från pacificviews.org:
For love of gods, what the hell are they thinking over there in Iran? I can't say I really buy that their leaders believe that the Nazis didn't kill systematically kill millions of people, but they've nonetheless gone and provided a forum for lunatics who believe exactly that.
Germany's prime minister has joined Israel's condemnation, which shouldn't be a surprise. It's against the law in Germany to deny the Holocaust. A willingness to irritate Germany should be of concern, as they've been one of the more reliably moderate foils to Bush's hawkishness in middle eastern matters for several years now.
I doubt very much, however, that this is more than a political statement. As noted on this blog previously, if Iran's leaders wanted to start ethnic cleansing against the world's jewish population, they could easily start with the 25,000 Jews in Iran. But not even Ahmadinejad seems to have anything against them personally and they can freely visit and call relatives who live in Israel:
... Despite the offence Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has caused to Jews around the world, his office recently donated money for Tehran's Jewish hospital.
It is one of only four Jewish charity hospitals worldwide and is funded with money from the Jewish diaspora - something remarkable in Iran where even local aid organisations have difficulty receiving funds from abroad for fear of being accused of being foreign agents. ...
The problem seems to be that on one hand, Israel seems to have finally achieved their apparent goal of getting a US administration to identify with them as completely as if they were a 51st state. That's great in terms of getting the US to take their side on every question, but it's also made Israel an excellent proxy stand-in for the new Least Popular Country on the planet. Ahmadinejad can do something like this that, through insulting the memories of Holocaust victims and driving the Israeli government crazy, allows him to gain points with other radicals while telling the US and Europe that he doesn't care what they think. Without firing a shot or holding a military parade, this is a sufficient leverage point through which he can thumb his nose at the west. On the other hand, the aftermath of the Iraq war has left Iran with a very strong hand, feeling perhaps "untouchable." This wasn't the case in 2003, when Iran made a sweeping offer to compromise on the nuclear issue and pull back from supporting Hezbollah, an offer brushed casually aside by the Bush administration. (h/ts Juan Cole)
They've created a good impression of it and have significant issues with human rights, but Iran doesn't act like a crazy country at home. At street level, it isn't even particularly radical. They're not a suicidal country, haven't started any wars in over a century, and surely know that any attack on Israel would be met with nuclear retaliation. Though they have good reason to distrust the US, the post-revolution governments have shown more willingness than several successive US administrations to reopen negotiations and potential diplomatic ties.
Yet the plain facts are that Iran no longer feels vulnerable and this conference should, beyond the strongly objectionable nature of the content, be interpreted as a loud statement of independence. We have only Bush's catastrophic adventurism in Iraq to thank for it, because this would have been unthinkable as recently as three years ago.
från vita huset:
The United States condemns the conference on the Holocaust convoked by the Iranian regime on Monday in Tehran. While people around the world mark International Human Rights Week and renew the solemn pledges of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which was drafted in the wake of the atrocities of World War II, the Iranian regime perversely seeks to call the historical fact of those atrocities into question and provide a platform for hatred. The gathering of Holocaust deniers in Tehran is an affront to the entire civilized world, as well as to the traditional Iranian values of tolerance and mutual respect. The United States will continue to support those in Iran and elsewhere who seek to promote human rights and dignity, and will stand with them in their efforts to overcome oppression, injustice, and tyranny.
från bbc news:
Why are Jews attending a conference on the Holocaust in Tehran at which star guests include deniers of the genocide? Clue: they also want an end to the Israeli state.
A handful of Orthodox Jews have attended Iran's controversial conference questioning the Nazi genocide of the Jews - not because they deny the Holocaust but because they object to using it as justification for the existence of Israel.
With their distinctive hats, beards and side locks, these men may, to the untrained eye, look like any other Orthodox believers in Jerusalem or New York. But the Jews who went to Tehran are different.
Some of them belong to Neturei Karta (Guardians of the City), a Hasidic sect of a few thousand people which views Zionism - the movement to establish a Jewish national home or state in what was Palestine - as a "poison" threatening "true Jews".
A representative, UK-based Rabbi Aharon Cohen, told the conference he prayed "that the underlying cause of strife and bloodshed in the Middle East, namely the state known as Israel, be totally and peacefully dissolved".
In its place, Rabbi Cohen said, should be "a regime fully in accordance with the aspirations of the Palestinians when Arab and Jew will be able to live peacefully together as they did for centuries".
Neturei Karta believes the very idea of an Israeli state goes against the Jewish religion.
The book of Jewish law or Talmud, they say, teaches that believers may not use human force to create a Jewish state before the coming of the Messiah.
But how do Neturei Karta and other Orthodox Jews such as Austria-based Rabbi Moishe Ayre Friedman justify attending such a controversial conference?
Rabbi Friedman told BBC Radio 4's PM programme that he was not in Tehran to debate whether the Holocaust happened or not, but to look at its lessons.
He says the Holocaust was being used to legitimise the suffering of other peoples and he wanted to break what he called a taboo on discussing it.
The main thing, he argued, was not Jewish suffering in the past but the use of the Holocaust as a "tool of commercial, military and media power".
In what many other Jews would consider the height of naivety, he commended Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for wanting "a secured future for innocent Jewish people in Europe and elsewhere".
In his speech to the conference, Neturei Karta's Rabbi Cohen said there was no doubt about the Holocaust and it would be "a terrible affront to the memory of those who perished to belittle the guilt of the crime in any way".
However, he also argued that the genocide had been divine will. "The Zionists, with their secular pompous approach behave in complete opposition to this philosophy and dare to say 'Never Again'.
"They have the audacity to think that they can prevent the Almighty from repeating a Holocaust. This is heresy."
Neturei Karta's views are regarded with abhorrence by most other Orthodox Jews, according to Rabbi Jeremy Rosen of the Yakar centre in London.
"And I think, frankly, even among the Hasidic world, by and large Neturei Karta are regarded as freaks," the Orthodox rabbi told the BBC News website.
från israeliska haaretz.com:
Serbia and Russia on Wednesday join international calls condemning an gathering of Holocaust deniers hosted and sponsored by the Iranian government in Tehran.
Serbia called the conference a "damaging and pseudo-scientific" event.
The Balkan country's Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the two-day conference that began Tuesday in Tehran is an "attempt to deny undeniable facts about the tragedy of the Jewish people during World War II."
Participants at the gathering, supported by Iran's President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, have questioned the Holocaust's death toll of 6 million or if it took place at all.
Serbia's government considers the gathering a "damaging and pseudo-scientific manifestation that cannot contribute to dialogue between cultures and religions," it said.
During the Nazi occupation of Serbia and other parts of the then Yugoslav Kingdom, tens of thousands of Jews died. Less than half of Serbia's 30,000-strong Jewish community before World War II survived the Holocaust. Many later moved to Israel or to the West.
Meanwhile, Russia's Foreign Ministry on Wednesday criticized Iran for
hosting a conference of Holocaust deniers, saying Moscow opposed "the
concealment of the truth about the monstrous crimes of the Nazis."
In a statement posted on the ministry's Web site, spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said Russia had condemned Tehran and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the past for threatening Israel and denying the systematic killing of 6 million Jews by the Nazis during World War II.
Russia opposes "the distortion of historic events, the concealment of the
truth about the monstrous crimes of the Nazis, and revision of results of
humanity's most difficult struggle against Nazism," he said.
"Russia shares the determination of the UN general assembly not to allow the denial of the Holocaust."
Russia has itself had a troubled history with anti-Semitism.
Some scholars estimate that as many as 2 million Jews from the Soviet Union died in the Holocaust following the Nazi invasion of the country in World War II.
Russian Jewish leaders also condemned the conference.
Authorities "should unambiguously state their rejection of such issues,"
Borukh Gorin of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia, was quoted by Interfax as saying. He also asked whether "an Iran headed by a maniac with an atomic bomb is advantageous or safe?"
The two-day conference in Iran sparked widespread and angry condemnation in Israel and across Europe, where many countries have made it a crime to
publicly deny that the Holocaust happened.
washington post skriver:
Yesterday the Iranian Foreign Ministry held an international conference. Nothing unusual in that: Foreign ministries hold conferences, mostly dull ones, all the time. But this one was different. For one, "Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision" dealt with history, not current politics. Instead of the usual suspects -- deputy ministers and the like -- the invitees seem to have included David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader; Georges Theil, a Frenchman who has called the Holocaust "an enormous lie"; and Fredrick Toeben, a German-born Australian whose specialty is the denial of Nazi gas chambers.
The guest list was selective: No one with any academic eminence, or indeed any scholarly credentials, was invited. One Palestinian scholar, Khaled Kasab Mahameed, was asked to come but then barred because he holds an Israeli passport -- and also perhaps because he, unlike other guests, believes that the Holocaust really did happen.
In response, Europe, the United States and Israel expressed official outrage. The German government, to its credit, organized a counter-conference. Still, many have held their distance, refusing to be shocked or even especially interested. After all, the Holocaust ended more than six decades ago. Since then, victims of the Holocaust have written hundreds of books, and scholarship on the Holocaust has run into billions of words. There are films, photographs, documents, indeed whole archives dedicated to the history of the Nazi regime. We all know what happened. Surely Iran's denial cannot be serious.
Unfortunately, Iran is serious -- or at least Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is deadly serious: Holocaust denial is his personal passion, not just a way of taunting Israel, and it's based on his personal interpretation of history. Earlier this year, in a distinctly eerie open letter to the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, he lauded the great achievements of German culture and lamented that "the propaganda machinery after World War II has been so colossal that [it] has caused some people to believe that they are the guilty party."
Such views hark back to the 1930s, when the then-shah of Iran was an admirer of Hitler's notion of the "Aryan master race," to which Persians were said to belong. Ahmadinejad himself counts as a mentor an early Muslim revolutionary who was heavily influenced by wartime Nazi propaganda. It shows.
Of course, Holocaust denial also has broader roots and many more adherents in the Middle East, which may be part of the point, too: Questioning the reality of the Holocaust has long been another means of questioning the legitimacy of the state of Israel, which was indeed created by the United Nations in response to the Holocaust, and which has indeed incorporated Holocaust history into its national identity. If the Shiite Iranians are looking for friends, particularly among Sunni Arabs, Holocaust denial isn't a bad way to find them.
But this week's event has some new elements too. This is, after all, an international conference, with foreign participants, formal themes (example: "How did the Zionists collaborate with Hitler?") and a purpose that goes well beyond a mere denunciation of Israel. Because some countries once under Nazi rule have postwar laws prohibiting Holocaust denial, Iran has declared this "an opportunity for thinkers who cannot express their views freely in Europe about the Holocaust." If the West is going to shelter Iranian dissidents, then Iran will shelter David Duke. If the West is going to pretend to support freedom of speech, then so will Iran.
Heckled for the first time in many months by demonstrators at a rally yesterday, Ahmadinejad responded by calling the hecklers paid American agents: "Today the worst type of dictatorship in the world is the American dictatorship, which has been clothed in human rights." The American dictatorship, clothed in human rights and spouting falsified history: It's the kind of argument you can hear quite often nowadays, in Iran as well as in Russia and Venezuela, not to mention the United States.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that this particular brand of historical revisionism is no joke, and we shouldn't be tempted to treat it that way. Yes, we think we know this story already; we think we've institutionalized this memory; we think this particular European horror has been put to rest, and it is time to move on. I've sometimes thought that myself: There is so much other history to learn, after all. The 20th century was not lacking in tragedy.
And yet -- the near-destruction of the European Jews, in a very brief span of time, by a sophisticated European nation using the best technology available was, it seems, an event that requires constant reexplanation, not least because it really did shape subsequent European and world history in untold ways. For that reason alone it seems the archives, the photographs and the endless rebuttals will go on being necessary, long beyond the lifetime of the last survivor.
vidare meddelas:
French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy condemned the Holocaust denial conference in Tehran, saying that denying the massacre of 6 million Jews in WWII is unacceptable. Pope XVI said the Holocaust is a terrible tragedy and its legacy should remain as a warning in people's conscience.
1 comment:
zzzzz..har du öppnat en politisk världsrapportering eller? Impad ändå.. men orkar inte läsa allt, kram
Post a Comment