Iran's New Foreign Minister Has Amazing Twitter Exchange With Nancy Pelosi's Daughter
Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has been tweeting at @JZarif for just a couple of days, and he's already causing a bit of a stir.
Yesterday Zarif tweeted a new year message to Jews around the World:
Christine Pelosi, daughter of Nancy Pelosi, decided to respond:
Pelosi is likely referring to comments by former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was frequently believed to have denied the Holocaust. For example, in 2005 Ahmadinejad appeared on live TV and reportedly said:
"If somebody in their country questions God, nobody says anything, but if somebody denies the myth of the massacre of Jews, the Zionist loudspeakers and the governments in the pay of Zionism will start to scream."
What happened next in the exchange is what's really remarkable. You can see it in this screen-grab which Pelosi tweeted:
Yes, in this tweet Zarif appears to specifically say not only that Iran never denied it, but that Ahmadinejad did deny it.
That tweet was then deleted and replaced with a less strongly worded version:
It's a remarkable exchange, and one that - perhaps unwisely - people will try and read a lot into. When an Twitter account linked to Iran's new President Hassan Rouhani tweeted a Rosh Hashanah message earlier this week, Iranian officials rushed to deny any formal link between the message and the account.
According to ABC's Christiane Amanpour, however, this does appear to be Zarif's real account: