Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Iranian Holocaust denial: a new development

A scholar who specializes in Persia/Iran has pointed out to me that Holocaust denial is something entirely new in the panoply of Iranian anti-Zionism. According to him, this is something quite different from anything we have seen before.

5 comments:

Lyndon said...

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0601/S00151.htm

William Fisher's personal experience of denial in Iran circa 'a few years ago'

Mitchell said...

That article describes a 'personal experience of denial' in Egypt, not in Iran.

"View from Iran", an American blogger married to an Iranian and living in that country, says: "...many of the Iranians I have met have never heard of the holocaust. They still appreciate the Germans for fighting those evil Brits. They know next to nothing about World War 2."

Deborah Lipstadt said...

Val urges me to go to the conference. I doubt that I will be invited or, if I went, heard. This is not a conference for open honest inquiry. If it were, it would not be "investigating" whether there was a Holocaust. Imagine if it called a conference to decide if there were a WWII. WWII historians would not go to "convince" them of the truth. They would say: these folks are nuts and dangerous

Deborah Lipstadt said...

Val: you seem to think that the President's remarks were mistranslated. I don't know Farsi so I can't make my own judgment. However, since they have been so widely condemned and discussed, I would venture to argue that had there been a mistranslation, many people would have protested.

He is not, as far as I know, a professor and I think it is a mistake to see him as simply misguided.

Mitchell said...

More on the history of Holocaust denial in Iran. The SF Chronicle article linked by Omid Memarian (who is an Iranian journalist) gives a few other recent examples of revisionists being welcomed or supported.