TEHRAN, Dec 11: Iran organized a conference on Monday to debate the Holocaust and question whether Nazi Germany used gas chambers, prompting charges it was encouraging the denial of the killing of six million Jews from 1933 to 1945.
Guests at the government-run event, titled “Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision”, included Westerners who have cast doubt on the Holocaust -- some of them from countries that have made it a crime to deny it happened -- as well as a few Jews.
“The aim of this conference is not to deny or confirm the Holocaust,” Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said. “Its main aim is to create an opportunity for thinkers who cannot express their views freely in Europe about the Holocaust.”
The two-day conference at a Foreign Ministry institute was inspired by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who since coming to power in August 2005 has sparked international condemnation by terming the Holocaust a “myth” and calling Israel a “tumour”. Ahmadinejad has said he wants to encourage scholarly debate and examine the justification for Israel's creation.
American David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, praised Iran. “There must be freedom of speech, it is scandalous that the Holocaust cannot be discussed freely,” he said. “It makes people turn a blind eye to Israel's crimes against the Palestinian people.”
Israel, the United States and a leader of Iran's own 25,000-strong Jewish community condemned the conference. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called it “a sick phenomenon that shows the depth of hatred of the fundamentalist Iranian regime”.The US State Department last week denounced the gathering as “disgraceful”. Moris Motamed, the sole Jewish representative in Iran's parliament, described it as a “huge insult”.
A rival conference was held in Berlin, backed by the German government, to protest about the Tehran meeting.
“Denying or doubting the Holocaust cannot be left without comment. We must do what we can to counter this before it starts making inroads in our society,” said Thomas Krueger, head of the Federal Agency for Civic Education, at the Berlin event.French writer Georges Thiel, who has been convicted in France for spreading revisionist theories about the mass extermination of Jews, said the Holocaust was “an enormous lie”.
“Jewish people have been persecuted, that is true, they have been deported, that is true, but there was no machinery of murder in any camp -- no gas chambers,” he said in Tehran.
Participants included about half a dozen Jews from Europe and the United States clad in long black coats and black hats, some wearing badges depicting the Israeli flag crossed out.—Reuters
