Holocaust Denial Conference in Iran 2006

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The Holocaust Denial Conference in Iran (official title: International Conference on "Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision" ) was a meeting initiated by the government of Iran on December 11 and 12, 2006 in Tehran , at which anti-Zionists , right-wing extremists and Islamists from 30 States the Holocaust questioned or denied and the existence of Israel denied. The conference is therefore considered an anti-Semitic propaganda event.

aims

The event was announced in January 2006 in Tehran.

The event was arranged in March 2006 by the then President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad . Since taking office in 2005, he had taken a course of confrontation with the West and in this context repeatedly questioned or denied the Holocaust.

According to Foreign Minister Manutschehr Mottaki , who opened it, the meeting should neither deny nor confirm the Holocaust, but rather pursue an allegedly open-ended Holocaust research , which is impossible in Western countries for political interests. According to the author Kasra Naji, the "official version of the Holocaust should be called into question in order to cast doubt on the origin and identity of the State of Israel as well." The government of Iran offered the invited participants a platform to represent Holocaust denial , Historical revisionism , alleged suppression of freedom of expression in their countries of origin and for organizational networking among each other.

Attendees

Mohammad-Ali Ramin , Ahmadinejad's advisor, organized the meeting as head of the Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS), which reports to the Iranian Foreign Ministry.

According to the organizers, 67 people from 30 countries invited by Iran took part. These included many well-known Holocaust deniers, some of whom had been judicially convicted and punished in their countries of origin.

Robert Faurisson , Georges Thiel and Serge Thion had come from France . From Germany two unnamed persons were invited to the rest received a tourist visa and participated as simple visitors, including the NPD functionaries Carsten Bormann , Benedict Frings , Markus Haverkamp , Arnold Höfs , Herbert Hoff and the National Anarchist Peter pottery . Höfs and Haverkamp as well as the Swiss Bernhard Schaub represented the association for the rehabilitation of those persecuted for denying the Holocaust (VRBHV), which is banned in Germany . Its founder Horst Mahler had German authorities withdrawn his passport in January 2006 in order to prevent his departure to Iran and thus foreseeable criminal offenses abroad and possible escape from a prison sentence beginning in November 2006. Günter Deckert was prevented from trying to leave Iran.

The 85-year-old Herbert Schaller , lawyer a. a. by Ernst Zündel , Wolfgang Fröhlich (former FPÖ district councilor convicted for re- activating the Nazis) and Hans Gamlich (author in the FPÖ-related weekly newspaper “ Zur Zeit ”).

Fredrick Toben , founder and director of the Adelaide Institute , his colleagues Richard Krege and Mohammed Hegazi and Michèle Renouf came from Australia . From the USA were Bradley Smith (co-founder of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust ), David Duke , the former leader of the Ku Klux Klan , today chairman of the racist European-American Unity and Rights Organization , his follower George Kadar, a native Hungarian and “Europe governor” of the anti-Semitic newspaper “American Free Press” (AFP) and its editor Michael Collins Piper were invited to speak.

The German NPD member Christian Lindtner , author of the “Quarterly Issues for Free Historical Research” , came from Denmark . From Sweden came Jan Bernhoff , a Swedish computer science teacher who claims that only 300,000 Jews perished during the Holocaust. In August 2006, he had already taken part in the anti-western and anti-Israel "International Holocaust Caricature Competition" , which was also organized by Iran .

Five members of the Jewish, ultra-orthodox Neturei Karta from the USA, Great Britain and Austria also took part, including Moishe Friedman . This group rejects the State of Israel for theological reasons and sees Zionism as a contributor to the Holocaust, but is thus isolated even among ultra-Orthodox Jews .

Chaled Machmid, an Arab Israeli who runs a Holocaust museum in Nazareth , said he had been invited to the conference, but had not received a visa for his participation. He attributed this to a political decision by the organizers, who at first had mistakenly mistaken him for a non-Israeli Palestinian.

Noach Flug , the chairman of the umbrella organization for Holocaust survivors, invited Ahmadinejad to visit the Auschwitz extermination camp with an open letter on August 31, 2006 and asked him to be allowed to attend the Tehran conference with Holocaust survivors in order to witness what had happened and the others Educate participants about it. No answer was known.

Talk

40 of the 67 invited people were planned as speakers; almost all of them belonged to the international Holocaust denial scene. Some avoided open denial because of previous convictions in their home countries and made their prosecution a topic of discussion.

In an interview with the Iranian Broadcasting Corporation (IRIB), Peter Töpfer complained that history revisionists in Germany were being persecuted "in a very terrible and terrible way". Hoff presented his holocaust-denying book Fact Mirror. Adolf Hitler and the Democrats. Facts and relationships that the “Nation Europe Sales Service” sells. Bernhard Schaub spoke about the "lie about the six million gassed Jews". Thiel described the Holocaust as a "big lie".

Moishe Friedman questioned the number of about six million Jewish Holocaust victims in his speech. Only the British Rabbi Ahron Cohen from Neturei Karta emphasized that the Holocaust was "comprehensively documented". At the same time, he put the number of victims into perspective: In view of the horror of this crime, it is insignificant how many millions were killed in it. The Zionists worked with the National Socialists on the Holocaust to facilitate the founding of Israel. This state should be dissolved and the land returned to the Palestinians, since God had ordered the exile of the Jewish people.

The Muslim political scientist Shiraz Dossa , who traveled from Canada without the knowledge of his university, St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia , described the alleged use of the Holocaust as a “political construct” to justify today's politics, including the war against terrorism in the western world, which he calls war against Islam . In response to criticism of his participation in Canada, he replied that he had never denied the Holocaust, did not know and noticed that the meeting was anti-Semitic. In a later statement, he denied that Ahmadinejad ordered the meeting and that it was about Holocaust denial. Rather, it was supposed to offer an "intellectual / political response to Western Israeli interventions in Muslim affairs". Only six speakers were Holocaust deniers, and none of the others knew this beforehand.

The Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mohammadi, on the other hand, summed up as a result of the meeting: The idea that the Nazis killed and burned six million Jews in gas chambers is an invention of the victorious powers incited by the Zionists. In his closing speech on December 13, 2006, Ahmadinejad called for the "abolition" of the Jewish state and the formation of a commission to further "examine" the Holocaust.

Planning, networking and other conferences

On the final day, the "International Foundation for the Investigation of the 'Holocaust'" (ISUH) was founded with Tehran as its seat. The official plan is to relocate the offices to Berlin "as soon as the ground is ready for it". Ramin was appointed Secretary General on December 14, 2006, and the steering committee includes Lindtner, Renouf, Schaub, Thion and Toben. Similar committees are planned for many states; Holocaust deniers from all countries are recruited as employees. The foundation's tasks are:

  • Formation of an "international commission of inquiry" in relation to the 'Holocaust'
  • "Establishment of an international legal commission to determine punitive measures for those who may be guilty of the 'Holocaust', in the event that the 'Holocaust' turns out to be a lie, punish false allegations and determine reparations for those previously wrongly convicted"
  • Preparation of the next international Holocaust denier conference.

In June 2007, Ramin asked Austria , Germany and Poland in writing to hand over documents to his foundation that could "clarify" the extent of the murder of Jews.

In January 2009, Ahmadinejad welcomed an event at Sharif University of Technology entitled “Holocaust? A holy lie of the West ”. According to Iranian news, he claimed that Zionists, with the help of politicians and parties, plundered the world's resources and dominated most of the forces, wealth and media. The "Zionist regime" is an "illegitimate child" of the "Holocaust phenomenon."

Reactions

International protests

The Tehran meeting met with sharp protests around the world and was condemned by many state governments and representatives of international organizations. Germany appointed the Iranian ambassador. Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that Germany would never accept Holocaust denial and would always take all available means against it. In a letter to Ahmadinejad, Bundestag President Norbert Lammert condemned "every attempt to offer a public forum under the pretext of scientific freedom and objectivity for anti-Semitic propaganda" and the "many scientifically confirmed historical facts about the Holocaust [...] through supposedly new scientific findings Doubt ”.

France's then President Jacques Chirac ordered an investigation into Robert Faurisson's statements in Tehran to see whether they were punishable under the French law against negationism, which has been in force since 1990 . Faurisson had been punished in five cases for denying the Holocaust in France. Bernhoff was released from school service in Sweden.

Almost 40 European and North American research institutes broke off their relations with the Institute for Political and International Studies of Iran a few days after the conference, no longer invite associated scientists and no longer accept invitations from Iran. The initiative came from François Heisbourg , head of the Geneva Center for Security Policy , and according to him was a moral, not a political decision.

The conference was also controversial in Iran itself; it was assumed that the originally scheduled date had therefore been postponed twice. Maurice Motamed , the representative of the Jewish minority in the Iranian parliament, was the only member to protest. He called Holocaust denial "a huge insult"; the meeting continues to insult the Jewish community and increase pressure on Jewish minorities in their states and the negative image of Iran. Iran's Foreign Minister Mottaki rejected the protests as "predictable" and stressed that it was only about an "independent examination" of the Holocaust. If it had taken place, it was impossible to see why the Palestinians had to pay for it; if it did not take place in this way, Israel's right to exist is all the more in question.

Counter-conferences

The Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb) held a counter-conference in Berlin at the same time as the Tehran event. Leading Holocaust researchers such as Raul Hilberg , Peter Longerich and Wolfgang Benz took part. They made it clear that there is no reasonable doubt about the fact of the Holocaust. The Tehran event is therefore irrelevant to the scientific discourse and can only be a topic of anti-Semitism research .

The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles held on the weekend of the Tehran meeting, a three-day video conference entitled Witness To The Truth ( "witness to the truth"), at the 60 Holocaust survivors from the United States and Canada about their experiences in the Nazi era reported . The center's offices in New York City and Toronto also received written credentials. They should be recorded on DVD and distributed to North American schools. A protest petition, which marked the Tehran meeting as a breach of the founding principles of the UN and the international Holocaust Remembrance Day proclaimed by the UN, was sent to the designated UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon .

The former President of Indonesia , Abdurrahman Wahid , who was friends with Ahmadinejad , chaired another counter-conference in his country in 2007, at which he rejected Holocaust denial.

Scientists' assessments

Dealing with the state-organized network of right-wing extremists, Islamists and anti-Zionists is controversial among the international public. The Berlin political scientist Hubert Kleinert demanded in advance of a mirror interview with Ahmadinejad in May 2006 that UN sanctions against Iran should now be seriously considered. Ahmadinejad used "the central figures of argumentation" of the neo-Nazi scene "in a simple and foolish as well as terrifying way."

The political scientist Armin Pfahl-Traughber said that despite the similarities that were emphasized in 2006, there will be no permanent alliance between Islamists and right-wing extremists because the ideological bases are too different. However, Holocaust denial will continue to play a major role in the attempt to forge an alliance as the “strongest common ground” of both anti-democratic groups.

The historian Götz Aly saw the Tehran meeting as a dangerous state instrumentalization of Holocaust denial, which could be followed by deeds for ideological and above all anti-Semitic reasons. However, he considered legal bans on Holocaust denial to be ineffective.

Political scientist Matthias Küntzel sees the importance of the conference in the fact that for the first time a large, important state is openly using Holocaust denial as a means of its foreign policy and in preparation for the next genocide , namely the destruction of Israel. The government set this goal independently of the “research result” of the meeting, and all groups of participants could have agreed on it. That is why the government of Iran attached so much importance to the participation of the Neturei Karta. Just as Adolf Hitler wanted to "liberate" humanity by murdering the Jews, Ahmadinejad is convinced that by destroying Israel, he will liberate humanity. His nuclear program is supposed to achieve this and is therefore already being religiously transfigured in Iran.

International condemnation of Holocaust denial

As a reaction to the Tehran event, the USA proposed to the UN General Assembly a resolution on the international outlawing of Holocaust denial in order to reduce the risk of new genocides. On January 26, 2007 - one day before the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of National Socialism (the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp ) - all 192 member states except Iran accepted the proposal by acclamation .

literature

  • George Michael (University of Arkansas): The Strategic Use of Holocaust Denial. In: Irving Louis Horowitz (ed.): Culture & Civilization , Volume 1, Transaction Publications, 2009, ISBN 1-4128-1065-5 , pp. 229-258.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sigrid Averesch: Possible participation in the Tehran Holocaust Conference should be prevented / praise for measures taken by the regulatory office: the authority withdraws the right-wing extremist Mahler's passport. Berliner Zeitung , January 27, 2006, accessed March 19, 2020.
  2. ↑ Nazila Fatih (The New York Times, December 11, 2006): Holocaust Deniers and Skeptics Gather in Iran
  3. ↑ a b c d FAZ, December 11, 2006: Iran: Holocaust Denier in Tehran
  4. ↑ Kasra Naji: Ahmadinejad. The secret history of Iran's radical leader. University of California Press, Berkeley 2008, ISBN 978-0-520-25663-7 , p. 167
  5. ↑ Iranian Holocaust Conference “Our President means well” , February 17, 2006
  6. ↑ Berliner Zeitung, January 27, 2006: Authority withdraws right-wing extremist Mahler's passport
  7. ^ The Local, December 14, 2006: Swedish teacher at Holocaust denial conference
  8. ↑ Horst Helas (Rosa Luxemburg Foundation 12/2006): The “Holocaust Conference” in Tehran: Who were the participants? ; ADL, December 14, 2006: Iran Hosts Anti-Semitic Hatefest in Tehran - Conference Attendees: A Who's Who of Hate ( Memento from June 10, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ^ Baruch Rabinowitz (Jüdische Allgemeine, December 21, 2006): Neturei Karta Movement: Beware, enemies!
  10. ↑ Focus, December 11, 2006: Holocaust Conference: Iran locks out critics
  11. ^ Noach Flug: Letter to the President of Iran, Mr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ; Netzeitung, August 31, 2006: Holocaust education: Schoa survivors travel to Iran: Jews take part in Iran's Holocaust conference ( Memento from September 4, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  12. ^ Anton Maegerle ( Blick nach Rechts , January 4, 2007): Meeting of Holocaust Deniers (fee required)
  13. ↑ Thomas Seifert (Die Presse, December 13, 2006): Holocaust Conference: Tehraner Provokationen
  14. ↑ CBC News, December 13, 2006: Canadian prof's presence at Iran forum 'abhorrent': university
  15. ↑ cbc.ca ( Memento from August 2, 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) CBC News, May 28, 2007: Prof defends participation at controversial Tehran conference
  16. ↑ Der Stern, December 12, 2006: Everything Nazis Want to Hear
  17. ↑ Conference resolutions published as: Proceedings of International Conference on Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision, Tehran, 11-12 December 2006 , Institute for Political & International Studies, 2007, ISBN 978-964-361-417-1 ; Report: Anton Maegerle, report for Blick nach Rechts , issue 1/2007 (subject to a charge)  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.bnr.de  
  18. ↑ dpa, June 6, 2007: Iranian Holocaust foundation demands documents on Jewish massacre
  19. ↑ Larry Derfner (US News / Mideast Watch, January 30, 2009): Iran's Ahmadinejad Endorses Another Holocaust Denial Conference ( Memento of March 26, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  20. ↑ Anti Defamation League, December 14, 2006: Iran Hosts Anti-Semitic Hatefest in Tehran: Responses from World Leaders ( Memento from June 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  21. ↑ Der Stern, December 11, 2006: Conference in Tehran: Holocaust deniers among themselves
  22. ↑ Jerusalem Post, December 15, 2006: Chirac orders Holocaust denier probed
  23. ↑ The Star, December 18, 2006: Top research institutes sever ties to leading Iranian think tank  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as broken. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.thestar.com  
  24. ↑ Aljazeera, December 11, 2006: Iran hosts Holocaust conference
  25. ↑ BBC, December 11, 2006: Iran defends Holocaust conference
  26. ^ Der Spiegel, December 11, 2006: Holocaust Conference in Berlin. Anti-Semitism in the middle of society
  27. ↑ Simon Wiesenthal Center, December 11, 2006: Holocaust Survivors In Three Cities Across North America Join Together To Confront Iran's Conference Of Holocaust Deniers And Revisionists
  28. ↑ Indonesia conference denounces Holocaust denial Reuters of June 12, 2007, accessed on May 2, 2010; on this William FS Miles: Indigenization of the Holocaust and the Tehran Holocaust Conference: Iranian Aberration or Third World Trend? Human Rights Review, Volume 10, 4/2009, ISSN  1524-8879 , pp. 505-519
  29. ↑ Hubert Kleinert, comment from May 30, 2006 in the Spiegel
  30. ↑ Armin Pfahl-Traughber (bpb): The relationship between Islamists and right-wing extremists. Is there a threat of a common extremist front over anti-Semitism?
  31. ↑ Spiegel Interview with Götz Aly: Aggression against Israel, Iran elevates insanity to the state program (January 20, 2006)
  32. ^ Matthias Küntzel (Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2007): Unholy Hatreds: Holocaust Denial and Antisemitism in Iran
  33. ↑ Tagesschau.de, January 26, 2007: UN condemns denial of the Holocaust (tagesschau.de archive)