Tehran meeting to 'study' Holocaust
The Australian, November 29, 2006
 

TEHRAN: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repaid hopes in the West that the Iranian President may play a constructive role in world affairs by mounting his favourite hobby horse: denying the Holocaust.
Tehran, which disputes that Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis, is to hold a conference next month to allow historians to clarify what its Foreign Ministry not so diplomatically called last night "hidden angles" of the murder of six million people.
The December 11 and 12 international gathering aims to "create opportunities ... for a suitable scientific research so the hidden and unhidden angles of this most important political issue of the 20th century become more transparent," said a statement on the ministry's website.
The move came only hours after Mr Ahmadinejad hosted a visit by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, amid calls in the US and Britain to recruit Iran and fellow pariah state Syria to quell the violence in Iraq.
Iran's fiercely anti-Israeli regime supports so-called Holocaust revisionists, such as jailed British historian David Irving, who maintain that the systematic slaughter by the Nazis of mainland Europe's Jews and other groups during World War II was either invented or exaggerated.
The event is organised by the ministry's Institute for Political and International Studies, which has called on researchers and lecturers to take part in the conference.
To add insult to injury, the gathering, titled ‘Study of Holocaust: A Global Perspective’, has been scheduled to coincide with international Human Rights Day on December 10.
"This conference fully respects the Jewish religion and is away from politicisation and propaganda," the statement said.
This is cold comfort for Israel, which Mr Ahmadinejad has vowed to wipe from the map.
Topics include "anti-Semitism, Nazism and Zionism: collaboration or animosity; the concept of Holocaust and its roots; views of revisionists; (and) denial or admittance of gas chambers".
"The laws against those who deny Holocaust and killing of the Palestinians" will also be discussed, the statement said.
Mr Ahmadinejad, who has recently been trying to clean up his image as he faces UN sanctions for a nuclear program many fear will produce a bomb, has prompted international anger by dismissing the Holocaust as a "myth" used to justify the creation of Israel.
In August, Tehran staged an international contest of cartoons on the Holocaust, in a typical overreaction to the publication in Danish papers last September of controversial caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.
Ignoring widespread condemnation, Iran awarded the top prize to a Moroccan artist for his depiction of Israel's security wall with a picture of the Auschwitz concentration camp on it.
The organisers of the exhibit earlier this month awarded Abdollah Derkaoui $12,000 for his work depicting an Israeli crane piling large cement blocks on Israel's security wall and gradually obscuring al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. A picture of Auschwitz appears on the wall.The mosque is Islam's third-holiest site.
Iranian officials said they wanted to emphasise that Palestinians were the indirect victims of the Nazis' killing of six million Jews during World War II.
"Palestinians have been victim of a deceptive history by Zionists," Iranian Culture Minister Hossein Saffar Harandi was quoted as saying by conservative newspaper Kayhan. "The cartoonists expressed their hate against oppressors and their love toward victims in their works."
The contest generated little coverage in the Iranian press and many Iranians expressed little interest, or criticised the exhibit as unnecessarily provocative.
AFP