September 7, 2007 | 6:32 pm

Reasoning behind Iran’s Holocaust denial

Posted by Karmel Melamed

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Frequently I am approached by Americans and other folks who ask me why Iran’s government officials and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have decided to deny the Holocaust all of a sudden. Why the Holocaust? What does the Shoah have to do with Iran and the regime? From the Iran experts I’ve spoken to over the past year, the reasoning for the Iranian regime to even bring up the Shoah are vast and multi-layered.

Perhaps the best explanation for the Iranian government’s decision to attack the validity of the Holocaust was made by Yigal Carmon, president of the Washington, D.C., Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which translates anti-Semitic and anti-American media reports from various Arab and Islamic countries, including Iran. In many of his speeches Carmon explains that Iran’s Holocaust revisionism is based on their ultimate goal to delegitimize Israel’s existence. For the Iranian regime’s officials the Holocaust lends moral justification to the creation and continued existence of the State of Israel. Now if the Iranian government could only deny the Holocaust and prove it was a mere “Jewish fabrication”, then they could more easily justify to their desires to eliminate the Jewish state of Israel.

I actually did an article about the roots of Ahmadinejad’s anti-Semitism: http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/searchview.php?id=17335

Political scientists have long studied brutal dictatorships such as the one in Nazi Germany, where a group of people were vilified in the media before the masses to rally hate and gradually win support for he dictatorship’s desires to harass or eliminate a certain group. Such was the case in Nazi Germany, where Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals and other “undesirables” were portrayed in German propaganda films as “subhuman” or like vermin. This disgusting propaganda worked as many Nazi supporters, soldiers, and officers were convinced that the Jews and others needed to be eliminated after they were dehumanized through films.

Again today, the Iranian government is seeking to do the same thing the Nazi propaganda machine did in the 1930’s…to blame the Jews for supposedly “taking control of the world and being evil”. Through this hateful message they hope to make their sick case for eliminating Israel. Here’s a three-part “documentary” created by Iran’s state-run television called “Merchants of Myth” which tries to disprove the Holocaust with a series of lies and disgusting use of famous Holocaust revisionists. This film would make Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels quite proud, as the Iranian government is trying its best to cover up all Nazi atrocities:

“Merchants of Myth” is not only ridiculous in it’s denial of undisputed historical facts about the Holocaust, but it makes absurd claims that News Corp. C.E.O. Rupert Murdoch is Jewish! Nothing could be further from the truth…Murdoch is not Jewish and does not have any Jewish ancestry. Now some Iran experts will argue that the Holocaust denial statements made by the Iranian President and others in Iran are just a smoke screen to draw attention away from their nuclear weapons plan. This argument may indeed be valid, but we in the free world who respect life and the have tolerance for all mankind, should not turn a deaf ear to tyrants who speak of genocide. The world ignored Hitler when he called for the destruction of the Jews nearly 70 years ago and as a result millions of Jews perished. Today, we just cannot afford to take the same risk of ignoring the Iranian government’s calls for the destruction of the Jewish people living in Israel.

For all of those journalists, Iranian government sympathizers and folks who think Iran is such a great place for Jews to live in, I’d like to ask them how anyone would consider a country where the Holocaust is so blatantly and regularly denied, as friendly to Jews?