Iran condemned over Holocaust deniers' conference

Iran faced fresh world condemnation as nearly 70 Holocaust deniers from around the world gathered in Tehran for a conference debating whether the genocide took place.

Israel’s prime minister called for world condemnation of the conference, calling it a “sick phenomenon”.

The 67 participants from 30 countries included former US Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and number of Western Holocaust sceptics who had been prosecuted in Europe for publishing their theories casting doubt on whether six million Jews were killed by the Nazis or whether gas chambers were used.

The gathering brought quick condemnation from the United States and Germany.

US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack called the conference “awful” and said it, combined with Ahmadinejad’s advocacy of Israel’s destruction, “should be of grave concern to everybody around the world”.

German parliament president Norbert Lammert protested in a letter to Ahmadinejad, calling it anti-Semitic propaganda “under the pretext of scientific freedom”.

Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, said the Tehran conference was “an effort to mainstream Holocaust denial” and “paint (an) extremist agenda with a scholarly brush”.

Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki dismissed the foreign criticism as “predictable”.

“If the official version of the Holocaust is thrown into doubt, then the identity and nature of Israel will be thrown into doubt,” said Mottaki, whose ministry organised the conference.

“And if, during this review, it is proved that the Holocaust was a historical reality, then what is the reason for the Muslim people of the region and the Palestinians having to pay the cost of the Nazis’ crimes?”

A statement from Ahmadinejad is expected to be read to the delegates today.

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

“The railroad to the camp did not have enough capacity to transfer large numbers of Jews.”

The two-day conference was initiated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in an apparent attempt to boost his status at home and abroad as a tough opponent of Israel.

The hardline president has described the Holocaust as a “myth” and called for Israel to be wiped off the map. Earlier this year, his government backed an exhibition of anti-Israel cartoons in a show of defiance after Danish cartoons caricaturing Islam’s prophet Mohammed were published in Europe, raising an outcry among Muslims.

Organisers 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.

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”.

Among the participants were two rabbis and four other members of the group Jews United Against Zionism, who were dressed in the traditional long black coats and black hats of ultra-Orthodox Jews. The group rejects the creation of Israel on the grounds that it violates Jewish law.

Rabbi Ahron Kohen urged participants not to deny the Holocaust. “If we say that this crime did not happen, it is a humiliation and insult to the victims,” he said, according to the Farsi translation.

But he added that Zionists had used the Holocaust to “give legitimacy to their illegitimate project”, the creation of Israel.

Another participant, Robert Faurisson, a retired French university professor convicted five times for denying crimes against humanity claimed that no gas chambers were used in Nazi concentration camps.