The Tehran Conference
revisionism gets peer review
By streiff Posted in War — Comments (8) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Despotic buffoonery is usually fun to watch from a safe distance. Who, other than their subjects, didn’t chortle at the madcap antics of Idi Amin Dada and Muammar Qaddafi. Sometimes though, we chortle at the tomfoolery of madmen and in our haste to ridicule them we take the edge from the serious threat they pose.
As we speak, one such depraved intelligence, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is playing host to a conference on the Holocaust. Under other circumstances the spectacle of a noxious dwarf like Ahmadinejad holding what amounts to a conference of nincompoops would make for great theater and a few Saturday Night Live sketches (remember Garret Morris’ “I am Idi Amin Dada, three As, two Ds, one gun” and “I like Americans, I had two for lunch”).
Unfortunately, these are not other circumstances.
Read on.
In one sense this conference is useful. It has drawn out a veritable smorgasbord of crazies and allowed their nonsense to be exposed to the sunlight of scrutiny.
Papers delivered Tuesday by participants from countries ranging from Austria to Indonesia included "A Challenge to the Official Holocaust Story", and "Holocaust, the Achilles Heel of a Primordial Jewish Trojan".
One of the stars of this intellectual feast, to coin a phrase, is the Austrian Frederick Toeben who holds, among other exotic opinions, that the death camp at Treblinka never existed. It was, he claims merely a transit camp where some few thousands of Jews died of disease. This despite the testimony of Franz Stangl, the camp commandant:
"Regarding the question of the optimum amount of people gassed in one day, I can state: according to my estimation a transport of thirty freight cars with 3,000 people was liquidated in three hours. When the work lasted for about fourteen hours, 12,000 to 15,000 people were annihilated. There were many days that the work lasted from the early morning until the evening . . . I have done nothing to anybody that was not my duty. My conscience is clear.' "
At the risk of violating Godwin’s Law, one cannot help but note the way in which Ahmadinejad has set about to morally delegitimize the Jewish state of Israel through his direct attack on the very concept of the Holocaust in the same way Hitler set out to delegitimize the Jewish community in Germany through his attacks on their role in national life.
Just as our grandfathers probably guffawed at some of the nonsense in Mein Kampf, in the final analysis Mein Kampf proved to be a very candid roadmap of the intentions on the Nazi regime we also must bear in mind that while Ahmadinejad placing himself in yoke with the clutch of nutbars headlining his conference makes for great fun this same Ahmadinejad seeks to possess nuclear weapons and their means of delivery and has repeated sworn that Israel will cease to exist.
"Thanks to people's wishes and God's will the trend for the existence of the Zionist regime is downwards and this is what God has promised and what all nations want," he said.
"Just as the Soviet Union was wiped out and today does not exist, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out," he added.
His audience in this conference, like Hitler’s in Mein Kampf, is not those predisposed to reason or reasonableness. His audience is those who are convinced of the falsity of the Holocaust and the necessity of destroying Israel. His audience is not wetting themselves in a paroxysm of laughter, they have been invited by the ISG to decide the fate of Iraq.
We fail to take him seriously at our peril.
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The Tehran Conference 8 Comments (0 topical, 8 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
David Duke - remember him? - was so there.
At the Tehran conference, Duke praised the dangerous ruler of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for his “courage” in holding the event. I guess Duke is not bothered that Ahmadinejad has been desperately trying to become a member of the “nuclear club.” Nor, is he bothered that Iran has been a supporter of terrorism against the United States for at least 27 years, ever since the unprovoked taking of American hostages in 1979.
Ahmadinejad has also called for Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth and has stated that the Holocaust did not occur. He has dreamed about a world without the United States, leading some to question whether he supports the killing of millions of Americans. He believes in worldwide radical Islamic rule, where the freedoms that Duke currently enjoys, would be curtailed or even eliminated. So, David Duke, American citizen and former elected official, is now giving support and actually defending this dangerous Iranian President.
One wonders what the Three Stooges comedy team, all Jewish, would have done with this event.
This is bizarre.
We don’t negotiate with terrorists, we just negotiate and cater to those that fund and supply terrorists…...what a load of bunk
if we do anything other than exterminate this knothead, ......
for words. And the "Conference" is just too tragic for tears (sufficient for rage, though).
Thanks for this.
Joe
Thanks to Jonah Goldberg at NRO.
In their article noting the conference...
The conference was inspired by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who since coming to power in August 2005 has sparked international condemnation with comments referring to the Holocaust as a "myth" and calling Israel a "tumor".
Among the participants was U.S. academic David Duke, a former Louisiana Republican Representative. He praised Iran for hosting the event.
"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."
Reuters refers to Duke as a US academic, according to Wikipedia, he has a PhD...
In September 2005, Duke received a Ph.D. title in History from the Ukrainian Interregional Academy of Personnel Management (MAUP). His doctoral thesis was titled "Zionism as a Form of Ethnic Supremacism".
and they also refer to him as a "Republican" without bothering to note that he was tossed from the party virtually as soon as he claimed to be a Republican.
Another fine job of objecting reporting from Reuters. Their standards would likely even embarrass AP.
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If "pro" is the opposite of "con", what is the opposite of "progress"?
This Iranian President was elected after several more popular but liberal (by Iranian standards) candidates were excluded from the last election. They had to bus students in from another university the other day to get a large enough friendly crowd. People now openly burn Ahmadinejad's effigy without covering their face.
I'm beginning to believe that the Iranian government is little more than a house of cards: a slight breeze and it all falls down.
"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."
Sure the Holocaust can be discussed freely! (except in Germany, where it is illegal to deny the Holocaust happened) It is very difficult, however to argue with the evidence of thousands of hours of video footage of the dead and dying locked behind fences, the intricate German record keeping, and the testimony of thousands of GIs and hundreds of camp offiials.
Even the Soviets, not exactly known to be friendly to Jewish causes, acknowledged the horrors of the Holocaust.
It's going to take one helluva lot more than a couple of "academics" arguing over it more than sixty years later to convince me that the Holocaust didn't happen.
"In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock."
--Thomas Jefferson
Rule One, tell a lie often enough and people will believe it.
Given that there are a billion or so people in the world who would like to believe this, a "conference" sponsored by a "government", replete with "academics" and even some "rabbis" (real rabbis who are anti-Semitic) this just feeds the beast.
Anti-Semites don't need a reason to kill Jews, it just helps by giving them cover. You're not their target audience, their audience - right now - is in Europe and the ME. Next it will be the folks who buy Jimmy Carter's books.
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If "pro" is the opposite of "con", what is the opposite of "progress"?
We either take down the Iranian WMD program in the next year, or we will see them dropping nuclear weapons in the Middle East down the line. It is that simple.
United States Air Force
http://airforcepundit.blogspot.com
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"I don't know." -- Helen Thomas, when asked by White House spokesman Scott McClellan, "Are we at war, Helen?"