Say what you will, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is no fool. His Holocaust Denial Festival in Iran may not impress the mainstream political establishment or any serious historian, but it demonstrates an understanding of the anti-Israeli and frankly antisemitic political culture that the rest of us are missing. By assembling a bunch of hacks - who nevertheless have populist appeal - and giving them the venue to speak without being discredited, Ahmadinejad is giving them credibility and standing.
This is because he knows that hating opposing Israel is the purest of virtues in certain circles, something that outweighs much else. The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, for example, devotes narry an editorial inch to this travesty but has written countless op-eds of mostly shoddy quality to condemning Israel. The news reporting concedes that the "conference" is "controversial," while reporting that "Iran's president" thinks Israel will go the way of the Soviet Union. And of course, the news that "several rabbis" are also attending the "conference," leaving readers with the idea that Holocaust revisionism is widespread also among Jews.
(Having said that, it is striking that none of the haredi dare issue a Pulsa diNura against the Neturei Karta for giving comfort to people who openly call for murder, though organizers of gay parades and Israeli prime ministers apparently are fair game for deadly curses.)
I don't know where all this is going, but it's not good. There's a new discourse emerging from all this, and it seeks to demonize Israel, the U.S., and all those that see an enemy in dogmatic fundamentalism and terrorism. It gives legitimacy to the sick Finkelsteinian notion that while the Shoah was a bad Iif exaggerated) thing, the evil Zionists are cynically using it as a pretext for colonialism and worse. The whole point is to sever any causal connection between antisemitism and the need for Israel, as if the 5 million Israeli Jews are simply misled or indoctrinated into their sense of patriotism.
It's incredibly offensive. Every time Finkelstein is presented, much is made of the fact that his parents survived Majdanek and Auschwitz, conveniently ignoring that there must be hundreds of thousands of descendants of survivors who vehemently disagree with Finkelstein's opinions. As Mona Levin pointed out in the aftermath of the Jostein Gaarder controversy, it is OK to be Jewish as long as you are an openly anti-Israeli Jew; otherwise you're a racist Zionist, one of "those."
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