According to Iran's state news agency, there was a "sensational scene" awaiting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when he came home from a United Nations anti-racism conference in Geneva this week.
Mr. Ahmadinejad told the conference that Israel is a "cruel and racist regime" founded on the "pretext" of Jewish suffering. Zionist supporters, he said, exercise "their domination to the extent that nothing can be done against their will." His original text was worse: He said Western countries "resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless on the pretext of Jewish sufferings and the ambiguous and dubious question of Holocaust." Twenty-three European Union delegates walked out.
But, in Tehran, people "from all walks of life" gathered at the airport and "warmly welcomed their political leader." Propaganda? No doubt. But whether or not he was really cheered by his countrymen, Mr. Ahmadinejad has plenty of support for his views about Israel, not just in Iran but throughout the Islamic world.
The idea that the Holocaust was an exaggeration or an invention exploited by the Jews and their Western backers to create an alien Jewish state on Arab soil is commonplace to the point of banality on the Islamic street. Far from being a heroic struggle to create a homeland for the remnants of a brutalized people, the founding of Israel was a conspiracy to do the Arabs dirt. Everyone from cab drivers to intellectuals swear it is so. Their leaders encourage the delusion.
From the archives
Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, a hero to the Arab world, once said no one "takes seriously the lie of the six million Jews who were killed." Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, a "moderate" who parlays with leaders of the democratic West, is the author of a 1983 book that questions the six-million death toll and claims there were secret ties between the Nazis and the Zionist movement. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad repeated an ancient libel when he said Jews were Christ killers "who try to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality with which they betrayed Jesus Christ."
Educators, authors, newspaper columnists and government figures routinely rant about how Jews control the Western media and international finance. The founding charter of Hamas, the militant group that rules the Gaza Strip, cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a poisonous anti-Semitic forgery, to support its claim that Zionists aspire to rule the Middle East from the Nile to the Euphrates.
So Mr. Ahmadinejad is only the latest in an inglorious line. Shortly after taking office in 2005, he said the Israelis "have created a myth today that they call the massacre of Jews and they consider it a principle above God, religions and the prophets." In 2006, he invited Holocaust deniers to Tehran for an "academic" conference. The same year, he told German Chancellor Angela Merkel that the Holocaust might have been invented by the victorious Second World War Allies to embarrass Germany.
It is tempting to shrug this off as the raving of a loon - Mahmoud I'm-a-nut-job, as Jay Leno calls him. The French students who tossed red clown noses at Mr. Ahmadinejad in Geneva caught the right tone of ridicule. But when the loon has called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" and his country has nuclear ambitions, his drivel takes on a more sinister cast.
Montreal MP Irwin Cotler says Mr. Ahmadinejad represents a new kind of anti-Semitism that, masking itself under the banner of human rights and anti-racism, attacks Jews collectively. It's more than just ignorance and prejudice that motivates people like him to question indisputable historical facts. Their intent is to delegitimize the state of Israel in the same way the Nazis sought to dehumanize the Jewish people. In the past, anti-Semites sought to make the world Judenrein (free of Jews). Now, said former Swedish politician Per Ahlmark at a recent conference that Mr. Cotler cites, the most dangerous anti-Semites seek to make it Judenstaatrein (free of a Jewish state).
That puts a different complexion on the quest for Middle East peace. Israel's critics have always said that its rule over the occupied territories was the source of much of the fury and violence directed against it and that a peace deal leading to the rise of an independent Palestinian state would draw the sting from that outrage. There's no doubt that such a deal is in everyone's interest.
But the casual acceptance Mr. Ahmadinejad finds for his vile theories suggests that a deeper source of this decades-long impasse lies in an ideology that demonizes Israelis as sinister interlopers in the Arab and Islamic homeland - much as Jews were demonized in Christendom. Until the Islamic world rejects that ideology, the hopes for real peace are faint.
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