 Iran on Tuesday defended its plan to organize a conference to examine what it terms the scientific evidence for the Holocaust. At the United Nations, the Israeli ambassador said the conference plans were proof that Iran was run by an "extreme, fundamentalist, lunatic regime."
| Has Gillerman been reading Rantburg? |
The planned conference, which has drawn condemnation from Western leaders, is yet another step in hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's public campaign to make an ass of himself against Israel. "For over half a century, those who seek to prove the Holocaust have used every podium to defend their position. Now they should listen to others," Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hamid Reza Asefi, was quoted as saying Tuesday by the official Islamic Republic News Agency.
| ... to include photography, motion pictures taken at the sites, captured records of the Nazi regime, eye witness testimony, and other such inconsequential data. |
Ahmadinejad already had called the Nazis' World War II slaughter of 6 million European Jews a "myth" and said the Jewish state should be "wiped off the map."
| That was when even the guys wearing intellectual blinders started to get the uncomfortable feeling — so far sternly suppressed — that he might be a nutbag. |
Dan Gillerman, Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, said the planned conference was "proof of what a global threat Iran really is."
| Yassss... A major nation straddling the Middle East and Central Asia, with lots of oil money to blow on foreign adventurism and a large pool of unemployed youth to mobilize, striving for nuclear weapons and ruled by men in really tight turbans. You might say that. |
"I fear that the only reason Iran is showing so much interest in the Holocaust is because they may be preparing another Holocaust and it is up to the world and the United Nations to prevent that from happening," Gillerman told The Associated Press on the sidelines of the opening of the "No Child's Play" exhibit at the U.N. commemorating Holocaust remembrance week.
| Right, Dan. The UN. Preventing something. Uhuh. That happens all the time. |
IRNA quoted Asefi as saying: that "blind prejudice together with political interests and aims have closed the eyes of the Holocaust defenders to the realities of the world, and they reject without any logic a scientific conference." Iran's Foreign Ministry, which was expected to sponsor the conference, has yet to fix a date or place. It was not clear who might attend. |