Iran launches book to back Holocaust denial stance

Iran Focus: Tehran, Iran, Mar. 01 – A government agency in Iran has launched a new book that sets out to prove the official position that the Holocaust was a “myth” and a “historical lie” that was concocted to justify the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. Iran Focus

Tehran, Iran, Mar. 01 – A government agency in Iran has launched a new book that sets out to prove the official position that the Holocaust was a “myth” and a “historical lie” that was concocted to justify the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

“The Place of Holocaust in the Zionist Project – Fact or Myth?” is the name of the new book published by the Islamic Revolution’s 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 Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gave prominence to the new book, the latest in some 300 anti-Semitic books in Persian that adorn Tehran’s bookshops.

The daily quoted several passages from the book’s 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”.

Iran’s 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 Iran’s cartoonists association, Masoud Shojai, set up a website, www.irancartoon.com, to put on display drawings and cartoons ridiculing the Holocaust.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry has announced plans to hold an anti-Holocaust conference in spring of this year to discuss “unresolved questions” about the Holocaust.