If you’re going to host a conference to study the Holocaust, the first person you should invite is the guy who would march about decked out in swastikas in college and throw parties to celebrate Hitler’s birthday, right? Just as you would employ Genghis Khan as a peacemaker or put Nero in charge of a fire safety course.
Iran’s much touted Holocaust conference opened Monday in Tehran with former Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard David Duke, hot off the “White World’s Future” conference this summer in Moscow, offering his opinion; his remarks are posted on his website because, he claims, there have been “false reports” about them. He thanked “the distinguished scholars who are here at a conference that history shall one day deem as one of the most important of the 21st century.” He also expressed an empathy with the Iranian president, since “the Zionist-influenced media lies about me with the same enthusiasm as they lie about him.” (Looks like someone’s getting invited to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s holiday party this year!)
Realizing, perhaps, that the conference is somewhat beneath the intellectual standards of a great scholar like himself, Duke explained that his primary reason for being there is a commitment to freedom of speech. (He refrained, however, from expressing an empathy with those who are hanged in Iran for a similar commitment.)
Also attending the conference are Frenchman Robert Faurisson, veritable poster boy for Holocaust denial, who claims that gas chambers were never used to kill Jews, and Australian Fredrick Toben, who claims that, at the very most, 2,007 people might have been killed at Auschwitz.
“Results of surveys so far show Holocaust is no more than a myth,” concluded Ali-Akbar Mohtashamipour, secretary general of the International Congress to Support Palestinian Intifada and former Iranian interior minister, in an interview with the Islamic Republic News Agency. He may be right about those results — staggering numbers of gun-toting, bomb-belt-wearing Hamas and Fatah members undoubtedly claim the Holocaust was a myth. “Saying that Holocaust is a myth does not mean that the Nazis committed no crimes in the course of World War II,” continued Mohtashamipour, as if to establish his credibility — it’s not that they like Nazis; they just hate Jews.
In a poor imitation of boondoggling Western bureaucrats, Mohtashamipour advocated a fact-finding committee to investigate the “truth.” The thought of an Ahmadinejad-commissioned Holocaust Study Group compiling a 160-page report to sell on Amazon is too much to bear.
Maybe the commission could go on a little fact-finding trip, say, to Los Angeles, New York, and Toronto, where the Simon Wiesenthal Center gathered by videoconference a Holocaust survivor for every Holocaust denier (about seventy of them, representing thirty countries) at the Iran conference. “It wasn’t enough that their loved ones were murdered in the death camps, now they have to prove to Ahmadinejad they are not liars,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier.
But, of course, the Iran conference is not about scholarly studies or bold exercises in free speech. It’s about riding the tide of anti-Israel sentiment that is cresting not only in the Middle East, but among antiwar activists in the United States and Europe. It’s about feeding and legitimating the latent, potent anti-Semitism that has crept back into acceptance across the globe.
While any reasoned person will laugh off this latest Ahmadinejad stunt, there is a danger that someone will hear the “scholars” claim that they care for World War II victims while stating that the systematic massacre of six million Jews was improbable; he will see news photos of the token “Jews United Against Zionism” rabbis at the conference; and he will begin to believe that it just might be true.
“We do not intend to deny or confirm the Holocaust,” Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said while addressing the conference Monday. “If the occurrence of the event is officially questioned, the identity of the Zionist regime will also be put under question.”
Bingo. It’s like fishing with dynamite, trying to find people receptive of justifications for their antagonism toward Israel. The whole kaffiyeh-sporting anti-Israel crowd, which accuses Israel of heinous human-rights abuses against the Palestinians while rallying behind the Taliban, has come to blame the Jewish state for all the ills in the world.
“Regional peoples continually ask for reasons behind the U.S.’ blind support for the Zionist regime, citing the U.S.’ veto of over 60 U.N. Security Council resolutions against Israel,” Mottaki said in a speech that could have been lifted from a pot-scented, anti-Bush, antiwar demonstration. “These arrogant powers think they can guarantee its survival through military power, but history will prove them wrong.”
Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem Shoah memorial in Jerusalem, aptly called Iran’s dog-and-pony show its latest “attempt to paint its radical agenda with a scholarly brush.” But perhaps the best comment to be made about the conference of crackpots and racists carefully assembled by Ahmadinejad is that of Yad Vashem’s upcoming symposium on Thursday, just after the Iran event ends: “Holocaust Denial: Paving the Way to Genocide.”
– Bridget Johnson is a columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News. She blogs at GOP Vixen.