Positive Liberty

This is very nearly the height of hypocrisy:

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran said Sunday it would sponsor a conference to examine the scientific evidence supporting the Holocaust, an apparent next step in hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s campaign against Israel and a move likely to deepen Tehran’s international isolation.

Ahmadinejad already had called the Nazis’ World War II slaughter of 6 million European Jews a myth and said the Jewish state should be wiped off the map or moved to Germany or the United States.

Those remarks prompted a global outpouring of condemnation, and Tehran further raised international concern last week when it resumed what it called “research” at its uranium enrichment facility…

Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi did not disclose where or when the Holocaust conference would be held, nor would he say who would attend or what had prompted Tehran to sponsor it.

On Saturday, however, Ahmadinejad urged the West to be sufficiently open-minded to allow a free international debate on the Holocaust. Asefi adopted that theme.

Open-mindedness is the last refuge of the closed-minded: A regime that routinely censors its own citizens, that persecutes religious minorities, and that executes dissidents… now urges a free international debate. It goes without saying that under these conditions, no debate is truly free, and that the offer is bogus from the start. Even to accept it would cede far too much ground to the forces of intolerance, who do not deserve the cover of decency.

Right now would also probably be a good time to link to The Nizkor Project, which debunks a lot of the material likely to be presented at the upcoming “conference.” I strongly recommend educating yourself about the Holocaust, the evidence proving that it happened, and the individuals and organizations who have tried to deny it. Nizkor has a lot of material, and much of it is unpleasant to read, but the world is better off because this information is not suppressed.

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