WEEK OF OUTRAGE

Iran’s much touted Holocaust conference opened Tuesday in Tehran with former Ku Klux Klan imperial wizard David Duke, hot off the “White World’s Future” conference this summer in Moscow, in attendance. He thanked “the distinguished scholars who are here at a conference that history shall one day deem as one of the most important of the 21st century.” Duke explained that his primary reason for being there is a commitment to freedom of speech, although he did refrain from expressing an empathy with those who are hanged in Iran for a similar commitment. Also attending the conference were Frenchmen Robert Faurisson and Georges Thiel, veritable poster boys for Holocaust denial, who claim that gas chambers were never used to kill Jews, and Australian Fredrick Toben, who claims that, at the very most, 2,007 people might have been killed at Auschwitz.

“Results of surveys so far show Holocaust is no more than a myth,” concluded Ali-Akbar Mohtashamipour, secretary general of the International Congress to Support Palestinian Intifada and former Iranian interior minister, in an interview with the Islamic Republic News Agency. In his speech to the conference, president Ahmadinejad said: “The Zionist regime will disappear soon, the same way the Soviet Union disappeared,” Thus, “humanity will achieve freedom.”

When one participant, Gholamreza Vatandoust, from Shiraz University, talked about the scholarship confirming the Holocaust, his views were quickly dismissed. For three days, seventy revisionist historians and white supremacists from thirty nations denied the atrocities of the concentration camps concentrating instead on such trivia as the existence of exhaust chimneys and the half-life of the poison Zyklon B.

While previous revisionist conferences have been held in seedy motels, largely ignored by the world's media, as would conferences of flat-earthers, the Tehran revisionists were the honored guests of the president and parliament of a sovereign nation.

Meanwhile, in the United States, former president Jimmy Carter has been on a tour promoting his new book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” On Tuesday night in Phoenix, Arizona, after a hastily arranged hour-long meeting with a group of rabbis, Carter declared: “We ended up holding hands and circled in prayer.” In a letter to The New York Times published on 15 December, however, Rabbi Darren Kleinberg representing the executive committee of the Board of Rabbis of Greater Phoenix, asserted that Mr Carter’s statement should not be construed “as representing any agreement or conciliation by us with Mr Carter’s position” and that “the opposite is true.”

Both Mr Carter’s use of the terms ‘apartheid’ and ‘colonisation’ to describe Israel’s policies, as well as his assertion that Israel is guilty of human rights abuses, have been very controversial. The furor comes a week after Kenneth W. Stein, an adviser to Mr Carter and former executive director of the Carter Presidential Library, resigned after calling the book “replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions and simply invented segments.”

But Mr. Carter is steadfastly defending the book, saying he believes there is a valid comparison between Israelis and the white South Africans who oppressed blacks. “It was obviously going to be somewhat provocative,” Mr. Carter said of the title. “I could have said ‘A New Path to Peace’ or something like that.” But Mr. Carter said he felt apartheid was the most pertinent word he could use, and in retrospect he would not change any of the book’s content.

And finally, on Wednesday in France, Jean-Marie Le Pen unveiled new election posters that seek the support of Arab and black voters and criticise what he characterises as the failed integration policies of the political establishment.

In one poster, a young black woman with a long mane of hair and a bare midriff makes a ‘thumbs down’ sign. The slogan reads: “Right/Left. They have broken everything!” Another poster shows the 78-year-old Mr. Le Pen walking with the young woman and a number of other people under the slogan, “With Le Pen. All Together, Let’s Lift Our France Back Up.”

Worse still and more troubling is his support: His latest poll rating, according to TNS Sofres, is 18% - higher than it was before the 2002 election.

What is the world coming to?