WTF?

I wasn’t going to write about this today…I like the happy date-a-versary thing, and why be a downer and take away from the fun? But this story I read in the paper is needling me, threatening to drive me nuts if I don’t write something about it, to get it on ‘paper’ and out of my head.

Iran is holding a two day conference to determine whether the Holocaust indeed happened. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust a ‘myth’, and Israel a ‘tumor’. Clearly, the goal here is to show that he is a President who can stand up to the West, as well as to support claims that Israel has no right to exist.

I do understand the history here…that Israel was created as a nation in response to the Holocaust, and so therefore, the argument goes, if the Holocaust didn’t happen, Israel has no right to be there, and Iran and other extreme fundamentalist countries have every right to wipe them off of the face of the Earth. It is sick, misguided, and dangerous logic, that any thinking, feeling person should find repugnant. To read the attendees of this conference is to read a who’s who of bigotry and hatred. David Duke, one time leader of America’s pride and joy, the KKK, for example, is attending. From such people, you get arguments such as these:

But French writer Georges Thiel, who has been convicted in France for spreading revisionist theories about the mass extermination of Jews, said the Holocaust was “an enormous lie.”

“Jewish people have been persecuted, that is true, they have been deported, that is true, but there was no machinery of murder in any camp — no gas chambers,” he said in Tehran.

Participants included about half a dozen Jews from Europe and the United States clad in long black coats and black hats, some wearing badges depicting the Israeli flag crossed out. One wore a badge saying: “A Jew, not a Zionist.”

“We came here to put the Orthodox Jewish viewpoint,” said British Rabbi Ahron Cohen. “We certainly say there was a Holocaust … But in no way can it be used as a justification for perpetrating unjust acts against the Palestinians.”

Now I know Palestinians, or at least I did when I was in college, and this is a very sticky situation, brought on by colonialism and complicated power structures in Europe. Whether Israel should have been created is a very sticky subject, and certainly both Israel and Palestine have behaved in horrible, unjustifiable ways in their war against each other. I heard a short interview on the radio the other day with Jimmy Carter, who has a new book out, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which discusses much of the history of modern attempts at peace in this region. He is more hopeful, I believe, than most people, that anything good can come of this situation.

I’m not sure exactly what I am trying to say here…and certainly Iran has plenty of intellectuals and non-fundamentalists who are horrified by this conference. I, for one, was shocked that such a thing could happen in this modern age. I am not sure why, in days where atrocities like that in Darfur and Rwanda are mostly ignored, I should be shocked by people willing to ignore, nay, DENY the murder and torture of millions of people. But somehow, I still am.