In Iran, unbelievers heap skepticism on Holocaust

Published 9:00 pm Monday, December 11, 2006

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran hosted Holocaust deniers from around the world Monday at a conference examining whether the Nazi genocide took place, a meeting Israel’s prime minister condemned as a “sick phenomenon.”

The 67 participants from 30 countries included former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and Holocaust skeptics who have been prosecuted in Europe for questioning whether 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis or whether gas chambers were ever used.

“The number of victims at the Auschwitz concentration camp could be about 2,007,” Australian Frederick Toben told the conference, according to a Farsi translation of his remarks.

“The railroad to the camp did not have enough capacity to transfer large numbers of Jews,” said Toben, who was jailed in 1999 in Germany for casting doubt on the Holocaust.

The two-day conference was initiated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has described the Holocaust as a “myth” and called for Israel to be wiped off the map. Organizers and participants touted the conference as a scholarly gathering aimed at discussing the Holocaust away from Western taboos and the restrictions imposed on scholars in Europe. In Germany, Austria and France, it is illegal to deny aspects of the Holocaust.

A statement from Ahmadinejad was expected to be read to delegates today.

Duke, a former Louisiana state representative, praised Ahmadinejad for his “courage” in holding a conference “to offer free speech for the world’s most repressed idea: Holocaust revisionism.”

“In Europe, you can freely question, ridicule and deny Jesus Christ. The same is true for the Prophet Muhammad, and nothing will happen to you,” Duke said. “But offer a single question of the smallest part of the Holocaust and you face prison.”

Also among participants were two rabbis and four other members of the group Jews United Against Zionism. The group rejects the creation of Israel on the grounds that it violates Jewish law.

Rabbi Ahron Cohen urged participants not to deny the Holocaust. But he added that Zionists have used the Holocaust to “give legitimacy to their illegitimate project,” the creation of Israel.

From Berlin, Wolfgang Benz, head of the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism, said people who deny the Holocaust “know perfectly well what happened.”

“They want to use what happened – through denying it – to effect something else, to articulate the crude old anti-Semitism against Israel,” he said. “It’s about politics … not about scholarship.”