Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gives a speech earlier today in which he said the Holocaust is a "myth". Photograph: AP
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran doesn't make too many foreign trips (only to the United Nations and Saudi Arabia since taking office in August) but one place you can be reasonably sure he won't be planning to visit is Austria, write Simon Jeffery and Mark Oliver. The country considers Holocaust denial a criminal offence. As the controversial British historian and Nazi apologist David Irving is no doubt learning from his prison cell in Vienna, it is a law it is not afraid to prosecute. He goes on trial in the new year.
Mr Ahmadinejad has produced yet another of his alarmingly frequent comments on Jews and Israel. First he said Israel should be "wiped off the map", then that Iran did not "accept this claim" that Hitler killed millions of Jews. Today he made a televised speech proclaiming "they have fabricated a legend under the name 'Massacre of the Jews', and they hold it higher than God himself."
It goes without saying that if Mr Ahmadinejad ever wanted to visit the International Atomic Energy Agency in its Vienna headquarters to make representations over Iran's restarted nuclear programme he may be best to do it via a video link.
Four months into office, Mr Ahmadinejad has become a disturbing figure. In his Guardian column today, Jonathan Freedland writes that he has chosen "to stand with the cranks, neo-fascists and racists who deny the factual truth of the Holocaust."
A recent piece from Newsweek looks at stories circulating in Tehran that the president is obsessed by the return of the Mahdi, the Shia messiah, and felt himself surrounded by a radiant light when he addressed the United Nations. Mr Ahmadinejad's rhetoric, it says, is creating "turmoil" within Iran's conservative leadership.
There is incredulity among bloggers about Mr Ahmadinejad's latest remarks.
Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, known as Hoder, says it is "now obvious that the new anti-Israeli line of Ahmadinejad and his allies is a change in policy, not a random personal rant".
Hoder asks why the change has come about now. He identifies three reasons: diversion from internal rows and pre-election promises about raising living standards, seeking support for the nuclear programme by being populist, and an attempt to oust moderates.
There are also numerous comments from bloggers in the US and elsewhere. Some of these latch onto Mr Ahmadinejad's argument that if the west believed the Holocaust was true, it should accommodate Jews in "Europe, the US, Canada or Alaska" not Palestine.
"Jews in Alaska?", is a common, disbelieving refrain in bloggers' postings. "Latest Ahmadinejad craziness" is the headline on the Restless Mania blog.
Most bloggers cite the new comments as further proof that Iran's alleged nuclear weapon ambitions must be checked. The writer on the Discard Lies blog predicts the worst, saying: "Ahmadinejad is capable of anything, and very soon he'll have nuclear weapons in his hands."
