Haaretz
Shvat 24, 5766
Iran
offered Wednesday to help finance a Palestinian Authority run by the Hamas
militant group, Iranian state radio reported.
The secretary of
Iran's Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, announced the
offer after a meeting with Khaled Mashaal, the political leader of the
Hamas, in Tehran, the radio said.
Larijani said the decision was
taken after the United States said it would not provide aid to an
authority governed by Hamas until the group renouced violence, recognized
Israel and agreed to abide by existing agreements between Israel and the
Palestinians.
"The United States proved that it would not support
democracy after it cut its aid to the Palestinian government after Hamas
won the elections. We will certainly help the Palestinians," Larijani
said, according to the radio.
Earlier on Wednesday, Acting Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert called Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad an
anti-Semite, a racist, and a hater of Israel, Army Radio
reported.
Speaking before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense
Committee, Olmert was quoted as saying:
"The president of Iran,
with all of his statements, is a heinous anti-Semitic phenomenon. He is an
Israel-hater, but there's no point in holding a competition of
inflammatory statements with him," Olmert said
Holocaust deniers
from East, West joining forces
Meanwhile, Holocaust-deniers from
the West play a key role in attempts by Iran to cast doubts on the
veracity of the Holocaust, according to documents that have appeared on an
Internet site.
The documents reveal Iranians have consulted with
well-known Holocaust-deniers from Western countries as part of the Iranian
initiative to hold a conference about the Holocaust.
The documents
were published on an Internet site involved in Holocaust denial and
reached scholars at the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of
Contemporary Anti-Semitism at Tel Aviv University.
On January 15,
the Iranian News Agency announced it was going to convene a "scientific
conference" on the Holocaust. A month before, French Holocaust-denier
Prof. Robert Faurisson received a request regarding the
conference
from Dr. Jawad Sharbaf, head of the Neda Institute of Political Sciences,
Tehran.
In the letter, which opens by expressing regret over the
United Nations
resolution to establish an international Holocaust Day,
Sharbaf writes that the recent statements by Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad about the Holocaust had created the right conditions to raise
the subject in Iran. "Our assumption for the time being is that the
president will undoubtedly do his best if you make contact and request
assistance for organizing an international conference," Sharbaf
wrote.
In his response, Faurisson wrote that the scientific
conference was
impractical, mainly because many of his colleagues are
"either in prison, in exile or in a precarious situation that forbids them
from crossing national borders."
Faurisson added that "in accord
with an idea put forth by Prof. Arthur Robert Butz [a Holocaust-denier
from Northwestern University in the U.S.], I shall say we hope to see
President Ahmadinejad create in Iran an international center for
revisionist studies."
Faurisson praised Ahmadinejad and added a
request "that Iran make repeated appeals to the Western world for the
freeing of our prisoners of conscience," referring to his colleagues
convicted of denying the Holocaust.
Faurisson, 76, is considered
the most prominent Holocaust-denier in Europe and is very much in demand
by the Iranian media. Last November he gave an interview to an
English-language Iranian newspaper, the Tehran Times, where he was quoted
as saying that the more the West believes in the Holocaust, the more
Muslims will be killed in Palestine, Iraq and
Afghanistan.
According to the head of the Roth Institute, Prof.
Dina Porat, in recent years solidarity between Holocaust-deniers and
extremist Muslims has increased.
"Since the law has begun to be
enforced regarding Holocaust-deniers, they
often speak of the 'common
fate of the persecuted,' which they feel they share with radical Muslims,"
Porat said.
Prof. David Menashri, head of Tel Aviv University's
Center for Iranian
Studies, said Holocaust-deniers had in recent years
begun to feel at home with the heads of the Iranian regime. Menashri said
this was especially true with regard to Roger Garoudi, who was invited to
Iran in 1998, shortly after he was convicted of denying the Holocaust by a
French court. Ahmadinejad represents the new generation of Iranians who
have been educated on the theory of Holocaust denial, Menashri
said.
Kenneth Jacobson, assistant national director of the
Anti-Defamation League, said adopting the theories of Holocaust denial of
Western scholars is a relatively new phenomenon in the Muslim world. The
accepted attitude had been to say that whereas it was true the Holocaust
had taken place, the Palestinians should not have to pay the price. A look
at Ahmadinejad's statements shows he has mixed the two approaches,
Jacobson added.