New York Times: Irans so-called Holocaust conference this week was billed as a chance to force the West to reconsider the historical record and, thereby, the legitimacy of Israel. But why would the Iranians invite speakers with so little credibility in the West, including a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and disgraced European scholars? The New York Times
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
Published: December 14, 2006
CAIRO, Dec. 13 Irans so-called Holocaust conference this week was billed as a chance to force the West to reconsider the historical record and, thereby, the legitimacy of Israel. But why would the Iranians invite speakers with so little credibility in the West, including a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and disgraced European scholars?
That question misses the point. Irans president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, portrays participants like David Duke, the former Louisiana Klan leader, and Robert Faurisson of France, who has devoted his life to trying to prove that the Nazi gas chambers were a myth, as silenced truth-tellers whose stories expose Western leaders as the hypocrites he considers them to be.
Just as Soviet leaders used to invite Americans who suffered racial or political discrimination to Moscow to embarrass Washington, Mr. Ahmadinejad seems to enjoy pointing out that countries like Germany, France and Austria claim to champion free debate yet have made Holocaust denial illegal.
He has also repeatedly tried to draw a moral equivalency between questioning the Holocaust and the decision in Europe last year to publish cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad. It wins him favor at home and across the Arab world for standing up to the West and allows him to present himself as morally superior to the West.
But there is another important point. Mr. Ahmadinejad actually seems to believe that the volumes of documentation, testimony and living memory of the Nazi genocide are at best exaggerated and part of a Zionist conspiracy to falsify history so as to create the case for Israel. As a former member of the Revolutionary Guards, he was indoctrinated with such thinking, a political analyst in Tehran said, and as a radical student leader, he championed such a view.
Now he has a platform to promote the theories and to try to position himself regionally as the reasonable man who is asking hard questions.
The two-day meeting included no attempt to come to terms with the nature of the well-documented Nazi slaughter, offering only a platform to those pursuing the fantasy that it never happened. In addition, the organizers of the conference, a small circle around the president, have been building ties with neo-Nazi groups in Europe.
He is connected to people in Iran who trust his way of doing things and who seriously believe the Holocaust did not take place, said Martin Ebbing, a German journalist in Tehran who has closely followed the president. They seriously believe it.
Evidence of that came in a revealing interview last May with the German magazine Der Spiegel. The interviewer mostly wanted to discuss Irans nuclear ambitions and the governments refusal to give up uranium enrichment, but the discussion kept returning to the Holocaust. At one point, the exasperated interviewer actually lectured the Iranian president on Germanys culpability.
In our view, there is no doubt that the Germans unfortunately bear the guilt for the murder of six million, the interviewer said to Mr. Ahmadinejad.
The president gave little ground, saying Germans should rid themselves of such guilt. I will only accept something as truth if I am actually convinced of it, he said.
Across the Middle East, contempt for Jews and Zionism is widespread and utterly mainstream. Many say the Holocaust has been wildly exaggerated and used to justify the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 at the expense of Palestinians, a move viewed as yet another example of Western imperialism.
Anti-Western rage fueled the 1979 Iranian revolution, and Mr. Ahmadinejad has tried to rekindle its energy by spreading Irans influence beyond its borders. Battling Washington, chiding Arab leaders and claiming to promote the Palestinian cause have made him extremely popular on the streets from Cairo to Morocco.
Such actions have also helped turn attention away from his inability so far to deliver on promises of economic populism, including a redistribution of wealth and greater social justice for the bulk of the country that is struggling to make ends meet.
The presidents ideas do not resonate in all corners of Iran, though, and some political scientists there say they have embarrassed officials who, even if they agree, do not want to see a focus on Holocaust denial further isolate Iran from Europe.
I raise two questions about this conference, said Ahmad Shirzad, a reformist politician and former legislator. First, how much does this solve the problems our people are faced with? And secondly, which one of our goals were realized? It looks like he wants to make news and do provocative things.
Others see an even more ambitious post-Iraq agenda reflected in Mr. Ahmadinejads high profile on the issues of Jews, the Holocaust and Israel.
It is for public consumption in Arab countries, said Mustafa El-Labbad, editor of Sharqnameh, a magazine specializing in Iranian affairs and published in Cairo. It is specifically directed toward deepening the gap between the people and their regimes and toward embarrassing the rulers so that the regional power vacuum, especially after Iraq, can be filled by Iran.
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting from Cairo, and Nazila Fathi from Tehran.
