Talk about a cast of creepy characters! They're all gathered in Tehran for a Holocaust Denier's Tea Party in the guise of an academic forum on the WWII atrocity. The Guardian reports that the attendees are a diverse and strange, sometimes sinister, bunch:
"An international cast of established Holocaust deniers and implacable foes of Israel were given an open forum by Iran yesterday to support Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's contention that the murder of six million Jews by the Nazis was a "myth".
"But pretensions to scholastic objectivity were undermined by the background of some among the 67 foreign visitors from 30 countries, including Britain. They included David Duke, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan; Robert Faurisson, a French lecturer stripped of his academic tenure for his anti-Holocaust opinions; and Michele Renouf, a London-based associate of the British author David Irving. Irving is currently serving a jail sentence for Holocaust denial in Austria.
"A group of radical anti-Zionist rabbis, Jews United Against Israel, who oppose a Jewish state on religious grounds, were given a prominent role. Among them was Rabbi Ahron Cohen, a retired former lecturer at the Jewish religious college in Hitchin, Hertfordshire. Rabbi Cohen acknowledged that the Holocaust had happened but said he saw nothing anti-semitic in Mr Ahmadinejad's comments.
"Few visitors were apologetic. Mr Duke praised the event as an exercise in free speech. "It's a shame that Iran, a country we often call oppressive, has to give this opportunity for free speech," he said. "I think Israel is a terrorist state. It is the number one terrorist state in the world."
"Ms Renouf said "terrible things" had happened to the Jews during the second world war but claimed their own leaders had brought it upon them. "If people become anti-semitic, it's because they believe the leaders of the Jews and are reacting to the anti-gentile nature of Judaism," she said.
"Moshe Ayre Friedman, an Austrian rabbi, argued that the figure of six million Jewish dead had come from a prophecy by Theodore Herzl, founder of modern Zionism, long before the second world war. He said recent research suggested the true figure was about one million. "Politically and historically, the land of Palestine doesn't belong to the Jews and should be returned to Palestinians," he said.
"But Moris Motamed, Iran's sole Jewish MP, labelled the gathering a "huge insult".
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