Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: No qualms about ruffling feathers

The Iranian president caused a stir when, in October 2005, at an anti-Zionist conference in Tehran, he was reported as having said that Israel should be “wiped off the map” and that The Holocaust – the genocide of about six million European Jews during World War II as part of a programme of deliberate extermination planned and executed by Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler – was a myth.

But a section of scholars and experts in Middle East affairs have come to his defence, saying his message was lost in the translation and thus he was misquoted.

According to the BBC, in 2005, the president banned Western and “indecent” music from state-run media. Though he has allowed women to participate in major sporting events in the country, he has continued to enforce the campaign to have women obey Iran’s strict Islamic dressing codes.

The following sources were used for this article: BBC, New York Times, CNN, Timesonline, Aljazeera, New Yorker, Tehran Times, The Jerusalem Post, Washington Post, Telegraph, IranChamber.com