An article on the front page of the Iranian Kayhan newspaper, affiliated with Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, on Thursday stated that Hitler was "smarter and more courageous" than current European leaders because he "expelled" the Jews from Germany.
The article was published as Israel marked Holocaust Remembrance Day. Iranian officials largely deny the history of the Holocaust. On Friday, Iran and its proxies mark Quds Day.
"The logic that Hitler showed by expelling them from Germany is that he is smarter and more courageous than all current European leaders," read the article. "Hitler expelled [the Jews] and European countries live by ransom and confirm the myth of the Holocaust, they look for an excuse for their cowardice and humiliation, otherwise if they knew the Jews as the Ukrainian blue-eyed immigrants, even in words and slogans, they would keep them among themselves and free them from this misery and anxiety."
The article started out by referencing how the Quran refers to the Jews in the Exodus story, saying that the verses about the Jews are "about a people who are known for their stubbornness, objections and excuses, who consider others as their property, and themselves as superior to others and God's permanent chosen people."
"They corrupt the earth; Their scholars are involved in distortion, usury, fornication, killing the prophet and murder; They have also laid the foundation for the murder of Shiite Imams," added the article.
The article additionally warned that the "the usurping Zionist regime, which has usurped the land of Muslim, Christian and Jewish Arabs in Palestine and gathered its population from the streets of the Soviet Union and Europe and intends to impose it on the region by force has shown since the time of Moshe Dayan and the Six-Day War that after Palestine and Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon it will look for Iraq, Iran, Africa and South America."
The Kayhan article stressed, however, that "of course" the Jews in Iran are "separate from this extremist and totalitarian thinking."
Iranian officials attacked for making antisemitic comments have often claimed that they are anti-Zionist and not antisemitic.
An article from January of this year in Kayhan's English-language version claimed that the UN is so "infatuated with the myth of the Holocaust that it has become powerless in preventing real and actual genocides taking place around the world over the past decades."
In December, an Iranian parliamentarian stated in an interview with the Iranian Fars News Agency that the enmity between Israel and Iran has a "long history," dating back to the story of Purim.
"The Zionist regime is the sworn enemy of Iran and Iranians, and this enmity, without any connection to the ruling regime in Iran, has a long history, so that the Zionists still celebrate Purim every year on the anniversary of the brutal massacre of the Iranian people," said Zohreh Lajevardi, Tehran's representative in the Iranian parliament, also known as the Majles, at the time. "But with the victory of the revolution, this enmity became so public, so much so that a brief look at the events of the last 40 years proves well that this vicious regime is the sworn enemy of Iran and Iranians."