He seeks to spot­light what he sees as West­ern hypocrisy on issue

by Michael Slack­man
THE NEW YORK TIMES

Cairo — Iran’s so-called Holo­caust con­fer­ence this week was billed as a chance to force the West to recon­sider the his­tor­i­cal record — and, thereby, the legit­i­macy of Israel. But why would the Ira­ni­ans invite speak­ers with so lit­tle cred­i­bil­ity in the West, includ­ing a for­mer Ku Klux Klan grand wiz­ard and dis­graced Euro­pean scholars?

That ques­tion misses the point. Iran­ian Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad por­trays such con­fer­ence par­tic­i­pants as David Duke, the for­mer Louisiana Klan leader, and Robert Fau­ris­son of France, who has devoted his life to try­ing to prove that the Nazi gas cham­bers were a myth, as silenced truth-tellers whose sto­ries expose West­ern lead­ers as the hyp­ocrites he con­sid­ers them to be.

Just as Soviet lead­ers used to invite Amer­i­cans who suf­fered racial or polit­i­cal dis­crim­i­na­tion to Moscow to embar­rass Wash­ing­ton, Ahmadine­jad seems to enjoy point­ing out that coun­tries like Ger­many, France and Aus­tria claim to cham­pion free debate yet have made it ille­gal to deny the Holocaust.

He has also repeat­edly tried to draw a moral equiv­a­lency between ques­tion­ing the Holo­caust and the deci­sion in Europe last year to pub­lish car­toons lam­poon­ing the prophet Muham­mad. It wins him favor at home and across the Arab world for stand­ing up to the West and allows him to present him­self as morally supe­rior to the West.

Across the Mid­dle East, con­tempt for Jews and Zion­ism is wide­spread and utterly main­stream. Many say the Holo­caust has been wildly exag­ger­ated and used to jus­tify the cre­ation of the Jew­ish state in 1948 at the expense of Pales­tini­ans, a move viewed as yet another exam­ple of West­ern imperialism.

But there is another impor­tant point. Ahmadine­jad actu­ally seems to believe that the vol­umes of doc­u­men­ta­tion, tes­ti­mony and liv­ing mem­ory of the Nazi geno­cide are at best exag­ger­ated and part of a Zion­ist con­spir­acy to fal­sify his­tory so as to cre­ate the case for Israel. As a for­mer mem­ber of the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guards, he was indoc­tri­nated with such think­ing, a polit­i­cal ana­lyst in Tehran said, and as a rad­i­cal stu­dent leader, he cham­pi­oned such a view.

Now he has a plat­form to pro­mote his the­o­ries — and to try to posi­tion him­self region­ally as the rea­son­able man who is sim­ply ask­ing the hard questions.

The two-day meet­ing included no attempt to come to terms with the nature of the well-documented Nazi slaugh­ter, offer­ing only a plat­form to those pur­su­ing the fan­tasy that it never hap­pened. In addi­tion, the orga­niz­ers of the con­fer­ence, a small cir­cle around the pres­i­dent, have been build­ing ties with neo-Nazi groups in Europe.

“He is con­nected to peo­ple in Iran who trust his way of doing things and who seri­ously believe the Holo­caust did not take place,” said Mar­tin Ebbing, a Ger­man jour­nal­ist based in Tehran who has closely fol­lowed the issue with the pres­i­dent. “They seri­ously believe it.”

Evi­dence of that came in a reveal­ing inter­view in May with the Ger­man mag­a­zine Der Spiegel. The inter­viewer mostly wanted to dis­cuss Iran’s nuclear ambi­tions and the government’s refusal to give up ura­nium enrich­ment, but the dis­cus­sion kept return­ing to the Holo­caust. At one point, the exas­per­ated inter­viewer actu­ally lec­tured the Iran­ian pres­i­dent on Germany’s culpability.

“In our view, there is no doubt that the Ger­mans — unfor­tu­nately — bear the guilt for the mur­der of 6 mil­lion,” the inter­viewer said to Ahmadinejad.

The pres­i­dent gave lit­tle ground, say­ing Ger­mans should rid them­selves of such guilt. “I will only accept some­thing as truth if I am actu­ally con­vinced of it,” he said.

Anti-Western rage fueled the 1979 Iran­ian rev­o­lu­tion, and Ahmadine­jad has tried to rekin­dle the energy of the rev­o­lu­tion by spread­ing Iran’s influ­ence beyond its bor­ders. Bat­tling Wash­ing­ton, chid­ing Arab lead­ers and claim­ing to pro­mote the Pales­tin­ian cause have made him extremely pop­u­lar on the streets from Cairo to Morocco.

Such actions have also helped turn atten­tion away from his inabil­ity so far to deliver on promises of eco­nomic pop­ulism, includ­ing a redis­tri­b­u­tion of Iran’s enor­mous wealth and greater social jus­tice for the bulk of the coun­try that is strug­gling to make ends meet.

The president’s ideas do not res­onate in all cor­ners of Iran, though, and some polit­i­cal sci­en­tists there say they have served to embar­rass offi­cials who, even if they agree, do not want to see a focus on Holo­caust denial fur­ther iso­late Iran from Europe.

“I raise two ques­tions about this con­fer­ence,” said Ahmad Shirzad, a reformist politi­cian and for­mer mem­ber of par­lia­ment. “First, how much does this solve the prob­lems our peo­ple are faced with? And sec­ondly, which one of our goals were real­ized? It looks like he wants to make news and do provoca­tive things.”

Oth­ers see an even more ambi­tious post-Iraq agenda reflected in Ahmadinejad’s high pro­file on the issues of Jews, the Holo­caust and Israel.

“It is for pub­lic con­sump­tion in Arab coun­tries,” said Mustafa El-Labbad, edi­tor of Shar­q­nameh, a mag­a­zine spe­cial­iz­ing in Iran­ian affairs and pub­lished in Cairo. “It is specif­i­cally directed toward deep­en­ing the gap between the peo­ple and their regimes and toward embar­rass­ing the rulers so that the regional power vac­uum, espe­cially after Iraq, can be filled by Iran.”