Ahron Cohen, an Orthodox Jew from Greater Manchester and a leading member of the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta movement, sparked new controversy on his return from Tehran by suggesting that God would have saved the victims of the Nazis if they had deserved to live.

Cohen, whose house in Salford was pelted with 1,000 eggs last year because of his extremist views, told The Sunday Times: “There is no question that there was a Holocaust and gas chambers. There are too many eyewitnesses.

“However, our approach is that when one suffers, the one who perpetrates the suffering is obviously guilty but he will never succeed if the victim did not deserve it in one way or another.

“We have to look within to improve and try to better ourselves and remove those characteristics or actions that may have been the cause of the success of the Holocaust.”

Cohen’s trip to Tehran — along with four American rabbis from the same sect — was paid for by the Iranian foreign ministry, which organised the conference entitled The Holocaust: A Global Vision. They were warmly greeted by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, and had two meetings with him.

Cohen ended his speech to the conference with a prayer “that the underlying cause of strife and bloodshed in the Middle East, namely the state known as Israel, be totally and peacefully dissolved”.

The rabbi claimed “learned gentlemen from both sides of the fence” were at the latest conference. They included David Duke, former “imperial wizard” of the Ku Klux Klan.

Cohen said on his return: “President Ahmadinejad is not a man of war. He is a man of peace. I have received criticism for meeting him and attending the conference, but Jewish people are adopting an attitude of criticism from an emotional point of view, not a logical or sensible one.

“We know there was a Holocaust. We lived through it. I had relatives who died in it . . . But in no way must the Holocaust be used to further the aims of the Zionist concept.”

Rabbi Yehuda Brodie, registrar of the Jewish Ecclesiastical Court for Greater Manchester, said: “Rabbi Cohen has for a long time been ostracised by the vast majority of Jews for associating with and thus giving support and legitimacy to the enemies of Israel and the Jewish nation.

“He represents an insignificant minority. His involvement is a stab in the heart of the Jewish community and of all decent law-abiding people.”

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