Holocaust conference closes after achieving its goals

Guy Rundle writes, Crikey newsletter-18/12/06

Well, Iran’s nasty-minded Holocaust conference is over, with Australian socialite-turned-historian, Michelle Renouf, appointed to the steering committee to organise the next one, and it seems to have achieved exactly the result intended by wily leader Ahmadinejad – to exaggerate Iranian power by having Western leaders go out of their way to react to it, a trap perfectly illustrated, for example, by Crikey’s sophomoric editorial on the matter, and by The Australian’s snide joke that Ahmadinejad, a transport engineer, has a PhD in "traffic lights" (and Qadaffi wears a dress, etc).

You don’t need to hold any illusions that the conference was honestly intended – a Palestinian who wanted to present a dissenting view from within Islam was barred from attending – to see that it effortlessly exposes the degree to which Western values such as "free speech" are hypocritically put. The justifiable pain many feel at the Holocaust being used this way is because it’s sacred, something that should not be profaned – something to remember the next time there’s a hilarious cartoon about Mohammed.

But what’s really flummoxed a few Western commentators has been the presence of the ultra-orthodox Neturei Karta sect, one of a number of anti-Zionist ultra-orthodox groups who regard the establishment of Israel as the ultimate profanity against Jews, since it has turned them into thugs and oppressors. Easy to smear Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein or others as "secular self-hating Jews" but you don’t get more Jewish than these guys – they live by the word of the book.

They don’t pull any punches either, orthodox anti-Zionists – their website repeats the charge that WWII Zionists could have saved many more from the gas chambers if they had been less fixated on taking Palestine.

For this reason, they’ve been pretty much excluded from the range of debate on Israel. Yet the conference has made visible the paradox of who gets to speak about what.

Take global warming, for example. The proportion of global warming sceptics (and note I am not equating them morally) to proponents is probably lower than that of Holocaust deniers to Holocaust accepters. Yet the climate sceptics get a regular right of reply every time the topic comes up. You wouldn’t want the David Irving crowd to get the same access (though maybe under the ABC’s new rules they’ll have a right to it), but it begs the question of why the climate cranks should too.

Or shall we conclude that free speech depends upon who’s dealing it out?

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Second Aussie joins Holocaust denial conference

Pia Akerman and Richard Sproull

December 14, 2006-The Australian

AN electrical engineer who works for federal agency Airservices Australia has told a revisionist Holocaust conference in Iran there were no mass killings at Treblinka, one of the Nazis' most notorious concentration camps. Richard Krege, who is on annual leave from the Canberra-based agency, said that only 5000 people died at Treblinka, from disease, and used his own model of the concentration camp to illustrate his claims.

Most historians believe that at least 800,000 prisoners were murdered in the camp, which was in Poland during World War II.

Mr Krege based his argument on a soil survey he undertook at Treblinka in October 1999, claiming to have found no evidence of mass graves.

Adelaide Institute director Frederick Töben, who claims there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz nor room for the Jews - at least 1.1 million - whose deaths there were recorded in Nazi records, was unable to join him on that trip because he was incarcerated in Germany, charged with Holocaust denial.

"All that exists are the words of some people," Mr Krege said. "There is no scientific proof to show that this place was an extermination camp."

Mr Krege has commented on books about Treblinka using his Airservices Australia email address.

A spokesman for the agency, which services airtraffic control facilities around the nation, said Mr Krege's manager was unaware he was visiting Iran.

"What he does on leave is his own personal business," the spokesman said, adding that Mr Krege would be "counselled" for using his work email to promote his views on the Holocaust.

Mr Krege travelled to Iran with Dr Töben, who yesterday met President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the host of the conference.

Dr Ahmadinejad, who has expressed the view that Israel must be "wiped out from the map", told conference participants in a private meeting that Israel would suffer the same fate as the former Soviet Union.

"When I said what was in the mind of the nation, that this regime (Israel) would disappear, the Zionist network attacked me a lot," Dr Ahmadinejad said.

"But just as the USSR disappeared, soon the Zionist regime will disappear."

The Iranian President, who has described the Holocaust as a "myth" invented to justify the occupation of Palestinian land, was the instigator of the conference.

According to Dr Töben’s website, the German-born Australian told Dr Ahmadinejad that Jewish Australians were ready to take him to court upon his return home.

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry is preparing to launch legal action against Dr Töben for failure to obey a 2002 Federal Court order to remove anti-Jewish material from his website.

International leaders continued to condemn the conference, which concluded on Tuesday.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair described it as "shocking beyond belief" and an indictment of the policies being pursued by its organiser, Dr Ahmadinejad.

"What further evidence do you need to have that this regime is extreme?" Mr Blair said.

A White House spokesman labelled the conference an "affront to the entire civilised world".

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, on an official visit to Germany, said it served only to underline the security threat posed by Iran. Mr Olmert laid a wreath at a Berlin train station from which 50,000 Jews were herded on to trains heading for the Nazi death camps.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, addressing a press conference with Mr Olmert, rejected "in the strongest terms" the denials of the Holocaust.

"Germany will never accept this and will use all possibilities at its disposal to oppose it," she said.

The Vatican stressed the "appalling tragedy" of the Holocaust and warned of the dangers of denying historical evidence.

"The memory of these terrible events must remain as a warning to consciences in order to eliminate conflicts, to respect the legitimate rights of all people, to plead for peace with truth and with justice," the Holy See said.

Letter to the Editor – right of reply   letters@australian.com.au

15 December 2006

The Aussie responds

Sir/Madam

Permit me briefly to responds to Pia Akerman’s and Richard Sproull’s report about the Tehran ‘Holocaust’-Shoah Conference, Australian, December 14, 2006.

1. The consistent deliberate misquoting of Dr Ahmadinejad’s words “to wipe Israel off the map”, aims to generate hatred and prepare the public to accept as inevitable a US attack on Iran. What he stated was that the racist Zionist and European colonial entity be dismantled peacefully and speedily, a position supported by Torah True Jews as based on their religious beliefs.

2. As to his “Holocaust is a myth” assertion, all he wished to achieve by this conference is to review the existing Holocaust narrative. A routine historical examination is what historical research is all about, and unfortunately the ‘Holocaust’ has been placed outside this process.

3. The Iranian President has a doctorate in engineering, which equips him with a scientific understanding of the Auschwitz gassing allegations’ problem as presented in Arthur Butz’s classic and unrefuted book, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century.

4. My claim there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz rests on Fritjof Meyer’s 2002 research and on my familiarity with the model of Krema II, as well as Van Pelt’s/Dwork’s book: Auschwitz from 1270 to the present. I need not reference Gitta Sereny’s 2001 statement that Auschwitz was not an extermination camp.

Dr Fredrick Töben

Adelaide Institute

- currently in Tehran

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Another Australian article - note the unbalanced approach, and note that I was not interviewed for this article, hence my quotes are made up, as is the 'gas chamber' quote by Richard Krege who has to date never mentioned anything about gas chambers.

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Socialite meets the stars of Holocaust denial
Richard Sproull, December 18, 2006

SHE is a one-time Newcastle beauty queen, the daughter of a truckie, a London socialite and former wife to the late Kiwi tycoon Frank Renouf. But so-called historian Michele Renouf now commands prominence for her controversial views on the Holocaust, meeting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the gathering of revisionists he sponsored in Tehran last week.

"I have come with great pleasure to see this expose," she told the BBC on Monday, the first day of the two-day conference, called The Holocaust: A Global Vision.

"I don't know too many things about Iran but certainly I think we must celebrate that we can come to this country and speak in the way that we cannot in the free world."

Speakers included Adelaide's Frederick Töben, who has described as "mere puffery" otherwise undisputed evidence - provided by the Nazis themselves - that Zyklon-B gas was used to murder Jews in their millions.

Another Australian, Richard Krege, an electrical engineer for Airservices Australia in Canberra, described the gas chambers as an "outright lie", a claim he thought was supported by a model he built of the Treblinka extermination camp.

The conference continued to cause outrage in Britain yesterday as Ahron Cohen, an Orthodox rabbi from Greater Manchester and a leading member of the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta movement, told The Sunday Times that God would have saved the Nazis' victims if they had deserved to live.

Cohen's trip to Tehran - along with four American rabbis from the same sect - was paid for by the Iranian Foreign Ministry, which organised the conference. They were also warmly greeted by Ahmadinejad, who has a PhD in traffic lights.

Renouf and another Australian attendee, Mohammed Hegazi of Melbourne, were so eager to meet the bogeyman of the West they pushed through a crowd to present him with their papers after he told the conference Israel would soon "disappear".

She reportedly called Ahmadinejad "a hero" for opening debate about the Holocaust. Wearing a green robe and Islamic headscarf, she addressed the conference. However Hegazi refused to comment about her address, saying it would be published next year. "If this is going to be part of a newspaper article then I can't divulge any information from her speech," he said. Attempts by The Australian to contact Renouf have been unsuccessful.

Töben - an amateur historian who set up the Adelaide Institute in 1994 to pursue his cause and spent seven months in a German prison in 1999 for inciting racism - describes Renouf as "once a commoner but lifted in the sophisticated set because of her own inner strength and convictions".

Renouf, who still uses the honorific lady from her knighted former husband, claims to be a media representative for David Irving, the British historian serving three years in an Austrian jail for denying the Holocaust.

Members tried to have her expelled from London's exclusive Reform Club for inviting Irving to a function.

Irving is said to have been the catalyst for Renouf's sudden interest in anti-Semitism, having claimed she had no interest in World War II or the Holocaust until reading about his libel trial.

Irving in 2000 unsuccessfully sued American academic Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier. Renouf attended the hearing and endeared herself to Irving, who was bankrupted by the legal costs.

Renouf was born Michelle Mainwaring and crowned Miss Newcastle in 1968. She was Sir Frank's third wife - after his divorce from Susan Renouf - and they married in 1991 when the banking tycoon was 72.

Frank knew her as Countess Griaznoff, the ex-wife of a Russian count. She reportedly stated on her marriage certificate that her father was dead. But the story disintegrated when Frank learned - while the couple were on a six-week honeymoon in Australia - that his father-in-law was a truck driver called Arthur living at The Entrance on the NSW Central Coast.

They divorced a month later.

At the end of the Tehran conference, Renouf was included among members of a "truthseeking" committee. Among the committee's "tasks" is to organise the next conference.

 

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NATIONAL (DECEMBER 14, 2006)
Iranian forum on Holocaust ‘beyond belief’
AJN

PETER KOHN

A CONFERENCE on Holocaust denial hosted by Iran earlier this week is an “outrageous fraud”, charged MPs and Jewish leaders, with one Auschwitz survivor calling it the work of “antisemites and the insane”.

Eva Slonim, one of Dr Josef Mengele’s “experiments”, said she would like to tour Auschwitz with the 67 participants of the Tehran conference, which had the backing of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In response to claims that the number of Jews murdered had been exaggerated, Slonim, who has identified herself in a photo at Auschwitz, said: “I would ask them, ‘What happened to these people who disappeared from the face of the earth whose ashes still float in the skies somewhere?’”

Leaders around the world as well as the Vatican, the United Nations and the European Union condemned the conference, with British Prime Minister Tony Blair describing it as “shocking beyond belief”.

Among the speakers at the two-day event, entitled “Review of the Holocaust: global vision”, was Adelaide-based revisionist Dr Frederick Toben, who told the conference that the Holocaust “has no reality in time or space”.

In addition to Dr Toben, who is facing contempt charges for flouting a 2002 Federal Court order to remove hate material from his website, attendees included Australian socialite Michele Renouf, a supporter of jailed revisionist Dr David Irving. Clad in traditional Muslim garb, Renouf hailed Ahmadinejad “a hero”.

Also in attendance were several ultra-Orthodox, anti-Zionist Neturei Karta rabbis from Europe, who did not deny the Holocaust – but blamed it on Zionism.

Notably missing from the conference, however, was Israeli Arab Khaled Mohammed, who runs a Holocaust exhibition in Nazereth.

Mohammed, 44, had planned to tell the conference that the Holocaust is a historical fact – but was denied a visa by Iranian authorities.

Reflecting the sentiments of conference attendees, Ahmadinejad was warmly applauded when he said Israel’s days are numbered. “Just as the Soviet Union was wiped out and today does not exist, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out.”

NSW Premier Morris Iemma said the event is “offending Israel and causing dismay among the worldwide Jewish community”.

Liberal Senator Michael Ronaldson described it as “a malicious attempt to undermine the very humanity upon which our civilisation is based”.

Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Grahame Leonard said in a statement that the conference “has no serious purpose, but rather seeks to offend Israel, Jews worldwide, and all civilised, decent people by mocking a tragedy that still lives in the memories of many survivors”.

NSW Jewish Board of Deputies CEO Vic Alhadeff said the conference was an “outrageous fraud”.

“There can be only one motive for Holocaust denial, and that is antisemitism, pure and simple,” he said.

Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council executive director Dr Colin Rubenstein said: “It would be much better for the world if those who have volunteered to assist Ahmadinejad were to never return from Iran, which, quite frankly, deserves them.”

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Iran: Antisemitismus ist europäisches Problem

Bei der Holocaust-Konferenz in Teheran versammeln sich Neonazis,

Rassisten - und eine Handvoll orthodoxer Rabbis

Von unserer Korrespondentin Birgit Cerha

Teheran. Internationale Empörung und massivster westlicher Druck vermögen Irans Präsidenten Mahmud Ahmadineschad nicht davon abzuhalten, den Westen herauszufordern. Nach sorgfältigen Vorbereitungen eröffnete Außenminister Manushehr Mottaki gestern in Teheran eine lange geplante Konferenz der Holocaust-Leugner. Ganz bewusst hat Teheran den Zeitpunkt der Tagung "Studien über den Holocaust - weltweite Perspektive" so nahe wie möglich an den 10. Dezember gesetzt, den internationalen Tag der Menschenrechte. Denn, so die offizielle iranische Argumentation, die Konferenz soll, indem sie sich "wissenschaftlich" mit dem Tabu-Thema Holocaust auseinander setzt, die Grenzen westlicher Meinungsfreiheit testen. Dabei verweist man darauf, dass etwa in Deutschland oder Österreich die Leugnung des Massenmordes an den Juden strafrechtlich verfolgt wird.

Nach offiziellen Angaben in Teheran nehmen "67 Wissenschafter aus 30 Ländern" an der Konferenz teil. Darunter sind Holocaust-Leugner wie der französische Professor Robert Faurisson, der in Deutschland geborene Australier Fredrick Töben, der zu behaupten pflegt, dass die Existenz der Gaskammern eine "ausgesprochene Lüge" sei, sowie das ehemaliges Mitglied des rassistischen Geheimbundes "Ku Klux Klan", David Duke.

Die Verantwortlichen in Teheran betonen, sie wollten keineswegs die Verbrechen Hitlers verteidigen. Um die iranische Führung in ihrem Argument zu bestärken, es handle sich bei dieser Konferenz keineswegs um eine antisemitische Veranstaltung, gewannen die Iraner auch jüdische Rabbis zur Teilnahme. Sie gehören der radikal-orthodoxen Richtung an, die die Legitimität des israelischen Staates leugnet. Ziel der Konferenz ist nach den Worten Mottakis, "eine Atmosphäre zu schaffen, in der unterschiedliche Ansichten über eine historische Frage geäußert werden können. Es geht uns nicht darum, den Holocaust zu leugnen oder zu bestätigen." Doch, so Mottaki, "wenn die offizielle Version des Holocaust in Zweifel gezogen wird, muss gleichzeitig die Identität und Natur Israels angezweifelt werden." Anderseits, wenn "bei dieser Revision der Holocaust als historische Realität bestätigt wird, dann müssen wir nach den Gründen fragen, warum die Muslime der Region und die Palästinenser den Preis für die Nazi-Verbrechen bezahlen müssen."

Die Konferenz war schon Anfang des Jahres als Folge des Aufruhrs um die Veröffentlichung der Mohammed-Karikaturen in einer dänischen Zeitung angekündigt worden. Sie reiht sich ein in eine Kette von israelfeindlichen Ausfällen Ahmadinedschads, der kaum zwei Monate nach seinem Amtsantritt Ende Oktober 2005 seine erste offene Verbalattacke gegen Israel richtete. Auf einer Konferenz "Eine Welt ohne Zionismus" rief er dazu auf, Israel von der Landkarte zu tilgen. Wenig später heizte er die internationale Empörung mit der Behauptung auf, der Holocaust sei ein "Märchen". Mit derartigen Aktionen will sich der iranische Präsident zum Führer einer Widerstandsbewegung in der islamischen Welt gegen die Hegemonie des Westens hochstilisieren.

In seiner Eröffnungsrede verwies Mottaki auf die Existenz der größten jüdischen Gemeinde im Mittleren Osten, die im Iran seit 3000 Jahren bestehe. "Antisemitismus ist ein europäisches Phänomen" betonte der Minister und stellte klar, dass der Iran niemals in der Weise gegen Juden vorgegangen sei, wie die Europäer es getan hätten. Die 25 000 heute noch im Iran lebenden Juden sind zweifellos beträchtlichem Druck als Minderheit, insbesondere wegen ihrer überwiegend familiären Verbindungen zu Israel, ausgesetzt. Doch sie sind loyale Bürger des iranischen Staates, stolz auf dessen Kultur, wie auf ihre eigenen jüdischen Wurzeln. Seit der Machtübernahme Ahmadinedschads haben die Medien aber immer wieder anti-jüdische Emotionen geschürt.

Mannheimer Morgen
12. Dezember 2006