No debate, just denial

Iran's one-sided Holocaust conference ends to a chorus of boos from the West.

A two-day gathering of Holocaust deniers and white supremacists ended Tuesday with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declaring that Israel would not survive long.

"The Zionist regime will disappear soon, the same way the Soviet Union disappeared," Ahmadinejad said, according to ISNA, an official news agency. Thus, he said, "humanity will achieve freedom."

He also suggested that the work of the government-sponsored conference – billed as a chance for "both sides" to be heard – should continue with formation of a committee to determine whether the mass killings by Nazis of Jews and others during World War II really happened.

The conference continued to draw outrage across Europe, where many countries have made it a crime to publicly disavow Nazi Germany's systematic extermination of 6 million Jews.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair called it "shocking beyond belief," saying, "I think it is such a symbol of sectarianism and hatred toward people of another religion; I find it just unbelievable."

The conference drew especially sharp condemnation in Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel said her country repudiated it "with all our strength."

The Vatican described the Holocaust as an "appalling tragedy to which one cannot remain indifferent," and the White House condemned Iran for convening a conference it called "an affront to the entire civilized world."

The conference, held by the Foreign Ministry, was said to be a chance for scholars to debate the Holocaust. But most speakers, which included discredited scholars and a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, agreed that the systematic annihilation of 6 million Jews was a lie fabricated to justify establishment of the state of Israel.

The former Klan leader, David Duke, said in an interview, "I think Israel is more afraid of this conference than of Iran having nuclear weapons," and, "They are afraid a taboo has been broken."

Duke said he was at the conference to support freedom of speech, but despite the promises of open-mindedness, when one participant talked about scholarship confirming the Holocaust, his views were quickly dismissed.

That speaker, an Iranian historian, Gholamreza Vatandoust, from Shiraz University, said, "Some facts about the Holocaust have been documented." But he was criticized by Robert Faurisson, a French academic, who said he had never found such documents.

One of a few Jewish rabbis at the conference, Moishe Arye Friedman from Austria, said, "I am not a denier of the Holocaust, but I think it is legitimate to cast doubt on some statistics."

The Austria Press Agency said Friedman maintained that the true Holocaust death toll was closer to 1 million.

Ahmadinejad has used anti-Israeli rhetoric and attempted to cast doubt on the Holocaust to rally anti-Western supporters at home and abroad, particularly in Asia and the Middle East.

Ahmadinejad said the conference would set up a "fact-finding commission" to determine whether the Holocaust happened. The commission will "help end a 60-year-old dispute," he said.

The Tehran conference gathered 67 writers and researchers from 30 countries, many of whom have been jailed or fined in France, Germany or Austria, where it is illegal to deny the Holocaust.

Rabbi Moshe David Weiss, one of six members attending from the group Jews United Against Zionism, told delegates, "We don't want to deny the killing of Jews in World War II, but Zionists have given much higher figures for how many people were killed.

"They have used the Holocaust as a device to justify their oppression," he said. His group rejects the state of Israel on the grounds that it was not established by divine intervention, although many other Jews see the events around the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 as just that.

Contact the writer: The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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