Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Have you seen the Guest List?

Just realized who was invited to the Iran Conference on showing the Holocaust is a joke? Just the usual intellectuals...David Duke among them, a former Ku Klux Klan leader; Georges Thiel, a Frenchman who has called the Holocaust "an enormous lie"; and Fredrick Töben, a German-born Australian whose specialty is the denial of Nazi gas chambers. Most interesting tidbit I read about Ahmadinejad was disproving the Holocaust is a big deal...I guess he assumes if he proves it didn't happen BACK THEN...no one will miss the Jews when he wipes them off the off the face of the earth NOW.

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 in his personal interpretation of history. Earlier this year, in a distinctly eerie open letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, he lauded the great achievements of German culture and assaulted "the propaganda machinery after World War II that has been so colossal that [it] has caused some people to believe that they are the guilty party." Such views hearken 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 meant to belong. Ahmadinejad himself counts as a mentor an early revolutionary who was heavily influenced by wartime Nazi propaganda. It shows.

No comments: