At a Quds Day event in Auckland, New Zealand, held on June 23, Iranian cleric Hojatoleslam Shafie said that Israel and the Zionist regime "hide behind a fake phenomenon" of the Holocaust and that it was a conspiracy to infiltrate the Islamic countries. He said that Quds Day was established "to deal a powerful punch to the mouth of the cancerous tumor known as evil Israel," and cited Imam Khomeini as saying that "if every Muslim were to spit in the face of Israel, Israel would drown." Iranian diplomat Hormoz Ghahremani, presented at the event as the first secretary of the Iranian Embassy in New Zealand, said that the "sinister phenomena of terrorism and extremism in the region" were "fueled and fanned by the enemies of Islam and the Zionist circles." Community elder Sayed Taghi Derhami said that Israel was a "cancerous tumor" that had to be "surgically removed." The event was organized by the Islamic Ahlulbayt Foundation of New Zealand, in Auckland, and was posted on its YouTube channel.
Finally, this is making headlines in New Zealand:
Official complaints have been laid over comments made by Iranian diplomats at an Auckland mosque event, which include calling Israel a "cancer" and calling the Holocaust a "conspiracy".The initial reaction of the Iranian diplomat Ghahremani to the news of the event going public is telling:
The Israel Institute of New Zealand has laid a complaint to the Human Rights Commission and Foreign Minister Winston Peters after video surfaced online of the speech.
Israel Institute of New Zealand director Professor Paul Moon says New Zealand cannot allow the incident to go unchallenged.
Mr Moon said at the event diplomats from Iran used "very strong language" and were "talking about Jewish conspiracies, describing Israel as a cancer that needs to be removed, denying the holocaust".
He said the event began with Iranian diplomat Hormoz Ghahremani talking about terrorism in the Middle East, and his speech then turned to "accusations that there was some sort of Zionist conspiracy behind what was going on, that somehow the Jews were responsible for terrorism in the Middle East".
Mr Moon said another speaker, Sayed Taghi Derhami, called Israel a "cancerous tumour" and said it has to be "surgically removed" and Iranian cleric Sheik Shafie denied the Holocaust.
A video of the speeches, which were made in June at a mosque in Pakuranga, was posted online by the Islamic Ahlulbayt Foundation of New Zealand but it has since been removed.
Mr Moon says it's troubling that such views are being expressed in New Zealand, and said the Government should be concerned that a diplomat was involved in the comments.
He wants to see the people involved in the comments issue an apology, and to say: "We were wrong to speak in these racist terms, we were wrong to speak about the destruction of a country, it's wrong of us to deny the Holocaust, all of these things are inappropriate for New Zealand and we shouldn't have said them."
This is the honor/shame culture! If no one knows about it, there is no problem; once the Western media finds out, now it is shameful. The problem, to Gharemani, isn't that there was a gathering of Muslims where speeches were made that he admits could fuel terrorism - the problem for him is that some idiot Muslim put the speeches on YouTube where non-Muslims can see what he and the others said and believe.Ghahremani told Stuff he agreed the speech could be seen as inflammatory, but it had to be taken in the context of the event at which it was given. He spoke at a gathering to mark the annual Quds Day, initiated by Iran in the 1970s to support Palestinians and oppose Zionism.
Contacted at the Iranian Embassy in Wellington, Ghahremani said his speech was supposed to be private and he was upset it had been put on the internet. "It was something private, a small gathering. I was there to reflect the position of the Iranian Government.
"We do not recognise the Israeli Government, that's not a secret. But we are not against their existence."
Asked if such inflammatory speeches could fuel radicalism in the Muslim community, Ghahremani said: "If it's spoken in public places yeah, you're right. But it was a small, private gathering that happens once a year. This year they make a mistake to shoot a film, to put it on YouTube."
It is also notable that in the earlier interview Gharemani didn't deny attending the entire event; in the later one (quoted above) he claimed he had left before the other speeches that denied the Holocaust.
It is interesting that the complaint is more concerned with the Iranian diplomat than with the direct hate speech given (in English) at the mosques in New Zealand. One would think that the existence of a mosque where blatant hate is preached would be more of a cause of concern for New Zealanders than an Iranian diplomat condoning that hate.