Iran Focus: Tehran, Iran, Mar. 05 Iran will host a conference on the Holocaust in Tehran on Tuesday, the state-run news agency Mehr reported on Sunday.
Iran Focus
Tehran, Iran, Mar. 05 Iran will host a conference on the Holocaust in Tehran on Tuesday, the state-run news agency Mehr reported on Sunday.
The seminar, dubbed The Holocaust: myth or reality?, has been organised by the Bassij, a branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the report said.
Several anti-Zionist Jewish rabbis are in Tehran to take part in the conference, the news agency added.
Irans hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad caused an international furore last year when he publicly declared that the Holocaust was a myth and threatened that Israel must be wiped off the map.
His comments were supported by senior Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and former president Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Ahmadinejad has been making a series of speeches, describing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the central front in the war of Islam and Global Arrogance, a reference to the West.
The radical president has been calling on Islamic nations and Muslims to unite to defeat the West in a jihad, or holy war.
The countrys state-run media have given extensive coverage to historians and experts who deny the Holocaust took place.
In its Wednesday edition, the hard-line daily Kayhan, which reflects the views of Irans Supreme Leader Ayatollah, gave prominence to a new book, the latest in some 300 anti-Semitic books in Persian that adorn Tehrans bookshops.
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.
