Israel doomed, Iran leader says
Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, December 12, 2006
TEHRAN, Iran – Iran’s hard-line president said Tuesday that Israel will one day be “wiped out” as the Soviet Union was, drawing applause from participants in a conference casting doubt on the Holocaust.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s comments were likely to further fuel the international outcry prompted by the two-day gathering, which has gathered some of Europe’s and the United States’ best-known Holocaust deniers.
But Ahmadinejad appeared to revel in his meeting Tuesday with conference delegates, shaking hands with American participants and sitting near six anti-Israel Jewish participants dressed in black ultra-Orthodox coats and hats.
“The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom,” Ahmadinejad said during Tuesday’s meeting in his offices, according to the official IRNA news agency.
He called for elections among “Jews, Christians and Muslims so the population of Palestine can select their government and destiny for themselves in a democratic manner.”
Ahmadinejad announced the conference would set up a “fact-finding commission” to determine whether the Holocaust happened or not. The commission will “help end a 60-year-old dispute,” he said.
Participants milled around a model of the Auschwitz concentration camp brought by one speaker, Australian Frederick Toben, who uses the mock-up in lectures contending that the camp was too small to kill mass numbers of Jews. More than 1 million people are estimated to have been killed there.
The Tehran conference was touted by participants and organizers as an exercise in academic freedom and a chance to openly consider whether 6 million Jews really died in the Holocaust. It gathered 67 writers and researchers from 30 countries, most of whom argue that either the Holocaust did not happen or that it was vastly exaggerated. Many have been jailed or fined in France, Germany or Austria, where it is illegal to deny the Holocaust.
Ahmadinejad has several times referred to the Holocaust as a “myth” used to impose the state of Israel on the Arab world.
The gathering touched off a firestorm of indignation across Europe, where many countries have made it a crime to publicly disavow the Nazis’ extermination of Jews. German, French and British leaders are among those criticizing the conference.
In Washington, the White House condemned Iran for convening a conference it called “an affront to the entire civilized world.”
The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, answering critics who contend revisionists are simply exercising their right to free speech, quoted an unidentified survivor as saying: “If the Holocaust was a myth, where is my sister?”
