In a statement to Euronews, the Israeli Embassy in Hungary has slammed the move to invite the Holocaust-denying Iranian ex-president to speak at a Budapest university.
ADVERTISEMENTFormer Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's guest lecture at a Hungarian university has sparked condemnation from the Israeli Embassy in Budapest and the country's Jewish community alike.
Ahmadinejad, who is known for his hostility to Israel and Holocaust denial, is to hold two lectures at the National University of Public Service (Nemzeti Közszolgálati Egyetem, or NKE) on Tuesday and Wednesday at the invitation of its dean, Gergely Deli.
According to Iranian newspapers, NKE invited the politician to a scientific meeting on "common values in the global environment".
Persian outlet Hammihan noted that Ahmadinejad is set to speak as a "special guest" on the importance of dealing with threats against the environment. The meeting is expected to be closed, as it is not advertised on NKE's website.
In the meantime, images of Ahmadinejad together with Deli in Budapest have appeared on Iranian social media accounts.
Euronews broke the story on Tuesday and tried to contact the university about Ahmadinejad's visit but was met with silence.
NKE's press office stated it did not wish to make any comments. Additionally, the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to requests for comment.
Visit 'seriously offends' Hungarian Jewish community
Meanwhile, the Embassy of Israel in Hungary reacted to the news, stating his visit to Budapest was an insult to "the memory of the victims".
In a statement to Euronews, it said that Ahmadinejad's visit "seriously offends and tramples on the memory of the approximately 600,000 Hungarian Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust".
According to the statement, the former Iranian president is "a self-proclaimed Holocaust denier who is directly responsible for the events that ridicule, belittle and question the Holocaust and its victims," a reference to the two-day "Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision" conference, held in Tehran in 2006.
They also point out that as Iranian president, Ahmadinejad regularly called for the destruction of Israel.
The Association of Hungarian Jewish Congregations, Mazsihisz, also criticised the invitation to Ahmadinejad.
The association said in a statement it was incomprehensible that the management of the National University of Public Service "allowed Ahmadinejad, who is anti-Semitic to the core, to hold a lecture at one of Hungary's elite universities."
"It is not only outrageous but also painful that the former Iranian president is in Budapest on the very days when the Hungarian Jewish community remembers the victims of [the Holocaust] 80 years ago in this country and Auschwitz."
"Ahmadinejad's reception in Budapest deeply offends the Hungarian Jewish community, which mourns its murdered dead," the statement added.
Mazsihisz called for an apology from "the leadership of the NKE" to the "offended Hungarian Jewish community," and demanded that the Hungarian government "explain how, in light of the excellent Hungarian-Israeli relations and the government's policy of supporting the Hungarian Jewish community, Ahmadinejad's visit to Hungary could have happened."
Holocaust denial
Ahmadinejad, who was president of the Islamic Republic from 2005-2013, is not known as an environmentalist but rather for his extreme Islamist, anti-US, Israel and Holocaust-denying views.
He was one of the proponents of Iran's nuclear program and banned UN inspectors from visiting the country's nuclear facilities.
ADVERTISEMENTDuring his presidency, the situation of human rights and minorities in Iran also deteriorated dramatically.
In 2005, in a speech praising Iranian Islamic revolutionary Ayatollah Khomeini, who served as the first supreme leader of Iran from 1979, Ahmadinejad announced that "Israel must be wiped off the map".
He repeatedly called the Holocaust a "myth" that was fabricated just so that Jewish people could create their own state.