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From news article: Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went beyond previous rhetorical attacks on the United States and Israel when, on December 14, 2005, he suggested that the Holocaust was a myth. Many European officials, among Iran's most lucrative trading partners, were outraged. The German government, for example, condemned his remarks and defended Israel's right to exist.[1] Then, on December 11 and 12, 2006, the Iranian foreign ministry's Institute for Political and International Studies convened a conference promoting Holocaust denial, attended by sixty-seven participants from thirty countries.[2] The fact that a head of state would endorse such a contrarian movement may seem remarkable but, for the Islamic Republic's leadership, it is a deliberate, strategic decision. Not only does the Iranian regime believe that Holocaust denial can propel it into a position of leadership among Islamic countries, but the Iranian regime and Holocaust revisionists have found their relationship to be symbiotic. Each believes a Jewish cabal controls Washington decision-making.[3] Holocaust denial further binds disparate groups who share a critique of Jews and Zionism.
The Roots of Holocaust Denial
Holocaust denial at its roots is a Western phenomenon. In much of the United States and Europe, the Holocaust is viewed as a singularity without comparison and a story whose lessons are of vital importance to both Jews and gentiles alike. While more people perished in Stalin's gulags or Mao's Great Cultural Revolution, the methodical way in which the Holocaust was prosecuted exemplified what Hanna Arendt referred to as the "banality of evil."[4]
The legacy of the Holocaust stigmatized both anti-Semitism and far right political figures and parties. However, in the 1960s, an intellectual atmosphere emerged in which nearly every truth could be challenged. Holocaust revisionism became the extreme right's answer to deconstructionism.[5] For this fringe, Holocaust denial is a necessary step to bring about the revival of the ideologies that led to the extreme nationalism and xenophobia that enabled the Nazi party to set the Holocaust in motion. These early revisionists sought to exculpate the Germans for World War II. They argued that "World Jewry" had declared war on Germany and that Western powers, fearful of Germany's growing military and industrial power, conspired to support Poland, triggering the war.[6] Subsequent Holocaust revisionists suggested the number of Holocaust victims was exaggerated; several argued many Jews had survived and were living either in Europe, Israel, or the United States.[7] Eventually three themes developed among many revisionists: First, they argued there were no gas chambers. Second, they denied six million deaths, and third, they said no Nazi master plan existed.[8] Despite their best efforts, neo-Nazis and revisionists hit a brick wall in the West. Few people outside their own circles were willing to discount history, fact, evidence, and logic. While the impact of Holocaust revisionism in the West has been limited, in recent years, it has found fertile ground in the Middle East.
Historically, anti-Semitism was not as intense in the Middle East as it was in the West. As historian Bernard Lewis observed, Jews under Islam were never free from discrimination but rarely subject to persecution. Their situation was never as bad as in Christendom at its worst and never as good as in Christendom at its best.[9] However, Israel's establishment augmented the vehemence of contemporary Islamic anti-Semitism.
Holocaust denial in the Middle East emerged soon after World War II. In 1955, Lebanese foreign minister Charles Malik dismissed the Jewish Holocaust as Zionist propaganda. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser once said, "[N]o person, not even the most simple one takes seriously the lie of the six million Jews who were killed."[10] In 1983, Mahmoud Abbas, who would later lead the Palestinian Authority, published a book titled The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and the Zionist Movement, which claimed that far fewer that six million Jews had died in the Holocaust.[11] More recently, Hamas has dabbled in Holocaust denial.[12] In Saudi Arabia, anti-Semitic themes—including the blood libel accusation, the putative Jewish control of the U.S. media and government, and Holocaust denial—are popular staples in the media and educational system.[13]
However, the Middle East produced no real scholarly exegeses. Revisionist historians associated with extreme right-wing groups in the West developed a far larger corpus of literature. More often than not, Arabic presses simply translated Western works. Of the various right-wing groups that have reached out to the Arabs, Turks, and Iranians, revisionist historians have been best received. One of the first efforts was in 1980 when Ernst Zündel, a German expatriate in Canada, wrote a pamphlet titled, "The West, War, and Islam," in which he suggested the existence of a conspiracy between Zionists and international bankers to rule the world. He recommended Muslims could better undercut the Jewish state by funding Holocaust revisionism rather than purchasing weapons.[14] Zündel sent the pamphlet to the heads of state of several Middle Eastern states.[15]
Holocaust revisionism has also become increasingly popular in Arab print media. Writing in the Jordanian newspaper, Al-Arab al-Yawm, Mahmoud al-Khatib averred that the "entire Jewish state [was] built on the great Holocaust lie" and that Hitler had killed not six million but only 300,000 Jews because "they betrayed Germany."[16] An editorial in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Akhbar said that Jews fabricated the Holocaust in order to "blackmail the Germans for money as well as to achieve world support."[17] More recently, a narrator on Lebanon's popular New TV announced that "never has there been an issue subject to as many contradictions, lies, and exaggerations regarding the number of victims as the issue of the Jewish Holocaust."[18]
As European countries enacted hate laws limiting Holocaust denial, many Holocaust deniers sought safe haven in the Middle East. Few Arab states have hate speech or liable laws, except where they bear on interpretations of the Qur'an. In November 2000, Jürgen Graf, director of the Swiss revisionist organization Verité et Justice (Truth and justice), fled to Iran to escape a Swiss hate speech conviction.
The Middle East has become a venue of choice to present revisionist theories. In March 2001, the Newport Beach, California-based Institute for Historical Review and Verité et Justice planned a conference in Beirut featuring long-time revisionists Roger Garaudy and Robert Faurisson. Only intense pressure from the U.S. State Department caused the Lebanese government to reconsider its role as host. The organizers simply moved the conference to Amman, Jordan. The Jordanian Writers' Association was happy to sponsor it.[19] While Graf's motives may have been purely anti-Semitic, his Jordanian hosts may have appreciated the geopolitical implications. As Graf explained, "Those countries which are authentically anti-Zionist … should make the breakthrough of Holocaust revisionism their foremost priority. A tank costs millions of dollars, yet one soldier can destroy it with a single missile. The revisionists can provide anti-Zionist freedom fighters with a weapon not even a thousand missiles can destroy."[20]
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Originally Posted by dayag
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