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| Iran hosts revisionists at disputed Holocaust meet
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Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki delivers his address at the opening of a conference on the Holocaust in Tehran , 11 December 2006.
Photo: AFP Copyright 2006
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TEHRAN (AFP)--- Iran on Monday defied an international outcry by holding a conference aimed at breaking taboos on the Holocaust and attended by a number of controversial Western "revisionist" historians.
Iran says the conference is aimed at providing a forum for historians to air any view about the Holocaust but Western countries have countered the event smacks of denial of the mass slaughter of six million Jews in World War II.
Some of the most notorious Westerners who have downplayed the scale of the Holocaust were attending the event, including French professor Robert Faurisson and German-born Australian Fredrick Toeben.
Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, in his opening address, styled the conference as a scientific forum that would seek to find answers to the questioning of the Holocaust by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Ahmadinejad has repeatedly questioned the truth of the Holocaust, at one point describing it as a "myth" and casting doubt on the scale of the killings.
"The simple question of the president of Iran: ’If the Holocaust is a historical event why can it not be researched?’ set off a a wave of accusations against Iran without trying to find a logical answer," said Mottaki.
"The basic aim of this conference is not to deny or to prove the Holocaust but is to provide an opportunity for researchers from Europe to give their views about this historical phenomenon," he added.
Praise for Ahmadinejad
Toeben, who maintains the existence of gas chambers is an "outright lie" and brought with him a model of the Treblinka extermination camp to this end, praised Ahmadinejad’s stance on the Holocaust.
"He has clearly seen the importance the Holocaust has for the rest of the world, which is beholden to the Holocaust as a dogma, as an unquestioning dogma," he told AFP before giving his paper on "The Holocaust: A Murder Weapon".
"Minds are being switched off to the Holocaust dogma as it is being sold as a historical fact and yet we are not able to question it. This is a mental rape," he said.
"It is my duty to be here, if we cannot speak freely it is a crime against humanity," said Toeben, who has served a prison sentence in his native Germany for inciting hatred.
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One of the most notorious revisionists, French professor Robert Faurisson | The walls of the conference centre in north Tehran were daubed with posters claiming to show up "myths" of the Holocaust, disputing whether smoke ever rose from the chimneys at Auschwitz and also castigating the film Schindler’s List.
Another poster with an arrow and the word "Truth" showed Irving and his revisionist German colleagues Enrst Zuendel and Germar Rudolf, both on trial at home for inciting racial hatred.
Toeben brought along a huge model of the Treblinka extermination camp -- complete with model trains and human figures -- which he said he would use to argue his claim that the gas chambers did not exist.
David Duke, a US white supremacist and former Klu Klux Klan member, said he believed it was "scandalous" that Europeans could be sent to prison for expressing opinions about the Holocaust.
"I think that Ahmadinejad is a very courageous man to talk about some of these issues," he said.
Other participants at the "Study of the Holocaust: A Global Perspective" included other Western revisionists along with Iranian "experts" and members of anti-Zionist Jewish ultra-Orthodox sects which reject the existence of Israel.
Iran had refused to disclose the identity of the participants before Monday’s opening of the two-day meeting, saying they risked having their passports confiscated if their home countries found out.
The Islamic republic insists that it is well positioned to hold a conference on the Holocaust and angrily rejects charges of anti-Semitism, pointing to the continued existence in Iran of a community of 25,000 Jews.
Western reactions
However after a call by Ahmadinejad for Israel to be "wiped from the map" and amid continued concerns over the Iranian nuclear programme, Western countries have lost little time in savaging the event.
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Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert slammed s "sickening" the Tehran conference questioning the Nazi Holocaust.
Speaking to reporters Monday on board his plane before leaving for Berlin, Olmert said: "The conference in Iran shows the depths of the hatred."
Israel called on the world "to disassociate itself from Iran and all the participants of the conference."
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Germany summoned the Iranian charge d’affaires while French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy warned the meeting would be condemned with the utmost firmness by France if it propagated revisionist ideas.
It is a crime to deny the Holocaust in a dozen European countries, including Germany and Austria.
David Irving, a British revisionist who is playing down Hitler’s role, was jailed by a Vienna court for three years in February for denying the Holocaust.
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