by Y. Mansharof & A. Savyon
For years, the Iranian regime has used Holocaust denial as a key means of challenging the establishment of the State of Israel, thereby denying its right to exist. The regime has promoted this policy in statements by its senior officials, by enlisting government media organs, and through a range of web-based activities. For example, at a 2009 conference in Tehran in support of the Palestinians, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei linked these two issues by saying that "the Zionists occupied Palestine under the pretext of the Holocaust," and complained that the Western governments and the Western and Zionist media tolerated no questions about the truth of the Holocaust: "The intolerance shown by the Western and Zionist media and pro-Zionist governments toward even the mere posing of any question concerning the Holocaust — which served as an excuse for the usurpation of Palestine — and research on the topic, is one of the signs of [the West's] nervousness and uncertainty."
At the forefront of Iranian and worldwide Holocaust denial as a means of delegitimizing Israel stands Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who said in January 2009 that "breaking the padlock of the Holocaust and reexamining it will be tantamount to cutting the vital arteries of the Zionist regime." Similarly, in an August 26, 2011 speech in Tehran on the occasion of Qods Day, he declared that "the Holocaust is one of the greatest lies" ever told. In an interview with Portuguese RTP television in early September 2011, Ahmadinejad once again challenged the Holocaust, saying that "if the Holocaust happened at all, it happened in Europe; thus, for the Palestinians to pay the price for it is unjustified." He added that the Holocaust was used as a "political game by the imperialists to control the region."
Other prominent figures in the Iranian regime who have been party to this Holocaust denial policy include Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the Iranian daily Kayhan and an associate of Khamenei, who said, "The Holocaust, or the slaughter of Jews during World War II by German Nazis, is a myth and a contrived story."
In an article published by the Iranian news agency Fars on October 1, 2011, Foreign Ministry official Mohammad Hassan Ghadiri Abyane, formerly Iran's ambassador to Austria and Mexico, said that a Red Cross official in Mexico had told him that "the total number of those killed in the Nazi detention camps... was 200,000, and most of them were not Jews.' Abyane added he had asked the Red Cross official to publish this information, but the latter had refused on the grounds that it was classified. Abyane urged Iran and other countries, as well as international organizations, to pressure the Red Cross to publish the names of those killed in the Nazi detention camps, in order to refute the Zionists' "false claims" about the killing of six million Jews.
The Iranian regime harnesses the country's media organs for propagating Holocaust denial, for example through the production of independent films on the topic, and provides a forum to Holocaust deniers from the Arab world and the West. In addition, the regime permits online activity aimed at disseminating Holocaust denial, for instance by the website Holocartoons.com and the website of the World War II Society (formerly known as The Adolf Hitler Society), which publish books on the topic.
To read the full report, visit http://www.memri.org/report/
Y. Mansharof & A. Savyon
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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