Conference Condemned
By Hinda Mandell
The Jewish Advocate
The most extensive documentation of a genocide in history failed to convince Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the Nazis actually carried out the calculated decimation of six million Jews.
The firebrand head of state hosted a conference on the Holocaust earlier this week, which questioned whether the genocide was as cataclysmic as history has proven.
Last Friday, Congress unanimously condemned the conference, and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan released a statement deploring those who give credence to Holocaust denial.
"It's garbage," said Deborah E. Lipstadt, author of "Denying the Holocaust" and director of the Rabbi Donald A. Tam Institute of Jewish Studies at Emory University. "At the bottom line, it's a form of anti-Semitism."
It's also a form of hatred that seeks to delegitimize the state of Israel, said Lipstadt. If the Holocaust is deflated, the historical event that accelerated the founding of the Jewish state loses its impact, and the legitimacy of Israel, therefore, becomes based on a historical fabrication.
Nancy K. Kaufman, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston said that the conference is so disturbing that Iran should be expelled from the U.N.
"I think we have to really pressure the U.N. and say that if a country was threatening the U.S. or Britain or France, would they be allowed to be a part of the U.N.," Kaufman said.
"It is unfathomable that a world leader can deny the truth of the Holocaust," she added.
The Foreign Ministry of Iran sponsored the conference, where organizers invited people from 30 different countries. Notorious white supremacist David Duke attended the conference, which marks the first time that a country has sponsored a symposium that questions the historical accuracy behind the murder of one third of world Jewry. Members of the Netuei Karta, an extreme sect of anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews, attended the conference. A rabbi in attendance said that the holocaust should not be used to justify the existence of the Jewish state.
The conference, in conjunction with Ahmadinejad's aggressive statements towards Israel and his country's attempt to go nuclear, should "send chills up the spines of not just Jews, but everybody in the Western world," said Kaufman.
In September, the JCRC led an organized protest against the former Iranian president Mohammad Khatani's visit to Harvard University. JCRC also worked with American Israel Public Affairs Committee this year on the Iran Freedom Support Act, which Congress passed in September and which tightens sanctions against the country and supports Iranians who promote democracy in Iran.
Kenneth Stern, a specialist on anti-Semitism and extremism at the American Jewish Committee's New York office, backed the view that the Iranian conference extends beyond incitement of the Jewish community.
"The answer has to come from other political officials and leaders," said Sterns, author of "Anti-Semitism Today."
He added that it is important to take mote of who attends the conference.
"To believe in Holocaust denial presupposes every tenured professor of history as incompetent or part of a conspiracy or both... There's no other way you can come to the conclusion that this is an open question."
