Iran using Holocaust conference in power play
Since Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad triggered international outrage more than a year ago by calling for Israel - a fellow member of the United Nations - to be 'wiped off the map', the method in his rabid anti-semitism has become more apparent. Within months he expressed doubt that the Nazis murdered 6 million Jewish people, which soon hardened into denial of the Holocaust, seen as a myth concocted to help justify the founding of the Jewish nation of Israel on Muslim lands.
This week Iran has hosted a conference on the Holocaust that has provided a rare platform for deniers from nations afar. That includes champions of free speech, such as Germany, France and Austria, who have made Holocaust denial illegal, and others where deniers have been muzzled by popular revulsion.
Far from being worried about condemnation of his conference, Mr Ahmadinejad has relished the chance to point to what he sees as double standards. And he has not missed the apparent hypocrisy in the free-speech defence of cartoons lampooning the Prophet Mohammed published in Europe last year that caused deep offence in the Muslim world.
But that is a sideshow. The Iranian leader is not playing to a western audience. His high profile on the issue of Israel, the Jewish people and the homeless Palestinians and his defiance of the United States over his nuclear programme is aimed at the Muslim rank-and-file throughout the Middle East. This being an audience already warmed up for him by anger at the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq by Israel's superpower ally. It has played well in the streets and given him pan-Arab recognition that is the envy of other regional leaders.
Middle East observers fear the strategy behind the denial of Israel's right to exist is more about spreading Iran's influence than about the Palestinian cause. If it succeeds, Iran would be poised to exploit a post-Iraq regional power vacuum.
The same man who has promoted Holocaust denial to advance what he sees as a just cause expects the world to take him at his word when he says Iran's pursuit of advanced nuclear capabilities is for peaceful purposes only. Ironically, western nations presented him with an opening on Israel by outlawing Holocaust denial. Some of those laws raise serious free-speech concerns, but they were passed because denial of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis has been promoted by racist groups and can easily be used as a form of anti-semitism.
Mr Ahmadinejad himself faces a moment of truth today when Iranians go to the polls to elect city councils. Reformist candidates hope it will be a referendum on his failure to keep the promises on which he was elected to tackle chronic poverty, unemployment and corruption. These are issues he should be focusing on, rather than devoting time to a distasteful conference on Holocaust denial.
