The Place of Holocaust in the Zionist Project Fact or Myth? is the name of the new book published by the Islamic Revolutions Documents Centre, a government agency headed by hard-line cleric Ruhollah Hosseinian. It is written by a little known author called Seyyed Mehdi Tarahi.
In its Wednesday edition, the hard-line daily Kayhan, which reflects the views of Irans Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gave prominence to the new book, the latest in some 300 anti-Semitic books in Persian that adorn Tehrans bookshops.
The daily quoted several passages from the books introduction, including this one: When at the end of the Second World War, the world saw macabre scenes of prisoners of war camps with heaps of corpses of POWs who had died of typhoid, Zionist circles began to spread rumours that the Jews had been exterminated by Nazis using special weapons called gas chambers. Thus a new phenomenon called the Holocaust, or the massacre of the Jews, came into being.
The book, according to Kayhan, studies the myth of Holocaust and the role it has played in cementing the political and economic basis of Israel.
Irans state-run newspapers have given widespread coverage to allegations by Holocaust deniers who dispute the genocide of the Jews by Nazi Germany after hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that the Holocaust was a myth and threatened that Israel must be wiped off the map.
In addition to daily articles and commentaries in the government-owned press denying the Holocaust, the chairman of Irans cartoonists association, Masoud Shojai, set up a website, www.irancartoon.com, to put on display drawings and cartoons ridiculing the Holocaust.
Irans Foreign Ministry has announced plans to hold an anti-Holocaust conference in spring of this year to discuss unresolved questions about the Holocaust.
