Castro criticizes Ahmadinejad's denial of Holocaust

Print AFP/File – Cuba's Fidel Castro

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Cuba's Fidel Castro criticized Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust and said in an interview Tehran should acknowledge Israel's fears for its own survival, the Atlantic said Wednesday.

The Iranian government should understand that the Jews "were expelled from their land, persecuted and mistreated all over the world, as the ones who killed God," Castro was quoted as saying in the magazine's website.

Castro delivered his defense of the Jews in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote a widely noted piece in Atlantic's September edition exploring the likelihood of an Israeli air strike on Iran's nuclear facility within the next year.

In his blog Wednesday, Goldberg said he was summoned to Havana to meet with Castro to discuss the article and that the Cuban leader told him it confirmed his own fears that a US-Israeli war with Iran was inevitable.

Over the course of a five-hour discussion, Castro criticized Ahmadinejad for denying the Holocaust and argued that the cause of peace would be better served if Iran came to terms with why Israelis fear for their nation's existence.

The former Cuban president who handed over power to his brother Raul in 2006 said Iran should understand the consequences of theological anti-Semitism.

"This went on for maybe two thousand years," Castro was quoted as saying. "I don't think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything."

"In my judgment here's what happened to them: Reverse selection. What's reverse selection? Over 2,000 years they were subjected to terrible persecution and then to the pogroms. One might have assumed that they would have disappeared; I think their culture and religion kept them together as a nation."

"The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust," he said.

Goldberg said he asked Castro if he would say the same thing to Ahmadinejad.

"I am saying this, so you can communicate it," he replied.

Castro, who was a the center of the 1962 missile crisis pitting the Soviet Union against the United States, warned, however, that US sanctions and Israeli threats would not cause Iran to change course.

"This problem is not going to get resolved, because the Iranians are not going to back down in the face of threats. That's my opinion," he said, observing that religious leaders were less apt to compromise.

"The Iranian capacity to inflict damage is not appreciated," he said. "Men think they can control themselves but (US President Barack) Obama could overreact and a gradual escalation could become a nuclear war."