I can't see any reason for people to get so aerated about this, whether it comes from the lips of a country's leader or not. If you want to spend a few merry hours at your computer, just check out the number of Holocaust sites, and the surprising number which deny not so much that vast numbers of Jews, homosexuals, Romanies and mental defectives were murdered by the Nazis (to keep the slaughter in its full perspective), as against it not happening at all.
There have been, for as long as the Internet's been around, a lot of sites saying that the numbers were ridiculously inflated, because there just weren't that MANY Jews (according to the censuses taken at the time) living in this or that village or town.
Now, I don't think I've heard wailing in the streets and the gnashing of international teeth over these, calling for them to be closed down as Holocaust deniers, etc., which is what they're near as dammit doing. Once you start to attack the statistics and provide a set of your own which appear to support an over-inflation of those murdered in the camps, then provide what are apparently also figures re-jigged by the UN to support your own views, then you can see where Holocaust denial starts to look reasonable.
I have no opinion on the stats, because I'm sure that immediate figures during and after the war were difficult to come by, given that many Jews (among the other persecuted peoples) fled into hiding hither and thither, and were presumed lost to the gas chambers, only to reappear in different countries once their safety was clear.
Iran's official position vis-a-vis Israel has been clear for years, since the departure of the Shah, so it shouldn't come as a shock that it seeks to ram home this message as part of its portfolio of hatred. However, as has been wisely said above, there is no total agreement among Iranians on the issue, except that the prospect of dangling publicly from a crane isn't the best incentive to voice dissent (having been fitted up as a drug smuggler first). We may never know how many Iranians despise the current governmental attitude, although we can guess from the thousands in exile since the early 1980s that there will be plenty.
