So what happens on Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) when the guardian.co.uk reports that Ahmedinijad engaged in Holocaust denial in a speech delivered during Quds Day events?

Well you have abbas123 who engages in outright Holocaust denial (hat tip AKUS):

19 Sep 09, 9:05pm

If what German forces did to Jews is Holocaust then what do you say about American bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

We are not sure about the Holocaust since there are many evidences that say Holocaust didn’t took place. [emphasis added]

Even if we assume Holocaust took place it does not justify the Israeli’s illegal occupation of Palestine.

Dr. Ahmadinejad is correct to call Israel as Racist because these people have built an apartheid wall which is causing the Palestinians reduced freedoms, road closures, loss of land, increased difficulty in accessing medical services, restricted access to water sources, and economic effects. The UN General Assembly asked the International Court of Justice to evaluate the legal status of Israels separation wall. In July 2004, the Court declared the illegality of the wall. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other Human rights groups have protested both the routing of the wall and the means by which the land to build the wall was obtained. In a 2004 report Amnesty International wrote that “The fence/wall, in its present configuration, violates Israels obligations under international humanitarian law.”The Red Cross has declared the barrier in violation of the Geneva Convention. On February 18, 2004, The International Committee of the Red Cross stated that the Israeli barrier “causes serious humanitarian and legal problems” and goes “far beyond what is permissible for an occupying power”. People wake up and stop these Racist Governments (America and Israel).

Although abbas123′s comment is now deleted, according to AKUS, it took between 3-5 hours for the moderators to delete this while comments which do not accord with the Guardian World View are deleted in minutes.

And then there is this from Chapaev, that is now deleted:

19 Sep 09, 6:36pm

Ahmadinejad is accused of being a denier of fascist crimes even there is no evidence that he has indeed done so. He did not say that the fascists did not build concentration camps where millions of people were murdered. Nor did he seek to rehabilitate the fascists by demonizing the allies, as many Anglo-American and eastern European revisionist liars do when they equate Russia to Hitler.

The real holocaust deniers are those hateful zionists who deny the fact that massacres, ethnic cleansing, expulsions against the Palestinians have taken place. In particular, they deny the fact that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled by the marauding Zionists in 1948, but instead blame the victims, whom they accuse of voluntarily leaving. Zionist extremists go as far as to deny the fact that even a Palestinian people

From the school of Ben White (remember his 2006 article that flirted with Holocaust denial), we have this undeleted comment from quadibloc:

18 Sep 09, 5:36pm

The term “myth” can have many meanings, so it’s possible Ahmadinejad is actually choosing his words with more care, and he is merely claiming that the West invests the Holocaust with too much meaning. Just because it actually happened would not make it an excuse for the conquest of lands belonging to Muslims. I think that’s a misreading of history, but the issue is complicated; and I still think regime change is the best option for Iran, but I realize the U.S. has quite a bit on its plate right now.

As well as this undeleted one from guysheard:

19 Sep 09, 9:20am

This strikes me as poor reporting. In America there are many national myths (The Alamo, Little Big Horn, 9/11). To call something a myth is not to say that it didn’t happen. It is to say that it is used as a rallying point to focus feelings of nationalism, partriotism, tribalism etc.

When Ahmedinejad describes the holocaust as a myth he may be trying to say many things. It is difficult to say precisely what as the translation into English may have distorted the meaning. The irony is that Ahmedinejad uses the holocaust to try to build an iranian nationalism and is himself myth building.

I don’t see any reference here from Ahmedinejad saying that millions of jews did not die in the Holocaust. It appears that he is saying that the event of the holocaust was used to justify the establishment of the state of Israel by the west on the basis that jews were not safe in a non-jewish state. It is this claim that is inaccurate by ahmendinejad.

The vast majority of jewish immigration into the land of the british mandate of Palestine occured between the first and second world wars. It was these jewish settlers who established themselves by buying land from arabs and creating socialist agricultural communes. There were factors such as the jewish force of numbers which made indigenous arabs feel less comfortable and therefore prepared to sell land around growing jewish settlements to new jewish settlers (in the same way that cultural ghettos have developed in Britain). There was also racially motivated violence between both jews and arabs which carved out small areas of race defined pockets in palestine. It was the jews of this period of immigration who fought a bloody civil war against the arabs and won large areas of territory. They declared a state of israel. The Holocaust itself would not have changed this reality, therefore Ahmedinejad’s analysis is wide of the mark.

Read ‘One Palestine, Complete’ for a good understanding of Palestine’s pre-Holocaust jewish history

And then we have the MEMRI mistranslation meme from Fozzie (also undeleted):

18 Sep 09, 5:13pm

I have no doubt that the Holocaust happened and do not question the figure of 6 million.

The only thing I would say is that Ahmadinejad has been deliberately mistranslated in the past by Zionist outfits (e.g. MEMRI) purporting to offer “objective” translations of Farsi for the Western media. On subjects as sensitive as the Holocaust, it would be easy for them to cynically distort what he actually says and create the wrong impression. So, I urge caution when reading the above.

An example of mistranslation was Ahmadinejad’s alleged statement about “wiping Israel off the map”. He said no such thing. His actual words were “remove the Israeli REGIME from the pages of time.” Just as the Soviet regime was removed from history.

By the way, did anyone ever bother to count –or commemorate–the number of Slavs, socialists, communists, trades unionists, travellers and gays killed by the Nazis? At least 20 million Russians alone died in the fight against Nazism–dwarfing the numbers killed by the Holocaust.

Never mind that according to the BBC (hardly a Zionist outfit!) Ahmedinijad is quoted as saying at the Quds Day events that the Holocaust was “a lie based on an unprovable and mythical claim”. Seems pretty unequivocal to me especially given Ahmdedinijad’s previous outbursts denying the Holocaust, his organization of a Holocaust denial conference and an officially sanctioned Holocaust denying cartoon competition.

At least there is one commenter with some sense. According to Discussant:

Ahmadinejad is a jew-baiter of the highest order, so naturally many Guardian commentators rush to defend his every utterance. He says the holocaust is a myth, they rush to say he meant it is over-sacralized. He says the Holocaust is a lie, they rush to say he meant it was a myth that has been over-sacralized to justify the oppression of the Palestinians.
Ahmadinajad calls for the destruction of Israel, and Guardian commentators rush to assure us that he only means “the regime.” Never mind that his speeches are delivered to crowds chanting “Death to Israel.” Orwell could not have designed a better 2 minutes of hate than that which is the normal day to day fare for the Iranian regime. Airstrip One had its Goldstien and the Islamic Republic (and the Guardian) have Israel.
Some commentators are gracious enough to acknowledge the slaughter of the Jews, but note that Russians, Poles, and other peoples also died in WWII. Never mind that no other people lost 90% of its numbers. Never mind that the goal of the Nazis was to kill every single Jew they could get their hands on.
Some commentators note the timing of this news, 2 days after the UN report about Gaza. Ah yes, the ever present hand of the Jew is evident in controlling even Ahmadinejad’s utterances, and the scheduling of Iran’s Quds day.

But this still begs the question, what is it that attracts this kind of discourse to the pages of what is supposed to be a respectable mainstream news media site?


Advertisement