Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s ludicrous Holocaust conference gets under way (though not everybody is allowed to participate):
Holocaust deniers and skeptics from around the world gathered at a government-sponsored conference here today to discuss their theories about whether six million Jews were indeed killed by the Nazis during World War II and whether gas chambers existed.
In a speech opening the two-day conference, Rasoul Mousavi, head of the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s Institute for Political and International Studies, which organized the event, said it was an opportunity for scholars to discuss the subject “away from Western taboos and the restriction imposed on them in Europe”…
Most of the speakers at the conference today praised Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments.
Bendikt Frings, 48, a psychologist from Germany, said he believed Mr. Ahmadinejad was “an honest direct man,” and said he had come to the conference to thank him for what he had initiated.
“We are forbidden to have such a conference in Germany,” he said. “ All my childhood, we waited for something like this.”
Toben Feredrick, from Australia, said Mr. Ahmadinejad has opened an issue “which is morally and intellectually crippling the Western society.”
“People are imprisoned in Germany for denying the Holocaust,” he added.
Some of the invited guests are surprising, to say the least:
Other Western “revisionists” presented what they called new facts about the Holocaust at the conference, which also attracted attendees from some ultra-Orthodox Jews belonging to anti-Zionist sects that reject the state of Israel. One participant wearing the traditional long black coat and hat of such groups wore a badge saying: “A Jew, not a Zionist.”
These Jews give Judaism a bad name.
Although this conference is justifiably regarded as a freak show in the West, more pressing issues are at hand, such as Israeli Prime Minister’s “admission” of his country’s nuclear arsenal. Memo to the world’s media: we’ve known this for around four decades, but thanks for the message.