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POLITICS: Holocaust Meet Taunts West, Worries Iran&#39s Jews

Kimia Sanati

TEHRAN, Dec 16 2006 (IPS) - By hosting an international conference on the Holocaust this week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad succeeded in doing what he does best- outraging the West and taunting the Israeli state. But he has also got the small community of Iranian Jews worried.

Both Ahmadinejad and his foreign minister Manoucheher Mottaki denied charges that the Dec. 11-12 conference, called ‘The Holocaust – Global Vision&#39, was anti-Semitic, but was an expression of respect for Judaism and Jewish people in Iran and the rest of the world.

Notes of alarm came from the White House and even outgoing United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. British Prime Minister Tony Blair termed the conference "shocking beyond belief". German chancellor, Angela Merkel, condemned the conference and her foreign ministry even summoned the Iranian charge d&#39 affaires in Bonn for an explanation but the conference went ahead anyway.

Despite the denials, the conference took place in the background of Ahmadinejad&#39s pronouncements, made a year ago, that the holocaust was nothing but a myth fabricated by Zionists to justify the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Ahmadinejad suggested that Germany and other European countries give Israeli Jews a chunk of their own countries to establish a Jewish state.

The conference, said Mottaki, was not aimed at proving or disproving the holocaust but giving academics a chance to express their views because ‘&#39in Europe where they claim there is freedom, there is no possibility to freely express views about this historical phenomenonàbeing accused of supporting Nazism and Fascism are the first thing that come to mind.&#39&#39

"If the conference comes to the conclusion that the holocaust did really take place, we will also admit that but then the question must be answered why, if that is true, Palestinians and Middle Eastern nations should pay the price," Manouchehr Mohammadi, deputy foreign minister said.

Prominent among the participants was a delegation of six top anti-Zionist orthodox Jews, including Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, Rabbi Yisroel Feldman and Rabbi Aharon Cohen. Rubbing shoulders with them was former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and skinhead groups from Europe.

Anti-Zionist rabbis oppose the establishment of a Jewish estate on religious grounds and condemn Israel for the occupation of Palestinian lands. Their belief in the actual happening of the holocaust, however, was challenged by revisionists who seemed to dominate the conference.

American revisionist historian Veronica Clark told the conference that the one million people who consider themselves descendents of holocaust survivors should be ashamed of themselves for being unfair to Germans who were killed for their sake.

She had for company the Prof. Robert Faurisson who, though convicted in 1991 in his native France for dismissing the Holocaust and challenging the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz, reiterated in a speech at the conference that the systematic extermination of six millions Jews was a fabrication made to justify the creation of Israel.

Ahmadinejad was scheduled to address the inauguration ceremony of the conference but, instead, delivered a speech at one of Tehran&#39s universities where he was booed at by angry students and his poster burned in the middle of the auditorium.

Meeting with conference participants the next day, Ahmadinejad said he was pleased with the very serious "academic" discussions. "Today the holocaust has turned into a great taboo for the great powers. In lands under their domination one can question God and his prophets but getting close to the holocaust taboo is an unforgivable crime," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying in the local media.

Promising the doom of Israel and calling Iran a home to the participants and all open-minded people of the world, Ahmadinejad said the establishment of a truth- finding committee was a necessity. Western countries, he said, must guarantee not to harass this committee and permit its members to visit sites where genocide had supposedly taken place and talk to witnesses.

Iran&#39s own hardliners&#39 denial of the holocaust, highlighted by the President, sounds bizarre to many ordinary Iranians who generally are antagonistic to Israel, but have lived in peace with their fellow Jewish countrymen so far.

"I am not a learned man, but I have heard a lot about Jews in Nazi concentration camps. It is history. How can one deny something the whole world has witnessed? How can it be impossible to kill six million Jews in several years when in Turkey they wiped out a million Armenians in just a few days? Or in Bosnia only a few years ago?" says Ahmad, who runs a small stationery shop in downtown Tehran. "Denying the holocaust doesn&#39t change anything for the Palestinians. It makes it even worse. Our President&#39s weird ideas only serve to disgrace Iranians in the eyes of the world and isolate them but what can we do to stop this madness? "

Inside Iran, the press took care to report the conference without comments. Former president and reformist Mohammad Khatami has, however, on several occasions condemned the denial of the holocaust.

Iran&#39s small Jewish community, numbering around 25,000 now, has since the 1978 Islamic revolution, enjoyed freedom of religious worship, in the same way as Armenians, Assyrian Christians and Zoroastrians who are recognised as "religious minorities" by the Iranian Constitution. Bahais, however, are refused that status and even persecuted at times.

The Jewish community, and other religious minorities, have their own representatives in parliament and run their own schools and hospitals. Jewish children can also attend public schools and go to university. Holding certain government jobs, however, is restricted to Muslims and Jews do worry about further erosion of their rights.

"Our elders sometimes told stories of being humiliated for being Jews, but I&#39ve always lived in peace with my Muslim neighbours. I still do. Sometimes we are even closer than brothers," says Davoud, a 64-year-old Jewish textile merchant in Tehran at one of the few remaining kosher butcher shops.

"A few years ago when Jews were arrested in Shiraz and were accused of spying for Zionists, everybody got scared and a wave of emigration began but with their acquittal and release from prison things went back to normal. Being Jewish and being a Zionist are not the same thing,&#39&#39 he says.

"Just as we were forgetting that unhappy incident, this holocaust story started. They say it is only Israel they want wiped out and that they respect our religion and our freedom. One wants to think this is true. One wants to believe the holocaust denial story is only a passing wave, too. But what if it goes on? It has already become official policy to deny the holocaust. What if anti-Semitism follows?" he asks.