A speech last Friday by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – in which the Shiite cleric questioned the existence of the Holocaust and committed to never recognizing the Jewish state – continued to draw commentary and analysis over the weekend and into Monday, with Brookings Institute Senior Fellow Suzanne Maloney noting that while she supported robust diplomacy with the Islamic Republic, she parted ways with fellow engagement advocates who “discount[ed] Khamenei’s repeated indulgences in intolerance” or suggested that he was “a fading figure in Iran’s convoluted power structure… [or] likely to refashion himself at this late date as a liberalizer.”

Iran’s ultimate authority harbors a vicious, conspiratorial, wicked — and oh yes, erroneous — view of the West…Khamenei presaged the signing of the interim nuclear accord with a scorching denunciation of the United States and Israel, in which he not only described the Israeli leadership as a “rabid dog” but also argued that Washington’s bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki postdated the war’s end and was merely an excuse to test nuclear weapons on civilians.

Maloney also gestured to traditional Western readings of Iranian Holocaust denial as a proxy for regime intransigence, though some analysts have given far less attention to that indicator since the Obama administration began vigorous outreach to Tehran in the aftermath of President Hassan Rouhani’s June 2013 election.

Both Lebanon’s Daily Star and Israel’s Jerusalem Post noted that Khamenei used the same speech to equate how the West approaches Holocaust denial with how Iran treats anti-government dissidents.

Human rights groups regularly blast Tehran for its treatment of regime critics, who are subjected to institutionalized arrests, tortures, rapes, and a recent a surge in executions. Top United Nations officials, including the body’s Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Iran and Secretary–General Ban Ki-moon, have recently noted that there has been no fundamental change in Iran’s human rights situation since Rouhani’s election.

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