semitic people in the Middle East and North Africa (with the exclusion of Israel).

According to the poll commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Iranian respondents scored the lowest (56%) in terms of holding negative views about Jewish people, while in other countries of the region, the figure ranges from 69% in Turkey to 93% in the Palestinian territories.

Iranian conservatives officially reject anti-Semitism, presenting themselves as "anti-Israel". Nevertheless, many Iranian state institutions - all under the control of associates of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - use anti-Jewish propaganda.

For example, Iran's state-run television networks and conservative media outlets have a record of denying, or downplaying the scale of, the Holocaust, blaming "influential Jews" for many of the world's problems and using crude anti-Jewish imagery.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani's predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, repeatedly used the issue of the Holocaust as a political tool against Israel, Iran's arch-foe, accusing Israel of exaggerating and manipulating it to gain international sympathy.

About six million Jews were killed in the Nazi genocide, subsequently termed the Holocaust, during World War Two.

On 6 May, Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran's foreign minister, was summoned to the parliament by hard-line MPs who criticised him for having called the Holocaust a "tragedy" in an interview with a German television station.

Bakudaily.az