In Europe they jail Holocaust deniers, in Iran they have freedom of speech

1. Holocaust Deniers and Skeptics Gather in Iran – by NAZILA FATHI/NY Times

TEHRAN — Holocaust deniers and skeptics from around the world gathered at a government-sponsored conference here today to discuss their theories about whether six million Jews were indeed killed by the Nazis during World War II and whether gas chambers existed.

In a speech opening the two-day conference, Rasoul Mousavi, head of the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s Institute for Political and International Studies, which organized the event, said it was an opportunity for scholars to discuss the subject “away from Western taboos and the restriction imposed on them in Europe.”

The foreign ministry had said that 67 foreign researchers from 30 countries were scheduled to take part. Among those speaking today are David Duke, the American white-supremacist politician and former Ku Klux Klan leader, and Georges Thiel, a French writer who has been prosecuted in France over his denials of the Holocaust.

Mr. Duke’s remarks late this afternoon are expected to assert that no gas chambers or extermination camps were actually built during the war, on the ground that killing Jews that way would have been much too bothersome and expensive when the Nazis could have used much simpler methods, according to an advance summary of his speech published by the institute.

“Depicting Jews as the overwhelming victims of the Holocaust gave the moral high ground to the Allies as victors of the war, and allowed Jews to establish a state on the occupied land of Palestine,” Mr. Duke’s paper says, according to the summary.

One of the first scheduled speakers, Robert Faurisson of France, also called the Holocaust a myth created to justify the occupation of Palestine.

The conference is being held at the behest of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad , who likewise called the Holocaust a myth last year, and repeated a well-known slogan from the early days of the 1979 revolution in Iran, “Israel must be wiped off the map.” He has spoken several times since then about a need to establish whether the Holocaust actually happened.

Most of the speakers at the conference today praised Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments.

Bendikt Frings, 48, a psychologist from Germany, said he believed Mr. Ahmadinejad was “an honest direct man,” and said he had come to the conference to thank him for what he had initiated.

“We are forbidden to have such a conference in Germany,” he said. “ All my childhood, we waited for something like this.”

Toben Feredrick, from Australia, said Mr. Ahmadinejad has opened an issue “which is morally and intellectually crippling the Western society.”

“People are imprisoned in Germany for denying the Holocaust,” he added.

Mr. Feredrick said he was jailed for six months in 1999 because of his ideas, and that a court in Germany has ordered him arrested if he speaks out publicly again denying that the Holocaust took place.

Other Western “revisionists” presented what they called new facts about the Holocaust at the conference, which also attracted attendees from some ultra-Orthodox Jews belonging to anti-Zioinst sects that reject the state of Israel. One participant wearing the traditional long black coat and hat of such groups wore a badge saying: “A Jew, not a Zionist.”

It was not entirely clear how the lineup of speakers at the conference was set. The Institute’s website had invited scholars and researchers to submit papers in advance for consideration, but revealed little about how they were evaluated. The Iranian foreign ministry also provided little information about participants, saying that it feared they would be prosecuted by their home countries.

The conference included an exhibition today of various photos, posters and other material meant to contradict the accepted version of events, that the Nazis murdered millions of Jews and other “undesirables” in death camps during the war. New captions in Persian on some familiar photos of corpses at the camps argued that they were victims of typhus, not the German state.

Anti-Zionist literature, including a 2004 book by the American author Michael Collins Piper, about Zionist influence in America, was offered for sale to visitors at the conference. So, apparently, was a video recording of 12 Holocaust survivors telling their stories, suggesting that the views represented at the conference may not have been entirely one-sided.

The conference prompted outrage in the West. The German government summoned the Iranian charge d’affaires in Berlin to complain. The French Foreign Minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, warned that the conference would be strongly condemned if it propagated claims denying the Holocaust.

Iran also organized an exhibition last summer of cartoons about the Holocaust, which outraged Jews inside Iran and out.

Iranian Jewish leaders reacted angrily to Mr. Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust-denying comments last year, issuing a statement saying that his words were spreading fear among Jews in Iran.

“We consider the Holocaust as a fact and a disgrace for humanity,” Haround Yashayai, a leading voice among Iranian Jews, said today. “We cannot say that such a conference cannot be held here. We have condemned similar events in the past, and see no reason to condemn it again.”


2. Iran grows strong, the world yawns – editorial from Israel’s Haaretz Daily

It is possible to make fun of the conference of Holocaust deniers in Tehran, as the historian Prof. Moshe Zimmerman proposes. It is also possible to view this reaction as yet another symptom of the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that has afflicted the West in the face of rising Islamic extremism. As long as the Arab world was united against Zionist Israel and its policies toward the Palestinians, it was possible to hope this hatred would disappear once the local conflict had been resolved. But the conference in Tehran is another sign that anti-Israel sentiment has long since turned into open anti-Semitism.

The repeated calls for Israel's eradication that emanate from Iran, to which even the reactions of disgust have grown weaker over time, should - especially when accompanied by nuclear weapons, but even without them - have generated an active and effective worldwide front. Instead, we are gradually seeing the problem become Israel's problem alone.

It is too early to say the world is remaining silent in the face of the threat to destroy Israel, but it is not too early to say that the world is apathetic and yawning. The Holocaust denial conference is an integral part of an Iranian foreign policy that has garnered great success over the past year after all the West's diplomatic offers to Iran were politely rejected. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's crude appearance at the UN General Assembly, which granted him legitimacy; the evaporation of the policy of sanctions; and now, the weakening of the American promise to defend Israel, as reflected in the Senate testimony of incoming defense secretary Robert Gates; the Baker document, whose essence is removing America from the Middle East; and the weakness that Israel demonstrated in its unsuccessful war against Hezbollah - all of these provide a morale boost to the Iranians.

The preoccupation with Ehud Olmert's statements about Israel's nuclear program is marginal and petty in light of the magnitude of the threat facing Israel. The ambiguity policy is not the subject on the table right now, and it could be that this policy's benefits were exhausted long ago. What is on the table now is Israel's war of survival against an open threat to destroy it. In the face of this increasingly clear possibility, everyone must unite, including those who believe, justly, that the Israeli occupation of the territories must end quickly and that the Palestinians' suffering undermines Israel's security rather than bolstering it.

Just as the Iranian president does not draw any connection between the occupation and his desire to nullify Israel's existence, the world should also view the Israeli-Palestinian struggle and the Iranian threat to Israel as separate issues. Ahmadinejad does not recognize the 1967 borders - or any borders - for a Jewish state. He uses Holocaust denial to eradicate the moral basis for Israel's existence, and even says so openly. That was the explicit explanation that the Iranian foreign minister gave for why it is necessary to discuss the "myth" of the Holocaust right now. To counter this, it is necessary to create a moral, diplomatic, political and even military front - one that will be activist rather than sleepy and apologetic, and that will make the discussion of Israel's destruction unprofitable for the Iranians even before any discussion of the goals of the nuclear capabilities they are developing.


3. Iran defiant as anger mounts over Holocaust forum

Iran has pressed on with a controversial Holocaust conference as international outrage mounted over its hosting of "revisionist" historians who cast doubt on the mass slaughter of Jews in World War II.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Tuesday slammed the conference as "shocking beyond belief", a sentiment echoed by his Israeli counterpart Ehud Olmert and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

A host of Western "revisionists" who doubt the slaughter of six million Jews in World War II took place, including a former Ku Klux Klan leader and a Frenchman given a suspended jail term in October, have taken part.

Iran said that the aim of the conference was to find answers to questions about the Holocaust from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has described it as a "myth" and cast doubt on the scale of the slaughter.

Papers delivered Tuesday by participants from countries ranging from Austria to Indonesia included "A Challenge to the Official Holocaust Story", and "Holocaust, the Achilles Heel of a Primordial Jewish Trojan".

"I think it is such a symbol of sectarianism and hatred towards people of another religion, I find it just unbelievable," said Blair. "I found that this conference that they had questioning the Holocaust is shocking beyond belief.

"If you're going to invite the former head of the Ku Klux Klan to a conference in Tehran which disputes the millions of people who died in the Holocaust, then what further evidence do you need to have that this regime is extreme?" said Blair.

Olmert led a chorus of angry condemnation from the Jewish state over the two-day meeting which started on Monday.

"The conference in Iran was sickening and shows the depths of the hatred," Olmert said, calling on the world "to disassociate itself from Iran and all the participants of the conference".

German Chancellor Angela Merkel condemned "in the strongest terms" dismissals of the Holocaust by the "revisionist" historians. In its reaction to the conference, the Vatican described the Holocaust as an "appalling tragedy to which one cannot remain indifferent."

Some of the most notorious Western figures who have downplayed the scale of the Holocaust have been attending the event, including French professor Robert Faurisson and German-born Australian Fredrick Toeben.

The conference wrapped up in the early afternoon and all of the participants, who have showered the Iranian president with praise throughout the meeting, were bussed away for a private meeting with Ahmadinejad.

In Tehran, an assistant of Toeben, who maintains the existence of gas chambers is an "outright lie", tried to show his claim using a model of the Treblinka extermination camp the researcher had brought to the conference.

"There is no scientific proof to show that this place was an extermination camp. All that exists are the words of some people," said Richard Krege.

He claimed that only 5,000 people died in the camp, of disease. Most historians believe that at least 800,000 prisoners were murdered in the camp.

The conference is the latest brush with controversy for the Islamic republic, which is already facing UN sanctions for failing to agree to halt sensitive nuclear work.

Historians specialising in the Third Reich, basing their figures on original Nazi documents, generally believe around six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, although some estimates are slightly lower or higher. Hitler's regime also killed millions of non-Jews.

It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in a dozen European countries, including Germany and Austria.

Mainstream scholars of the Holocaust meanwhile held a counter gathering in Berlin on Monday to condemn the conference, entitled "Study of the Holocaust: A Global Perspective".

US academic Raul Hilberg, the author of "Destruction of the European Jews", which is widely considered one of the standard texts on the Holocaust, said he wanted to make "a statement" by attending the Berlin conference.

The European Jewish Congress "condemned in the strongest terms" the "negationist and revisionist" conference in Iran attended by Western figures it described as "pseudo-historians and intellectuals".


4. Israel Fading, Iran’s Leader Tells Deniers of Holocaust -- by NAZILA FATHI

TEHRAN — A two-day gathering of Holocaust deniers and white supremacists ended Tuesday with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad welcoming participants in his office and telling them Israel would not survive long.

“The Zionist regime will disappear soon, the same way the Soviet Union disappeared,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said, according to ISNA, a government-financed news agency. Thus, “humanity will achieve freedom.”

He also suggested that the work of the government-sponsored conference — billed as a chance for “both sides” on the Holocaust to be heard — should continue with formation of a committee to determine whether the mass killings by Nazis of Jews and others really happened.

Mr. Ahmadinejad said the West had used the Holocaust as propaganda to dominate the Middle East.

The conference continued to draw outrage among foreign leaders.

Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain called it “shocking beyond belief,” Agence France-Presse reported. “I think it is such a symbol of sectarianism and hatred towards people of another religion, I find it just unbelievable.”

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, condemned “in the strongest terms” dismissals of the Holocaust by “revisionist” historians, and the Vatican described the Holocaust as an “appalling tragedy to which one cannot remain indifferent.”

The French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy, called “the resurgence of revisionist ideas” on the Holocaust “unacceptable.”

Although the conference, held by the Foreign Ministry, was said to be a chance for scholars to debate the Holocaust, the second day was much like the first. Most speakers, a group that included discredited scholars and a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan , called the systematic annihilation of six million Jews a lie fabricated to form the state of Israel.

The former Klan leader, David Duke, said in an interview, “I think Israel is more afraid of this conference than of Iran having nuclear weapons,” and “They are afraid a taboo has been broken.” He said he came to support freedom of speech.

Despite the promises of open-mindedness, when one participant talked about the scholarship confirming the Holocaust, his views were quickly dismissed.

That speaker, an Iranian historian, Gholamreza Vatandoust, from Shiraz University, said, “Some facts about the Holocaust have been documented.” But he was criticized immediately by Robert Faurisson, a French academic, who said he had never found documents to support the Holocaust.

One of a few ultra-Orthodox rabbis at the conference, Moshe Ayre Friedman from Austria, said, “I am not a denier of the Holocaust, but I think it is legitimate to cast doubt on some statistics.”