Friday, February 23, 2007

Iranian Mullahs on Holocaust denial

According to an oped in today's New York Times The New York Times by Abbas Milani, the director of Iranian studies at Stanford and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution,Iranian officials, despite defying UN resolutions, have been sending another kind of message, a more conciliatory one.

After a meeting with the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader’s chief foreign policy adviser, Ali Akbar Velayati, declared last week that the mullahs might agree to certain steps to imporve relations with the west.

These steps include announcing that the Holocaust is a fact of history and chastising those who question its reality. Ali Larijani, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, also declared the Holocaust a “historical matter” to be discussed by scholars (and not, he implied, by ignorant politicians).

There seems to be general agreement that this is another chink in the armour of President Ahmadinejad.

From my perspective, it's fascinating and a bit chilling that the existence of the HOlocaust has become a factor in foreign policy and international relations.

Some may cheer this development and I guess it is a good thing. But the fact that acknowledging the existence of the HOlocaust should be a sign of moderation and outreach leaves me dumbfounded.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Could you please address my comments on your 2/21 post Another Question for Carter? I know you want to correct your error. And you support debating these issues, rather than ignoring contrary evidence.
Thanks,
Dave

Skye Frontier said...

Holocaust denial by State actors only provides further rhetorical ammunition to those neo-Leftists who assert that a Jewish state is racist by definition, and as such has no right to exist.

Don't be fooled by these putative "non-concessions". The Mullah regime is quite deft at using such ruses to deflect attention from their ultimate goal of mastering the nuclear cycle, which they will, no doubt, eventually achieve.