Iran's hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is seeking a second term in office, reiterated Wednesday his anti-Israel stance by calling the Holocaust a "big deception." Ahmadinejad also said liberal democracies of the world have degraded "human values," the Iranian state television news website quoted him as saying. "The identity of the liberal democracy has been exposed to the world by its protection of the most criminal regime in the history of humanity, the Zionist regime, by using the big deception of the Holocaust," he said. Ahmadinejad was speaking to a gathering of 600 international scholars who have arrived in Tehran to mark the 20th anniversary of the death of the founder of the Islamic republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which falls Thursday.