As long as the conference is open to scholars with different and opposing views, I feel this could serve a valuable function in promoting better education on the subject. Similar conferences in the West are often polemical in nature, and while the overall atrocities committed by the Nazis against Jews (and others) cannot be refuted, there are some historical facts that need to be better understood. Without the threat that such scholarship would land anyone in jail or result in them being blacklisted and out of a job. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-01/16/content_4057221.htm
From a psychological perspective, this if of interest to me... Why do the Iranians care ? What possible effect does the veracity of the holocaust have on Iranian life ? Lets suppose the "scholars" decide that only 600,000 Jews were killed and not 6 million....then what ? Do the Iranians' and the other virulent anti-Semites that are planning this "scholarly" meeting think the Israelis are just to say "Aw shite, only 10 % of what was claimed, we better pack up and leave and give this country back to Jordan ? While their at it, can Iran sponsor a "scholarly" debate on the atrocities committed at Sabra and Shatila ? I bet there were only 600 Palestinians killed there, not the thousands claimed.
Do you honestly believe that your insane President is doing this for some sort of scientific, psychological research after all he said about Holocaust? Stop being such brainless, brainwashed apologist for current Iranian regime.
No, it isn't just you. This regime is led by the most vile creatures the world has known since Nazi Germany.
Hmmm, do I go to this symposium, or do I attend the wolf seminar on the issues involved with killing sheep? This really is too funny, especially when couches as "serious" education.
How is this valuable when from the start the host countries president has called it a myth? That's not being open to new ideas. It's pretty clear where the hosts beliefs lie. This isn't about clarifying a few minor points of history. And this is not the kind of action a leader would take if they were interested bettering relations. Wanna know where Osama is? Ask Ahmadinejad.
Would you expect anything else from IM? So if he is indicative of the young Iranians we hope will reform their country, we'll be waiting a long time. Come to think of it, they seem pretty gutless. I don't expect them to do anything.
Seriously IM. I generally feel like you get a tough shake around here, but this is just plain idiotic. You have an openly racist administration holding a conference to "debate" something that isn't up for debate. There is no value here. Period. What facts do you think need to be better understood? This is about giving podium space to racists and liars, nothing more. You can't be this naive.
Provided the condition I mentioned is satisfied, namely the conference being open and attended by scholars with different viewpoints, I believe it could serve an educational purpose. The facts relating to the issue are tinged, in both the West and in the Islamic world, by propaganda and polemics. While on this issue, the underlying atrocities are clear and cannot be disputed, a conference such as the one I have mentioned would allow those facts to be better appreciated in a country like Iran. On the other hand, the attempt to make this a "political issue" as it is in the West, imposing certain ideological restrictions on free debate on some of the relevant particulars on the subject, needs to be countered as well. The kind of overt as well as covert censorship on the subject that exists in some countries, makes people often believe things (in both directions, including in opposite of the purpose behind the censorship) that a thorough examination untinged by polemics might reveal to be wrong.
Dude, do you realize you're dealing with Iran's version of Pravda? He's not this naive. He hopes you are.
Unlike you, I actually have heard the full comments of Ahmadinejad on the issue, including in his press conference a couple of days ago. Let me summarize his position and comments as follows: First, Ahmadinejad position has been offered in the guise of a question. Namely, he has posited two alternatives. First, that the Holocaust is a myth, in which case he has asked Western countries: If the Holocaust is a myth, then why do you (who claim to stand for freedom of speech) imprison and censor scholars who dispute the version popular in the West? Second, he has asked that if the Holocaust happened as related in the West, then obviously those who committed such atrocities must pay for their crimes. And what better compensation for their criminal misdeeds than to have established a "Jewish homeland" in the territory of countries responsible for such atrocities? For a Zionist movement which at its inception was willing to even consider Uganda and Argentina as the possible homeland for the Jews, if they were offered a peace of European territory exclusively for the Jews as a Jewish state, they would have accepted it. Instead, being denied that option, and offered land belonging to the Palestinians, naturally the Jews began to insist on that territory as their future home. And started to lay the foundations for an ideology that takes Bible stories as a justification for changing the ethnic makeup of Palestine and establishing a Jewish land on a territory that previously was not predominately Jewish. In asking these questions, Iran's government has been explicit that Ahmadinejad was not offering an answer as to the historical facts regarding that holocaust. That issue is one that should properly be debated, openly and without censorship either way, by scholars and historians. Hence, the idea behind the conference discussed in this article.
Well, once again, in the guise of answering a question, you fill your post with garbage. Uganda was offered and rejected. The land allocated to the Jews in 1947 were only those areas where Jews were the majority population. Apparently, you are in the group that feel that only non-Jews deserve self-determination. Jewish literature and tradition clearly show that Israel and only Israel was the land that Jews sought to return to for nearly 2000 years. History clearly shows that the Palestinians were on the wrong side once again. They supported the Nazi's and sought to cleanse the middle east of Jews as well. You pick the wrong side and you lose out in the settlement. That's how it usually works out. Except for Arabs, that lose wars and still believe that to the loser goes the spoils.
Did ppl from Uganda offer it or some imperial master decided for them? While there are reasons that justify the need of a jewish homeland, the reasons you are trying to offer lead to nothing, actually I'd say they're counterproductive if you are really willing to examine the issue with fairness and not with a unilateral revised history. 1 - the palestinian community was protesting the wild illegal immigration (with also riots) that lead to the creation of areas where they were no more majority. 2- It is not true that all the areas that were assigned to the jewish state were populated by a jewish majority. And your reasoning is not correct. Actually in the land that was to be partitioned arabs (christians and muslims) were still a clear majority but they were given less than half of the land. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism Outside of Jerusalem, Safed, and Tiberias, Arabs and/or Muslims constituted the overwhelming majority of the population. The early Zionists were well aware of this, but believed that the inhabitants could only benefit from Jewish immigration. This attitude resulted in the Arab presence being ignored, as in Israel Zangwill's famous slogan "A land without a people, for a people without a land". Generally though, such statements were propaganda invented by leaders who did not foresee the subsequent conflict with the Arabs and thought of them as allies against the big empires whom they viewed as the main obstacle. Agreements with the Ottoman authorities, or with Arab rulers outside Palestine were their main concern and concerns of the local Arabs were overlooked. One of the earlier Zionists to warn against these ideas was Ahad Ha'am, who warned in his 1891 essay "Truth from Eretz Israel" that in Palestine "it is hard to find tillable land that is not already tilled", and moreover "From abroad we are accustomed to believing that the Arabs are all desert savages, like donkeys, who neither see nor understand what goes on around them. But this is a big mistake... The Arabs, and especially those in the cities, understand our deeds and our desires in Eretz Israel, but they keep quiet and pretend not to understand, since they do not see our present activities as a threat to their future... However, if the time comes when the life of our people in Eretz Israel develops to the point of encroaching upon the native population, they will not easily yield their place." Though there had already been Arab protests to the Ottoman authorities in the 1880s against land sales to foreign Jews, the most serious opposition began in the 1890s after the full scope of the Zionist enterprise became known. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Uprising In 1936, the Arab leadership in the British Mandate of Palestine, led by Haj Amin al-Husayni, declared a general strike to protest against, and put an end to Jewish immigration to Palestine. The strike rapidly deteriorated into a violent rebellion which lasted approximately three years. The revolt was driven primarily by Arab hostility to Britain's tolerance of restricted Jewish immigration and land purchases which Arabs argued was leading them to becoming a minority in what they considered their territory and future nation-state. They demanded immediate elections which, based on their demographic superiority, would have resulted in a government under their control. (...) The mainstream Jewish military organization, the Haganah (Hebrew for "defense"), actively supported British efforts to quell the largely peasant revolt insurgency, with the insurgent bands, at their peak during the summer and fall of 1938, reaching 10,000 Arab fighters. Although the British administration didn't officially recognize the Haganah, the British security forces cooperated with it by forming the Jewish Settlement Police, Jewish Auxiliary Forces and Special Night Squads. A smaller Haganah splinter group, the Irgun organization (also called by its Hebrew acronym Etzel), adopted a policy of retaliation and revenge (including against noncombatants). Their actions, which included setting off bombs in public places, killed hundreds of civilians. This frankly has zero validity from a laical and legal POV. History clearly shows that everyone was wrong. This is BS propaganda. Also many prominent zionists were accused of being friendly to nazism (of course, before nazis begun their crimes) and fascism. No surprise since they all were nationalist movements. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revisionist_Zionism The national-messianist movement, called Lehi and nicknamed the "Stern Gang" by the British, was led by Avraham "Yair" Stern. Lehi was founded by Stern in 1940 as an offshoot from Irgun, and was initially named Irgun Zvai Leumi be-Yisrael (National Military Organization in Israel or NMO). The group openly described itself as terrorist. (...) NMO—and, to a lesser extent, Lehi— were influenced by the romantic nationalism of Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi, Italian fascism, and the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. Its goal was to establish a corporatist and religious society. In 1940 and 1941, NMO proposed intervening in World War II on the side of Nazi Germany[1] to attain their help in expelling Britain from Mandate Palestine and to offer their assistance in "evacuating" the Jews of Europe arguing that "common interests could exist between the establishment of a new order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO." Late in 1940, the NMO representative Naftali Lubenchik was sent to Beirut where he met the German official Werner Otto von Hentig and delivered a letter from NMO offering to "actively take part in the war on Germany's side" in return for German support for "the establishment of the historic Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German Reich". Von Hentig forwarded the letter to the German embassy in Ankara, but there is no record of any official response. Lehi tried to establish contact with the Germans again in December 1941, also apparently without success. (...) Up to 1933, a number of leaders from the national-messianist wing of Revisionism were inspired by the fascist movement of Benito Mussolini. These leaders, such as Abba Achimeir, were attracted to fascism for its staunch anti-communism and its focus on rebuilding the glory of the past, which national-messianists such as Uri Zvi Greenberg felt had much connection to their view of what the Revisionist movement should be. And i'd say that given the outcome (nakbah) and a lot of zionist ideological work that theorized that a "cleansing" was needed, all the parts were involved in trying to cleanse the other. I still don't understand the need to forge history some israelis and proisraelis show too many times.
I don't know think the details regarding the conference have yet been arranged, but I assume that if the conference is able to attract serious scholars with varied viewpoints, the program might be aired on Iranian tv. In that case, there will probably be ways to watch the conference through the internet as well. Incidentally, IMO if the only viewpoints represented in the conference are from those who are regarded as "revisionists", I believe the conference will fail to serve a useful purpose. I like to see a free debate on the subject, without censorship on either side, between so-called "mainstream" and "revisionist" historians in a forum that favor neither. That should throw some light on the validity of some of the claims and disputes that exist regarding the holocaust.
Can I bring my Lugar and my swatiska. I wounder what the Germans would have done with Iranians if they had won the war slave labor?
Conceded. Change it with "some". The point is still valid. While I am at it I would like to post my opinion on the topic (my previous post was just the n. xxxx correction of the same old convenient pseudo-history - revisionism, the wildeyed zionist way). I cannot see other motives of that conference other than trying to piss off Israel a bit more. I understand that it could turn interesting if real top scholars were to participate but I don't think that was the real motive and I don't think many scholars will participate, because of safety reasons, because of political reasons. It's very likely most scholars will boycott it. Except revisionists, of course. And the conference will likely transform into a revisionist parade.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend The same exact motive why some arab had contacts with nazis. The sterne gang was fighting the Perfida Albione.
In a stunning development, the conference hosted by Iran has just come to a conclusion that Jews in fact murdered 6 million Germans.