Iran taunts the West with Holocaust debate
TimesOnline
DEFYING international condemnation, Iran will open a conference tomorrow questioning whether the Holocaust in which millions of Jews and other minorities were killed by the Nazis really happened.
An official at the Iranian foreign ministry claimed that delegates from 30 countries, including Britain, would attend the conference, initiated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The president, who claims the Holocaust is a myth used to justify the occupation of Palestinian land, has called for Israel to be wiped off the map and suggested that its citizens could be resettled in Alaska.
Among the first arrivals in Tehran for the two-day forum, called Studying the Holocaust: An International View, was Frederick Töben, who describes himself as an “expert”. Töben, an Australian Holocaust denier, brought his own model of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. He claimed that it proved there would have been no room for the Jews at least 1.1m whose deaths there were documented in Nazi records.
Asked why western countries were so outraged, he replied:
“The Holocaust equals a lie. Therefore Israel is built on a lie.”
The agenda is chilling. The Iranians have presented the forum in the banal manner of international conferences where experts examine evidence in open debate.
The seminars could have been designed to cause maximum pain to Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Gas Chambers: Denial or Confirmation, is the title of one. Others are entitled Freedom of Speech and the Stance of Holocaust Deniers in the West, and The Current Laws Against Holocaust Deniers.
With no trace of irony, Iranian officials said the conference sponsored by the Institute for Political and International Studies, a foreign ministry think tank would include archives, photographs and demographic evidence to establish whether the number of victims was exaggerated.
“Our aim is scientifically to study the Holocaust and listen to both sides before reaching a conclusion,” said Manouchehr Mohammadi, the foreign ministry spokesman for research. “We weren’t involved in this event so we can be a neutral judge. If we conclude that the Holocaust happened, we will admit it, but we are still going to ask why the Palestinians have to pay the price.”
Iranian sources said the conference emerged from a behind-the-scenes struggle. Foreign ministry officials are well aware that it will have a negative impact on the country’s image at a time when Iran is already under pressure at the United Nations over its nuclear programme, support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Shi’ite groups in Iraq.
Hence, although Ahmadinejad has been publicly flagging the conference for almost a year, foreign ministry officials who were supposed to organise it have been dragging their feet. Forced to go ahead by the president, the foreign ministry tried to portray the conference as an exercise in free speech. It was at pains to point out that Iran has a community of 25,000 Jews. who are protected by the government.
One foreign ministry official said:
“Does this conference make sense politically for Iran? No. The conference is being held to answer the questions of the president.” Tony Blair, who was invited, called it “shocking, ridiculous and stupid”.
Wild Thing’s comment……
A cruise missile aimed at the conference would do a world of good. Afterwards we can tell their families that it never happened and they’re conspiracy kooks for thinking so. Is Jimmy Carter scheduled to be a guest speaker?
Good point, WT. Carter will probably be rolled in for the dunk tank at this freakshow.
This is bad stuff, no doubt. But Blair is right. Every day is a crap bath for Iran. The cross-bred monkey cretins in charge are beyond any rational explanation.
The Iranians as a people will pay for generations to come, as every complicit population pays, when the fires start. The fresh turd mullahs seem to think that twenty-million Iranians are a fair price to eliminate Israel.
It won’t be twenty-million Iranians, it will be sixty million Iranians, with the country beyond recovery, maybe forever. Because Islam has run aground in the modern age, it appears to have no way to push itself off the rocks, and it gets worse and worse and worse. Maybe we thought it could evolve on its own. It won’t. It will need some nuclear encouragement.
Rhod thank you so much for your input on this.
Chrissie,
I had that same cruise missle thought as well. Other than family (and Carter and Kofi), no one would miss ’em. Send ’em on that one way trip for their 72 Helen Thomas’.
razOr good one, I sure hope their 72 virgins are all lilke you said and look like Helen Thomas. haha
Ahmaweeniejob failed to mention that those Jews “protected by” the Iranian Government also have to wear Yellow Stars of David, reminiscent of the Nazis.
These deniers can not explain what happened to the 6 Million Jews who prior to the War lived in Germany, Poland and all the surrounding countries.
They also can not explain away the Wannsee Konferenz in Berlin where Heinrich Heydrich laid out the plans for the ‘Entloesung’, aka ‘The Final Solution’
In the beginning of the systematic mass murder of Jews, Nazis used mobile killing squads called Einsatzgruppen. The Einsatzgruppen consisted of four units of between 500 and 900 men each which followed the invading German troops into the Soviet Union. By the time Himmler ordered a halt to the shooting in the fall of 1942, they had murdered approximately 1,500,000 Jews. The death camps proved to be a better, faster, less personal method for killing Jews, one that would spare the shooters, not the victims, emotional anguish.
Auschwitz-Birkenau is credited with slaughtering almost 2 and 1/2 Million Jews. These evil bastards had gotten so efficient at this, they could gas and incinerate 20,000 people per day at this rate 2.5 Million victims can be murdered in 125 days.
Auschwitz was also the place where Josef Mengele practiced his experiments on human guinea pigs.
It was the most despicable thing to take place in the twentieth century, howver more despicable is to deny that it happened.
Excellent Mark thank you so much for what you said. It was despicable and this thing of denial from him and others is unforgivable.
Thank you again for your comment on this and the information.