Help us raise $30,000 to purchase 1000 copies of the Muhammad Asad Translation and Commentary of The Quran to be donated to Western mosques and prisons. This work resolves many of the errors and oversights of the Saudi sponsored translations, one example being women's rights.
Open Letter on Iranian Holocaust Denial Conference
[This has been sent to me by an Iranian reader, with with a request that I post it.]
An open letter by a group of Iranian academics, writers, and artists regarding the Tehran Conference on Holocaust Denial
Over the past year or so a number of official and unofficial public statements have been made in Iran denying the genocide of Jews during the Second World War. The culmination of this trend was the widely publicized, so called "International Holocaust Conference", held in Tehran in December 2006. Given the serious moral and practical implications of this trend, we, a group of Iranian academics, intellectuals, writers and artists, find it imperative to take a public stance on this issue.
1- Today, several decades after the end of the Second World War, testimonies of the survivors and researches carried out by numerous historians have unequivocally confirmed the Jewish genocide during the World War. Besides the genocide of the Jewish people, historians have also spoken of the mass murders of the gypsies, the Slav people, potential and actual opponents of the Nazi regime, the disabled, prisoners of war, and even in the closing days of the war, the incapacitated German soldiers. These crimes were committed widely and in various ways, including through firing squads, starvation, long hours of forced labour in concentration camps, and massacres in the gas chambers of extermination camps. The extensive material evidence, the confessions made in the Nuremberg trials and other trials that took place after the war and the testimonies of the survivors establish the veracity of the accounts beyond any doubt. Moreover, the voluminous anti-Semitic and racist literature left from the Nazis shed light on the roots of this inhuman hysteria. The accuracy of the accounts has been acknowledged by many academic, political and religious authorities including the Catholic Church. They have all condemned these crimes. On the other hand, there have always been a few individuals who have denied the genocide of the Jewish people or questioned its significance, through casting doubt on the number of people murdered or the manner in which they were put to death. The majority of the speakers in the recent conference held in Tehran were from amongst those few. This conference did not meet the requirements of an academic forum. The speakers in such a forum should be chosen by specialists of the topic on which they are to speak (in this case, historians). In an academic forum both sides of an argument should be invited in order to engage in a discussion. Only in an open discussion involving all sides of a debate one can hope to see the presentation of substantiated claims. In the absence of such academic standards, in the conference held in Tehran, mere unsubstantiated claims were put forward, mainly for propaganda purposes. Moreover, the proponents of these claims were invited to the conference without paying any attention to their background which in some cases was outright racism. The presence and the appalling speech presented by a former Ku Klux Klan leader, a group infamous for its involvement in hate crimes against the African Americans, was a result of this recklessness.
2- In the history of mankind, there have been dark events that have treaded upon human values and broken basic moral principles in such a way that make them distinct from other comparable events. The scars left behind on the face of humanity by these events are irreversible and talking inconsiderately about them can only be described as rubbing salt into the wound and exacerbating the pain. This is in particular true of the crimes committed during the Second World War, some survivors of which are still among us. The sensitivity of the issue could be seen in the reaction shown by the people and the governments of the Eastern Asian countries against the stance of the current Japanese government in regard to senior military officers of the War. Those who perpetuate the discourse on Holocaust denial ignore the feelings of the people directly affected by this event. These people include, among others, a group of our Jewish fellow citizens in Iran.
3- One of the main claims put forward in this conference was that the Holocaust, as a historical event, has been used as a tool to justify the policies of the state of Israel. This claim was expressed in particular by a group of Jewish religious scholars who according to their reading of the Holy Scriptures opposed the existence of the state of Israel. Such claims are at best unhelpful to the cause of Palestine. The creation of the state of Israel on the lands of Palestine has its own history. No matter what political position we adopt regarding the creation of Israel and its further expansion, the historical evidence for the Holocaust remains intact. The fact that since the inception of the state of Israel many crimes have been committed against the Palestinian population does not provide moral ground for the denial or undermining of the genocide of the Jewish people. Acknowledging the Holocaust does not lead to the disavowal of the rights of the Palestinians, nor does its denial or undermining strengthens the case in their favour. The Palestinians, like all other nations, have a right to enjoy their livelihood in their own independent state. This right has nothing to do with the denial or acknowledgement of the Holocaust. Claims such as those that were uttered in the conference held in Tehran, can only work to the detriment of the rightful cause of the Palestinians and the efforts of the proponents of peace in Israel.
4- Forgotten amongst all the sensationalism in the Iranian media accompanying the conference, was the bitter reality that the undermining or denial of human suffering for the sake of making political points – whatever they might be – will inevitably lead to moral degeneration: a moral degeneration that makes any judgment on the wrongfulness of the murder of the innocent dependent upon its political reverberations; a moral degeneration where by questioning the number of the victims, it fails to realize that "whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind".
We, the signatories of this letter, are of the opinion that such "conferences", more than anything, harm the academic image of the Iranian universities. We believe that conferences like this do not help the cause of the Palestinian people and only provide pretexts for the warmongers in the region. We are of the opinion that holding a conference in Tehran in support of the denial of the Holocaust has perpetuated an immoral stance that seriously endangers the culture of peace and the peaceful cohabitation of human beings.
1. Babak Ahmadi, Writer and Translator (Iran) 2. Emad Baghi, Writer (Iran) 3. Kaveh Bayat, Historian (Iran) 4. Maziar Behrooz, History Department, SFSU (USA) 5. Mansour Bonakdarian, University of Toronto, Mississauga (Canada) 6. Rama Cont, Columbia University (USA) 7. Khashayar Dayhimy, Writer and Translator (Iran) 8. Kaveh Ehsani, University of Illinois at Chicago (USA) 9. Farideh Farhi, University of Hawai'i at Manoa (USA) 10. Laleh Ghadakpour, IRIP (Iran) 11. Arsalan Kahnemuyipour, Syracuse University (USA) 12. Ramin Karimian, Translator (Iran) 13. Arang Keshavarzian, Connecticut College (USA) 14. Azadeh Kian, University of Paris 8 (France) 15. Morteza Mardiha, Writer (Iran) 16. Ali Moazzami, Writer (Iran) 17. Mohammad R. Moeini, UMass Amherst (USA) 18. Mehran Mohajer, Photographer (Iran) 19. Hassan Mortazavi, Translator (Iran) 20. Mohammad Rezai-Rad, Translator (Iran) 21. Kian Tajbakhsh, Researcher and Sociologist 22. Mehran Tamaddon, Documentary Filmmaker (Iran) 23. Farzin Vahdat, Vassar College, NY State (USA)
Doublethink is an Orwellian term: is the act of holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously, fervently believing both, despite being notionally aware of their incompatibility – rather, being willfully unaware. Iran it.
Recently, Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council went to Munich to attend the Conference on Security Policy which Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora has boycotted simply because Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni was going to be at the conference.
This is very interesting! To free itself from the diplomatic impasse that it sees itself in, the Iranian regime which presents itself to be the most serious enemy of Israel and which accuses any voice-for-peace in the Middle East to be a sell out to the Americans, is going to a conference that is boycotted by the Lebanese whom Iran accuses of being a US and Israeli puppet, because of Israeli participation.
Which is, I suppose, intended to make you think I'm all the wiser, and should make you embarrassingly eager to read this post. In the , Shadid writes that while the Middle East is roiled by sectarian tensions, these tensions have specifically political origins (in other words, this isn't happening because "time stopped" in the Middle East around 680 and suddenly "resumed"):
Over centuries, differences in ritual, jurisprudence and theology evolved, some of them slight. But the Shiite community -- as a majority in Iraq and Bahrain and a sizable minority in Lebanon, and Kuwait -- is shaped far more today by the underprivileged status it has often endured in an Arab world that is predominantly Sunni. For decades, the Saudi government banned Shiite rituals; a Sunni minority rules a restive Shiite majority in Bahrain; Lebanese Shiites, long poor and disenfranchised, often faced chauvinism that still lingers.
One of the key problems here is, I think, the legacy of "Arab nationalism," a concoction that has been little short of a disaster for the peoples of the Arabic-speaking world. Because it attempted to create consensus, connections and commonalities, oftentimes political in nature, where historically few meaningful economic and political connections existed, it divided and suffocated the Arab world precisely when it most needed to develop. Hence Turkey and Iran, with "contained nationalisms", were able to develop far more swiftly and effectively, leaving the Arab world in the dust. Desert. You get my drift.
This idea that there is an Arab world has long been a popular one, but a strikingly ineffective one, perhaps encouraging us to see the Arab world as instead several distinct regions, each of them with strong Arabic-language influences. What was the Middle East was generally divided between wealthy, broadly Islamic, ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse governments -- even Safavid Iran, which lays the most claim to a proto-nationalist identity, is the result of Turkic dynasties from Azerbaijan establishing their rule in the Persian plateaus.
Historically, Turkey has looked to the Balkans and Anatolia as its power base; wealthy Egypt was important to the Ottomans, but it had no meaningful connections to the Persian Gulf (at least, not compared to its connections to Greece and the Balkans). Iran's sphere of influence was the Mesopotamian plains, the Persian Gulf and southern Transoxiana and Khurasan. Why lump Egypt in with Dubai? Dubai with Jordan? Because they speak the same language?
The solution is not going to be found in Sunni v. Shi'i "dialoguing" alone -- Sunni and Shi'i have different readings of Islamic history, and it is terribly unlikely we will forego our differences and blend into one Islamic mass. But this does not mean Sunni and Shi'i are doomed to slaughter one another, just because they read history and texts differently: The solution is in effective security for Iraq, with the partnership of neighboring countries, who are far more concerned with their stability than with presumed theological correctness. (Since when has Saudi Arabia, staunch ally of the West, been concerned with upholding pan-Sunni Islamism?).
The solution is democratization, the only process that can handle tensions in the region that are not sectarian, but the product of political strategies of oppression, marginalization and fear. And in that process of democratization, leadership has to bend to the realities of the region: Just as there was never a real Turkey, and hence the problems with the Kurds, there were never small "Arab" states, with an exclusively "Arab orientation," such that would encourage and promote homogenization, dictatorship and demagoguery.
Kamal Nazer Yasin, a journalist at , provides a factually helpful if theoretically simplistic of the current tensions in the Middle East between Sunni and Shi'i factions, governments and potential alliances.
Yasin points out how dominantly Shi'i Iran is alarmed by sectarian tensions, highlighting efforts to soften the divide. This point-of-view is quite helpful in that we often hear of Sunni fears of a "Shi'a crescent", but we rarely read about Iran's government's opinions:
To reduce the chances of a broad anti-Iranian coalition ... Tehran has made a variety of goodwill gestures aimed at improving Iran’s image among Sunnis. Iranian leaders have allocated funds for the construction of Sunni mosques and curtailed anti-Sunni propaganda.
On January 14, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei threw his support behind the new course. Ostensibly responding to the Bush administration’s toughened stance toward Iran, he characterized those urging Shi’a-Sunni strife as "neither Shi’a nor Sunni." He further said there was a need for greater unity in the Islamic world to discourage some Muslim countries from embracing the United States and Britain.
Within days of Ayatollah Khamenei’s comments, the Iranian press and Friday Prayer leaders picked up on the theme of Shi’a-Sunni unity in radically new fashion. For example, Baztab, an influential conservative-dominated website, published an unprecedented article January 25, cataloguing the wrongs that Sunnis have suffered in Iraq.
Later, Iran’s Press Oversight Committee announced that the hardliner-dominated paper Siasat-e Rooz, published by former commanders of the Revolutionary Guards, had been closed indefinitely for publishing an article that mocked Islam’s second caliph, Omar ibn Khattab, who has been traditionally reviled by Shi’as.
(I wonder, where does President Ahmedinejad stand in all of this?) Mr Yasin also points out Sunni concerns about Iran as counterpoint, though I find this portion of his article to be somewhat an after-thought, without a clear discussion of political implications and revelations:
Some believe that anti-Iranian sentiment among many segments of the Sunni community is so deeply entrenched that opening a dialogue would seem impossible at this time. They point out that Iran’s conciliatory rhetoric is contradicted by an aggressive Iranian-backed campaign to win Sunni converts to Shi’sm in Muslim nations, including Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Syria.
Officially, the Islamic Republic has always discouraged anti-Sunni rhetoric and has endorsed the concept of Shi’a-Sunni unity. Nevertheless, anxiety and wariness towards everything Sunni has continued to pervade Iran’s religious and political life at all levels. Evidence of prejudice is found in the fact that, over 27 years after the Islamic revolution in Iran, there are no Sunni mosques allowed to operate in Tehran. Likewise, no Iranian of Sunni persuasion has ever risen to a high official position in the Islamic Republic, even though Sunnis constitute roughly 9 percent of the population.
I can't speak to the charge of "seeking converts" in Middle Eastern countries, though I know it's something King Abdullah (the Saudi variety) picked up on recently, insisting that the majority of Sunnis would not leave the "fold."
More immediately, the other Sunni grievances don't seem like "real" factors in the current tensions. I continue to believe that the tensions are political and economic in nature, albeit they are increasingly given a sectarian mask in order for both sides to gain leverage or for outside forces, aiming to create regional instability, to accomplish their objectives.
Why, after all, are Sunni governments so concerned Iran doesn't give equal rights to Sunni Islam? It's not like we're talking about democratic states; Saudi Arabia and Iran are already facing-off across an ideological divide created to represent a struggle for control of the Muslim world and the (Persian) (Arabian) Gulf. Saudi Arabia was most threatened by Iran in the early 1980's, as Saudi Arabia saw in radical Khomeinism a great threat to a certain dominance that had in fact only gone unquestioned for 10 years, or so. I'm talking about Nasser, of course, and the Egypt v. Saudi divide that became a Modernizing, Republican v. Traditional, Monarchical divide. If we pay closer attention, we'd see...
Yeah I concluded that the Left covers Iran far better than the Right ever can, but recently I've been reading what I think is the best and most well researched coverage of the Iran War Buildup.
. Man, the things you can do with a think-tank.
Check it out. You might learn that "Iranians United With U.S. On Terrorism, Bin Laden, But Oppose Permanent Bases." Among other things.
The group’s political tactics have not been and are not complex. In fact, this group is essentially incapable of designing elaborate plans. In the field of foreign policy, it decided to create controversies whenever it could, so that the price of oil would go up and more money could be spent on the poor – to purchase popularity, so to speak. The tactic seems plausible on the surface. And it worked for a year. Mr. President talked of the need to remove Israel from the face of the planet, and there was a huge uproar. He denied the Holocaust, and more controversies emerged. Both times the price of oil went up and reached a peak. But this group did not know that the opposite side would use expertise and computer rooms to come up with a counterattack very soon. And the counterattack came all right: nowadays, no matter what Ahmadinejad says or does, there are no major controversies; the price of oil stays the same, and has even gone done.
The group’s whole plan, which seems “complex” to itself, can be summarized in one line: provoking the international community into making threats and using those threats as an excuse to create an abnormal and emergency situation, in which publications, labor unions, the student movement and non-governmental organizations can be suppressed.
What was it that enabled the American neo-cons to implement their lifelong dream of bringing 200-300,000 troops to the oil wells of the Middle East? The answer is clear: Bin Laden. The presence of “Bin Ladens” is essential for quenching the thirst of neo-cons for energy resources. The radicals on both sides live parasitically off one another.
Saudi Arabia has helped in lowering the price of oil. I was watching a financial show on commodities trading and all three of the oil traders were confused because in 45 years of combined experience, they had never before encountered Saudi Arabia unequivocally stating that it wanted the prices of oil lower.
Sean Paul what I thought of Friedman's Times Select article on why attacking Iran makes no sense. (You can read excerpts of Friedman's article if you click over).
Basically, Friedman sets up an imaginary hypothetical in which Iran ends up looking far more positive than Saudi Arabia, and then he wonders why we wouldn't attack Saudi Arabia first. I said the same thing in passing a couple of days ago:
(Is invasion acceptable in any circumstance? Methinks unless Iran launches an invasion or uses nukes, no). This whole arms supplying soft-power argument doesn't do it for me. Why? Because Saudi has been doing that for ceaseless years in the ME, and we never contemplated going after them.
Willow, or maybe someone else on our site, made the same point Friedman made a while back, namely: that if you compared Iran to all the Arab nations surrounding it, it actually looked like an enlightened place. Since I can't find that post, I'll wait for Willow to link to it. It isn't just the Arab countries. Iran is way ahead of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and I believe, even India, in literacy for women.
The Agonist has about what the Bush Administration is going to have to demonstrate before we accept an Iranian invasion
(Is invasion acceptable in any circumstance? Methinks unless Iran launches an invasion or uses nukes, no). This whole arms supplying soft-power argument doesn't do it for me. Why? Because Saudi has been doing that for ceaseless years in the ME, and we never contemplated going after them.
Anyway, point is, Sean Paul is "underwhelmed" by the evidence that has been offered so far. Check out the discussion.
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