David Duke speaks at Iran Holocaust denial conference

That pretty much says all you need to know about the “scholarship” behind yet another of Iran’s attempts to delegitimize the Jewish State. Shimon Peres called it a conference of liars. He’s right.

In his opening speech, the institute’s chief, Rasoul Mousavi, said the conference provided an opportunity to discuss “questions” about the Holocaust away from Western taboos and the restrictions imposed on scholars in Europe.

In Germany, Austria and France, it is illegal to deny the Holocaust.

“This conference seeks neither to deny nor prove the Holocaust,” Mousavi said. “It is just to provide an appropriate scientific atmosphere for scholars to offer their opinions in freedom about a historical issue.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki dismissed the foreign criticism as “predictable,” telling conference delegates in a speech that there was “no logical reason for opposing this conference.”

How about this? The Holocaust is a documented fact, and Iran refuses to accept the evidence already in existence. The mere premise that people can’t talk about the Holocaust is a lie; Jews are not responsible for the laws about Holocaust denial in various countries. Here’s a great quote from convicted tax evader David Duke:

“There must be freedom of speech, it is scandalous that the Holocaust cannot be discussed freely,” Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader told Reuters. “It makes people turn a blind eye to Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.”

In America, it can be discussed so freely that this particular Jew-hater nearly got elected governor of Louisiana, and was elected to the state legislature.

And yes, we have quotes in the Reuters article from more Holocaust deniers:

French writer Georges Thiel, who has been convicted in France for spreading revisionist theories about the mass extermination of Jews, said the Holocaust was “an enormous lie.”

“Jewish people have been persecuted, that is true, they have been deported, that is true, but there was no machinery of murder in any camp — no gas chambers,” he said.

The mainstream media works hand-in-hand with the Jew-haters and Holocaust deniers by pushing trash like this as news. Reuters buries these interesting facts near the end of their article:

The conference has upset Iran’s 25,000-strong Jewish community, said Moris Motamed, the sole Jewish representative in Iran’s parliament.

“Denying it (the Holocaust) is a huge insult,” he told Reuters. “By holding this conference, they (the government) are continuing to insult the Jewish community.”

Many ordinary Iranians admitted to embarrassment about the event, which follows Iran’s decision to hold a competition for cartoons about the Holocaust in October.

Funny how the reaction of Iran’s Jewry doesn’t make it into the part that will be published in many newspapers’ “International” section, but this makes it into the lead:

Jewish rabbis were present at the government-sponsored event “Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision” alongside academics from Europe, where some countries have made it a crime to deny the Nazi killing of 6 million Jews from 1933 to 1945.

What does not make it into the lead is the fact that Ahron Cohen is a member of the tiny and demented sect known as Neturei Karta, who believe that only God can bring back the Israel, and who work hand-in-hand with all of Israel’s enemies. Instead, Reuters just calls him an Orthodx Rabbi, misleading readers into believing that he’s just an ordinary religious Jew.

And on top of everything else, the conference denied attendance to an Israeli Arab who runs his own Holocaust museum in Israel.

Attorney Khaled Kassab Mahamid, an Israeli Arab from Nazareth, hoped to attend the Holocaust Conference taking place in Tehran Monday, but was denied entrance by the Iranian Foreign Ministry.

“I wanted to face the Holocaust deniers and prove to them that they should recognize the Holocaust,” said Mahamid. “Recognizing the Holocaust could start a different policy based on acknowledging what makes up 90 percent of the Jewish identity.”

Mahamid has opened a small museum in Nazareth, which receives at least ten Arab visitors per day who come to learn about the Holocaust.

And now, it’s time for the yourish.com mantra: Anti-Semites of the world, just die already. And please, in the lead, let it be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.