The Tehran Holocaust Conference

Qu'ran Sura 5, Aya 32:

مِنْ أَجْلِ ذَلِكَ كَتَبْنَا عَلَى بَنِي إِسْرَائِيلَ أَنَّهُ مَن قَتَلَ نَفْسًا بِغَيْرِ نَفْسٍ أَوْ فَسَادٍ فِي الأَرْضِ فَكَأَنَّمَا قَتَلَ النَّاسَ جَمِيعًا وَمَنْ أَحْيَاهَا فَكَأَنَّمَا أَحْيَا النَّاسَ جَمِيعًا وَلَقَدْ جَاءتْهُمْ رُسُلُنَا بِالبَيِّنَاتِ ثُمَّ إِنَّ كَثِيراً مِّنْهُم بَعْدَ ذَلِكَ فِي الأَرْضِ لَمُسْرِفُونَ

Pickthal's English rendition:

"For that cause We decreed for the Children of Israel that whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind. Our messengers came unto them of old with clear proofs (of Allah's Sovereignty), but afterwards lo! many of them became prodigals in the earth."

Hence there is no greater or lesser morality in the murder of more or fewer.

A point made by Rabbi Aharon Cohen of the Neturei Karta at the "Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision" held in Tehran:

"The figure of six million is regularly quoted. One may wish to dispute this actual figure, but the crime was just as dreadful whether the millions (and there were millions) of victims numbered six million, five million or four million. The method of murder is also irrelevant, whether it was by gas chamber (and there were eye witnesses to this), firing squads or whatever. The evil was the same. It would be a terrible affront to the memory of those who perished to belittle the guilt of the crime in any way."

History is littered with genocides; many of equal and even greater magnitude than the Nazi one; for instance, the two genocides perpetrated by the British government against Iran during the Twentieth century, which remain the subject of D notices.

To question the dogmas of the Nazi "Holocaust" is not to deny the German genocide; rather it is to ask pertinent questions. Why, for instance, is the religious terminology holocaust used for this genocide? Why has this particular genocide acquired a mythological status? What makes the genocide unique? Why the focus on Jewish victims to the exclusion of all others?

To not ask these questions is an affront to reason.

It is also pertinent to question why an extrapolated figure of six million has become such an unchallengeable dogma. It is logically absurd, to place such faith in a necessarily unreliable extrapolated figure. Where is the margin of error?

Yad Vashem, "The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority" in Israel can list only 3.2 million potential Jewish victims of Nazi genocide. Therefore it is impossible to say with any accuracy that six million died.

What of the path to genocide? Was it pre-planned or the corollary of Lebensraum? Did it begin with Kristallnacht?

And what of the role of Zionism in the Nazi genocide?

Another pregnant question is how and why this genocide came to be thought of as the rasion d'etre for the existence of the Jewish state? Certainly this was not so in 1948; only much later in the 1960s did the "Holocaust" came to dominate European and North American politics.

To address these questions is neither to diminish the suffering of the victims or to justify the perpotrators of this gencoide. The reaction of Western governments to the "Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision" conference in Tehran was evidence - if any was needed - of their rank hypocrisy, fanaticism and dogmaticism.