IRAN: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.
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.
However, exhibitions on the conference's fringes conveyed a different message. A series of posters carried the words "myth" and "truth" juxtaposed. Under "myth" were verities of the Holocaust while under the "truth" label were opposing contentions.
One poster, simply headlined "truth", carried photos of Irving and Ernst Zundel, a prominent German neo-Nazi also now in jail. Two of Irving books, Hitler's War and Nuremberg: The Last Battle, were displayed along with several other Holocaust revisionist works. There were no books by orthodox historians on the Nazi era. - (Guardian service)