Iran’s conference on Holocaust denial begins on Tuesday

Iran Focus: a pro-MEK website

Iran will host a conference on the Holocaust in Tehran on Tuesday, the state-run news agency Mehr reported on Sunday.

The seminar, dubbed “The Holocaust: myth or reality?”, has been organised by the Bassij, a branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the report said.

Several “anti-Zionist Jewish rabbis are in Tehran to take part in the conference”, the news agency added. READ MORE

Iran’s hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad caused an international furore last year when he publicly declared that the Holocaust was a “myth” and threatened that Israel must be “wiped off the map”.

His comments were supported by senior Iranian officials, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and former president Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Ahmadinejad has been making a series of speeches, describing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as “the central front in the war of Islam and Global Arrogance”, a reference to the West.

The radical president has been calling on Islamic nations and Muslims to unite to defeat the West in a jihad, or holy war.

The country’s state-run media have given extensive coverage to historians and “experts” who deny the Holocaust took place.

In its Wednesday edition, the hard-line daily Kayhan, which reflects the views of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah, gave prominence to a new book, the latest in some 300 anti-Semitic books in Persian that adorn Tehran’s bookshops.

In addition to daily articles and commentaries in the government-owned press denying the Holocaust, the chairman of Iran’s cartoonists association, Masoud Shojai, set up a website, www.irancartoon.com, to put on display drawings and cartoons ridiculing the Holocaust.