An international cast of established Holocaust deniers and implacable foes of Israel were given an open forum by Iran yesterday to support Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's contention that the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis was a "myth".
The foreign ministry opened a two-day conference, Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision - which senior officials portrayed as scientific scholarship but which Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, denounced as a "sick phenomenon". Visiting Berlin, Mr Olmert urged Germany to sever diplomatic ties with Iran.
Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, insisted the event was necessary to counter an alleged lack of free speech in the west about the Holocaust, which Iranian officials argue is used to justify Israel's oppression of the Palestinians.
"Today people who claim to be against Nazism have a record of colonialism and racism," he said. "The objective for organising this conference is to create an atmosphere to raise various opinions about a historical issue. We are not seeking to deny or prove the Holocaust."
No, we don't want to "deny or prove" the Holocaust, we just want to get together and talk about how we're not supposed to talk about our hare-brained notions regarding the most notorious genocide in human history. Anyone else follow that treasure trail of logic?
So, what sort of jet-setting douchebags travel all the way to Tehran to discuss the bamboozlement the cunning Israelites pulled on the other 98% of humanity?
But pretensions to scholastic objectivity were undermined by the background of some among the 67 foreign visitors from 30 countries, including Britain. They included David Duke, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan; Robert Faurisson, a French lecturer stripped of his academic tenure for his anti-Holocaust opinions; and Michele Renouf, a London-based associate of the British author David Irving. Irving is currently serving a jail sentence for Holocaust denial in Austria.
A group of radical anti-Zionist rabbis, Jews United Against Israel, who oppose a Jewish state on religious grounds, were given a prominent role. Among them was Rabbi Ahron Cohen, a retired former lecturer at the Jewish religious college in Hitchin, Hertfordshire. Rabbi Cohen acknowledged that the Holocaust had happened but said he saw nothing anti-semitic in Mr Ahmadinejad's comments.
Does the rabbi understand the utterly insane contradiction inherent in his very own words? Apparently not. Evidently there's nothing at all anti-semitic about contending that an entire religion deliberately perpetrated an impossibly elaborate hoax on the rest of the world, in order to....retain a tenuous toehold on a besieged sliver of desert and artifacts. Nope, that's a perfectly rational and unhateful thing to accuse people of.
Look, you crazy fuckers, we get that you're upset about the Israelis' treatment of the Palestinians. Pretty much everyone is, even many Israelis. But to conflate a pattern of over-reaction and maltreatment with a loony consipracy of perpetuating a vile hoax -- at the very least you'd think they could understand how such nonsense irredeemably undermines the legitimate aspects of their political arguments.
Few visitors were apologetic. Mr Duke praised the event as an exercise in free speech. "It's a shame that Iran, a country we often call oppressive, has to give this opportunity for free speech," he said. "I think Israel is a terrorist state. It is the number one terrorist state in the world."
Iran is oppressive. They imprison political dissidents at the drop of a hat. They hang homosexuals from cranes in the public square. Their religious police will fuck your shit up if you even think about a nice pork chop.
Duke oughta know better than to spout stupid shit like that -- before he decided to fester on the fringe of cracker politics, he held plenty of Klan rallies where no doubt he expounded at length on many a wild-eyed racial theory regarding Jews, blacks, whoever. Anyone but his own perfect lineage, one assumes.
The difference is that here the government -- even a crappy one -- knows better than to be caught within 1000 miles of such twisted shit. Duke doesn't even seem to get that he's just one of a group of patsies. On the one hand, Ahmadinejad seems like he watched Borat and took it literally; on the other, it occurs that Ahmadinejad is also crazier like a fox, and that he understands that provocative schtick like this hootenanny of batshit assholes ramps up the unstable-goofball factor here in the West.
Ahmadinejad would probably like nothing more than to goad someone into doing something stupid, whether it's us or Israel. At such a point, Russia and China would be at odds with us on some level, protecting their considerable financial investments in Iran.
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