Tehran, Iran – Iran has made some powerful enemies since its 1979 Islamic revolution, and hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government appeared Sunday determined to continue the tradition.
He has ordered the resumption of a process that could be used to make nuclear weapons, shrugging off threatened U.N. sanctions that could cripple his economy.
And now his Foreign Ministry says it will organize a conference to study the “scientific aspect” of the Holocaust.
Ahmadinejad already had declared the Nazis’ World War II slaughter of European Jews a “myth,” capping a series of statements that began with a call late last year for Israel to be wiped off the map.
Those remarks prompted a global outpouring of condemnation, and it wasn’t clear who would be willing to attend an Iranian-sponsored Holocaust conference.
Late last year, however, the leader of Egypt’s main Islamic opposition group joined Ahmadinejad in characterizing the Holocaust as a myth and lambasted Western governments for criticizing those who dispute that the Jewish genocide happened.
“Western democracies have slammed all those who don’t see eye to eye with the Zionists regarding the myth of the Holocaust,” Muslim Brotherhood chief Mohammed Mahdi Akef wrote on the group’s website.
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 Teh ran to sponsor it.
On Saturday, however, Ahmadinejad urged the West to be sufficiently open-minded to allow a free international debate on the Holocaust.
“It is a strange world. It is possible to discuss everything except the Holocaust,” Asefi told reporters.
The move came after Tehran raised international concern last week about its nuclear program when it resumed what it called “research” at its uranium-enrichment facility.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. organization that monitors nuclear proliferation, said Iran was resuming small-scale nuclear enrichment, a process that can produce fuel for atomic bombs.
That, in turn, prompted Washington and its allies to renew their push to take Iran before the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions.
