Iran Holocaust Denial--Rewriting history to suit their political ends

A musical letter sang to the Iranian regime regarding their Holocaust denial and revisionism activities, nuclear threats and propaganda, including their recent hostage videos of British sailors.  If you wish to make comments, visit YouTube.

How do your people, feel when you
Open your arms to the Klu Kluts Clan
Aligning your nation with, bigots

The name Iran means the Aryan people
Your former regime was proud of this
You and your psudo-academics, feel the same

Look at your actions for just one moment
Your morals, are baseless……

Stop bringing shame to your good people with
Irrational officials who rewrite
History as they see fit

Your revolution did not confer
‘ Holy’ authority nor legitimacy
To silence opposition and civil liberties

And revisionism obtains your political aims
Political aims……
(It’s a platform for your crusade)

No one is impressed by your propaganda
You run theocratic dictator state
But God does not take sides
In politics

There are no universal ‘rights’ to
Nuclear weapons, nor chemical bombs
With such risks, standard ethics do not apply

But if Iran have “rights”, as you insist
Shouldn’t you start by granting ‘rights’
To the women and critics, whom you repress

The West is not against you
You’re against them......
(Ya, so you can score political points)

I’m not taking sides in the Middle East conflict
It’s very complex
With competing facts, and different histories

Peace will stem from dialogue between
Opposing parties who stand their ground
While building trust and opposing lies

But your account of history is far from true
Far from true……
(Are all means justified by your ends?)

Rewriting history with propaganda
Abusing reason and human rights
Those who believe absurdities
Commit atrocities

As long as your critics……
Are threatened or imprisoned………
You have no legitimacy……

Propagating conspiracy theories
And disregard your dirty truths
You’ve locked yourself inside
An intellectual bunker

On the world stage
You act delinquent
You’ll be isolated till you mature
It’s time to grow up Iranian Regime

Your long-running holocaust denial campaign, which includes your recent cartoon contest and conference, signals Iran’s intention to align itself with the world’s leading bigots. Lets be crystal clear, this is not about free speech—it’s about propaganda designed to incite hatred and violence. If your nation supports ‘free speech’, then why do Iranians risk intimidation, imprisonment and at times, death, depending on the nature of what they’ve publicly expressed?

Crossing the line from free speech to premeditated violence is sometimes difficult to identify. Since border line cases are hard to judge, I’ll briefly describe some recent, and  worst, examples of words, hatred and violence. 

Starting in 1971 the Khmer Rouge led Cambodia’s revolution and systematically killed existing and suspected political opposition, ethnic minorities, religious groups and academics. At the time of the killings, the government used this slogan: “To spare you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss.” By the time the regime ended, around 2,000,000 persons had perished. A prominent military leader, operating in Bosnia-Herzegovina, from 1992-1995, once said “Serbs and Muslims are like cats and dogs. They cannot live together in peace. It is impossible.” No doubt, these aggressive words were directly related to ethnic cleansing and genocide against Muslims and other local groups. Around the same time, in 1994, Rwanda’s Tutsis were victims of the fastest genocide ever which saw up to 800,000 people killed in approximately 100 days. Weeks before the genocide started, this broadcast was spoken on public radio “You cockroaches must know you are made of flesh. We won't let you kill. We will kill you.” Currently in Darfur, a similar situation is underway.
   
These are recent examples of the world’s worst acts of mass violence; but before all these atrocities happened, populations were primed with conspiracy theories and propaganda. Now let’s look at your country, Iran, to see where you stand on this continuum between free speech, hate speech and direct calls to violence. Your recent holocaust denial cartoon contest and conference has unleashed a wave of emotionally appealing art and intellectually suited academic propaganda. At root, these persuasive materials paint Jews as manipulators who invented the Holocaust to justify Israel. Your propaganda builds on the false assumption that Israel exists because of the Holocaust, it blames the victims, and further, it reduces complex historical accounts into a simple conspiracy theory.

As an example of your link between violent words and deeds, in October 2006, the Argentinean state prosecutor called for the arrest of the former Iranian President and members of his cabinet for directly ordering and orchestrating the bombing of a Jewish community centre in Argentina which killed 85 people and wounded 150 others. In response, your officials replied with a bigoted cliché, blaming the charges on a US and Zionist plot. Then you tried to intimidate the Argentina government with diplomatic threats.  Baseless conspiracy theories about Zionist-American plots do not excuse your actions. If you’re innocent, then refute the charges with facts and evidence, not narrow-minded clichés.

This crime displays a connection between your Holocaust revisionism campaign, terrorist links and acts of violence. This Argentinean bombing is a unique case which is drawn up entirely on the basis of religious intolerance with no connection to the Arab/Israeli conflict. There are also numerous cases of direct threats to Israel by your current and former leaders. Instead of building understanding with the West, your officials heighten tensions. Instead of resolving the Arab/Israeli conflict, your policy makers inflame it.  

But let’s be clear, there are no historical facts, there is no truth about the past. There are only historical interpretations based on scholarly research and evidence. True historians aim for impartiality and try to understand the past without bias. Politically motivated actors, such as your regime and hate groups, selectively pick and choose evidence which justifies their political objectives, while disregarding opposing evidence.

Both Hitler and his propaganda minister, Gobbles discussed the value of telling big lies. Gobbles’s famous quote explains your regime’s tactics on many fronts; he said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” Consider a few of your nations lies: that Iran desires “peaceful” facilities to enrich uranium; that Iran is not supporting Iraqi insurgents; that Iran is not funding terrorist organizations; that Iranian officials did not orchestrate the AMIA bombing; that the abducted British sailors were in Iranian waters and that the Holocaust created Israel. To cope with the backlash, your state censors all media and imprisons opposition, keeping Iranians in an intellectual bunker where they are shielded from the truth of your nation’s absurd viewpoints and actions. Moreover, your deceptions have brought your people moral condemnation, political isolation, academic boycotts and incrementally worsening sanctions.

Your President, Ahmadinejad, argues that Western nations uses free speech to offend Islam while hypocritically suppressing free speech related to the Holocaust. He cited the Danish cartoons as proof. Understandably the Danish cartoons were offensive to many Muslims, just as similar images targeting other religious figures could have been equally offensive to Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Baha'is or followers of Shinto. 

However, your regime’s response to the Danish cartoons, with a Holocaust denial conference, is ridiculous for a number of reasons. First, if you really cared about free speech, you would grant it to your citizens. Second, since it is offensive to insult Islam (all other faiths equally), and your regime responded to the Danish cartoons by denigrating Judaism (through propagating historical revisionism and conspiracy theories), then you’ve adopted a spiritual double standard as official state policy.  Third, if you were really truly offended by the cartoons, then your regimes should have target the source of the offence, not Israel nor followers of Judaism who had nothing to do with it. To respond appropriately, you should have launched a campaign to rewrite Danish history. Fourth, since 1979, you nation has systematically disseminated anti-Israeli propaganda while frequently using anti-Semitism to mobilize hostilities against Israel. In reality, you’ve not responded to the free speech debate or the Danish cartoons at all—you’re just escalated your long-running hate campaign. Fifth, you forgot to mention that in Western nations, virtually all other religions face public criticism and ridicule.  For example, when the singer Madonna recently toured Europe, crucified to a disco-ball styled cross, this seriously offended many Christians, but nobody dreamed up a conspiracy theory about Western nations using “free speech” as a pretext to attack the Vatican.  Nor were the news companies that showed Madonna on her disco-cross deemed part of some Western conspiracy against Christianity.  So to say that the West used the cartoons against Islam without recognizing that all other religions are subjected to the exact same treatment, is an intentional distortion.  And finally, bigoted cartoons denigrating other religions have circulated throughout Iranian media for many years; therefore, if you believe the Danish media companies to be wrong, you have a moral duty to stop the flow of religious intolerance in your local media.  For all these reasons, it is obvious that your Holocaust denial campaign is not about free speech; rather, it’s your pretext for aggravating the Arab/Israeli conflict which you hope will increase your regional power assets and political positioning.

Although free speech is not really the issue, it’s still worth responding to your false accusation that Europeans hold a double standard; or in other words, that they defend free speech when it suits them, while hypocritically criminalizing Holocaust denial. Responding to this charge will also show how Iran uses the “free speech” debate as a pretext to disseminate bigoted conspiracy theories about “Zionist plots”. First, questing the past is not criminal; however, intentionally distorting historical accounts to damage the reputation of any individual or group is an act of slander, and a criminal offence in many nations. Numerous countries have laws and policies against the propagation of racist or xenophobic materials; and virtually all nations outlaw direct incitement of hatred and violence. But more importantly, is the legal concept of defamation, which is defined as a communication that makes a false claim, explicitly or implied to be factual, that can harm the reputation of an individual, business, product, group, government or nation. Under many legal systems, lies designed to damage individuals or groups are treated as criminal offences.  When groups like the KKK revise history, perhaps that’s free speech; but when they move to the next stage, and use their revisions to justify conspiracy theories that incite violence, then they’ve crossed the line into slander and incitement to violence.  Some legislative systems address these threats before they manifests, while others must wait till direct incitement to violence emerges, or acts of violence have already happened.

Second, European nations experienced World War II directly and are in a position to judge what constitutes an accurate account of the Holocaust, an inaccurate one, and an outright lie. On this point, it’s interesting to note that the Americans, British, Canadians, Germans, Polish and Russians who’ve all spoken against your Holocaust denial activities were there, during World War II, in the cities, on the battle fields, in the concentration camps.  Furthermore, only a small number of countries have laws that specifically address Holocaust denial; however, many of these countries where the perpetuators of the Holocaust, or were directly involved in it. For example, Germany opposes the rise of neo-Nazism by criminalizing Nazi symbols, books and attempts to whitewash their past atrocities. Criminalizing Holocaust denial is not about protecting Jewish interests (as your conspiracy theories profess); rather, it’s entirely focused on preventing the spread of Nazism.

Third, efforts to oppose Holocaust denial aim at stopping the spread of violent ideologies. Among the sixty million people who died in World War II, the Jewish genocide stands as the Nazi’s single worst war crime—for this reason, it is the most obvious target for historical revision. Because the Nazi’s lost World War II, their ideology has been blamed for the atrocities. Hitler is attributed with saying that “The winners write the history books” and politically motivated groups dedicated to white-washing the past will do whatever it takes to draft the history book as they see ideologically fit. Normally, they disregard the Holocaust while aiming to justify Nazism. So when a country like Germany arrests historical revisionists, such as Zundel, they’re fighting neo-Nazis. Of course, if you visit the websites of the KKK, white supremists and neo-Nazis—and also reflect on Iran’s recent alignment with these groups—they’ve taken the absurd position of trying to defend “free speech”.  This is absurd because each of these groups (your officials included) profess superiority over other people; but moreover, they all have a track record of using violence to silence their critics and opponents. The KKK and white supremists groups were founded on preventing African Americans civil rights and free speech; the Nazi’s attained power through imprisoning opposition; and Iranian can be imprisoned for just blogging.  Indeed, the debate is not whether or not Europeans have “free speech”; it’s about the point at which European legislative systems step-in to prevent the spread of Nazi-like ideologies and calls for xenophobic violence.

Furthermore, the fact that your nation has an obsession with placing Nazi symbols on images of your enemies is perplexing for a number of reasons. First, the name Iran was adopted in 1935—it means “Aryan” in Farsi and your former Shaw was proud of this. Second, though your country was technically neutral in World War II, your former government granted sanctuary to Nazi operatives, Gestapo agents and the Mufti of Jerusalem who was later implicated in the Nuremburg trials as a leading advocate for the final solution. Because Iran continually moved towards Nazi Germany, the Allied forces invaded your country in 1941. Third, Iran openly recruited volunteers to join the Mufti of Jerusalem’s Islamic Waffen SS divisions whom committed war atrocities for the Nazi’s in Bosnia. During the war you played both sides. Even though your current regime is different from your former one, you’re still accountable for your past. Considering your history, it looks absurd when your officials plaster swastikas on Jewish, American and Iraqi symbols.

The only reason you oppose Western influence in the Middle East is that your officials aspire to be worse meddlers. It’s absurd for you to complain about American interventions when Iran is intentionally destabilizing Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Iraq. No doubt foreign involvement in the regions has contributed to problems, but your regime only makes matters worse—if you wish to do good, try contributing to peace for a change.  The international community would like to see more carpets and fewer nuclear bombs.