Teheran, the Iranian capital, was the scene of a bizarre gathering last month of a bunch of people for a conference whose single theme was to question the authenticity of the claims of Nazi genocide against European Jews, an event which historians have dubbed “The Holocaust.” The mastermind of this absurd and provocative endeavor was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the crackpot who unfortunately presides over the government of Iran. The strange, motley assemblage was made up of, among others, intellectual pretenders from Europe and America; rabbis who are either mentally unstable or may have simply sold their souls to the mullahs for some financial advantage; lowlife white racists from the U.S. and elsewhere; as well as rabid Islamic zealots cast from the same crude and ugly mold as Ahmadinejad.
All the participants, including a character named David Duke, a notorious racist from the U.S. who was once a flag-bearer for the Ku Klux Klan, had one thing in common: their unlimited capacity for hatred. They hate anyone who happens to be different. Hardly a homogenous group, however, they hate for different reasons, some, like Duke, on racial grounds, others, like Ahmadinejad, on religious grounds. But in Teheran they were driven by their common hatred for Jews and the State of Israel.
These congenital hate-mongers have the right to hate whomever they want to. What repels most observers is their audacity to insult the collective intelligence of the vast majority of the people of the world by organizing a conference to deny a tragic chapter in human history that occurred within living memory and whose gruesome physical and emotional scars many of the survivors still bear, not to mention the artifacts in the concentration camps that tell their own grim stories. The question now is: What next? If these individuals can deny that the systematic destruction of 6 million Jews in Europe over sixty years ago in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Dachau which was meticulously documented on both film and paper as only the meticulous Germans could, never occurred, what else could be so sacrosanct that they cannot deny?
Before long, they may very well deny that the trans-Atlantic slave trade ever happened. Or they may challenge the self-evident truth that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Or they may question the scientific assertion that the earth is round as opposed to its being flat as the ancients had thought. They could deny anything if it fits their hateful agenda. The point here is that the venom of hatred can make people enemies of the truth, even a sacred truth.
The lack of commonsense among the infamous Teheran conferees -who obviously are on the lunatic fringes of society wherever they hail from- is astounding. For instance, what do they make of the fact that nearly every European country has a law against Holocaust denial? Furthermore, why would the Germans pay reparations to Jews for wrongs or suffering that is only a myth? Europe was the epicenter of Nazi barbarism, and if European governments have acknowledged that the Holocaust is, indeed, a solid historic fact, not a figment of someone’s imagination, who is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or David Duke or some demented pseudo-scholars craving cheap publicity to say that it’s not so?
Logically speaking – if logic has any meaning for haters – the Germans, who are primarily blamed for the tragedy, might have been the ones to spearhead any campaign to deny it, if anyone should mount such a campaign at all. On the contrary, the German government strongly denounced the Teheran charade and even went so far as to organize a conference of its own to counter the sinister propaganda of Hitler’s nutty, profoundly obnoxious admirers in Iran.
Although it may not be a religiously-correct thing to say, perhaps a little blasphemous, in a sense, denying the Holocaust – or any other evil occurrence for that matter – is a far more outrageous act than denying the existence of God, if only because the truth in the case of the former can be empirically verified, whereas the latter is not amenable to such verification. Believing in God is a matter of faith. Willfully denying that a hideous evil had taken place here on earth in spite of overwhelming and irrefutable evidence is morally offensive and flies in the face of God’s own prohibitions against dishonesty and lying.
The haters may not be done yet. After their theatrical exercise to deny the Holocaust, it won’t be an exaggeration to suggest that the history of African slavery may be disputed next. Taking their cue from Ahmadinejad, white racists in America may launch a campaign to deny that Africans were ever enslaved by white people, especially in light of growing agitation by African-Americans for slavery reparations from the U.S. government. As improbable as it sounds, David Duke and fellow white supremacists may try to convince the world that all those millions of black Africans who were shipped to these shores in chains centuries ago to be brutalized and dehumanized on the southern plantations were brought here for their own good; in other words, they were brought here to be civilized. In fact, such a rationalization has been offered for European colonialism in Africa in the past. After the farce in Teheran last month, absolutely nothing can be ruled out.