(MEMRI/JNS) Kuwaiti cleric Sheikh Jihad Al-‘Ayesh delivered a speech in which he said that the figure of six million Jews killed in the Holocaust was a “historical lie,” but that Hitler “knew the truth about the Jews” and therefore began “tormenting and persecuting them.”

“The Jews were banished, tortured and annihilated because of their deeds. They were not banished for being Jews,” he said. In an effort to dispute the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz, Sheikh Al-‘Ayesh, who heads the Bait Al-Maqdis Documentary Studies Center, which has a branch in the Gaza Strip, drew the following analogy: “Imagine you want to build a bakery. What size bakery would you need to make 10,000 loaves of bread? … What if you wanted to make 50,000 loaves of bread an hour? You would need a larger bakery. How many ovens would you need to burn six million human beings?” Sheikh Al-‘Ayesh posted his address on his personal YouTube channel on May 26. The video was also posted on the Facebook account of Bait Al-Maqdis Documentary Studies Center.