Iran's Lectures on Tolerance

Iran’s Lectures on Tolerance
By Frida Ghitis

The new government of Iran has launched a campaign for more tolerance, open-mindedness and freedom of speech in the West. Yes, Tehran now argues that, "The Europeans should get used to hearing other opinions, even if they don't like them.” How refreshing.
Fortunately, those close-minded Europeans will have none of it.
The call for more tolerance for differing views in Europe and the United States came from Iran’s foreign ministry following the furious response from the West to claims by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the Holocaust – Nazi Germany’s slaughter of six million Jews -- was a “myth.”

The Europeans called Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denials “Wholly unacceptable,” and the US declared them “Outrageous.” Iran thinks they overreacted and says its time for an “academic debate.”
Some may still wonder why the West does not want to engage in a debate about history. What are we afraid of? The answer is that we have played this game before.
Europeans heard this kind of rhetorical Jujitsu many times before; an attempt to use the West’s own values against it.
As always, the calls for open-mindedness on the Holocaust come from individuals and groups with a track record that shows little tolerance and respect for other views, not to mention other races and religions.
If it weren’t so troublesome, it would be almost be funny to hear Iran, of all countries, call for open-mindedness and tolerance. This is a regime that imprisons journalists, assassinates opposition figures and executes gay teenagers. It won’t even tolerate Western music on state radio and television stations. According to Human Rights Watch, Iran’s government has closed down more than 100 opposition newspapers just since 2000. The revolutionary regime has executed thousands of real and perceived opponents since taking power. HRW says members of President Ahmadinejad’s new cabinet, particularly the Ministers of Information and the Interior should be investigated for crimes against humanity, including the assassination of dissidents in and out of Iran.
It is no coincidence that the same regime that suppresses dissent now calls for more tolerance on its views about the events of World War II.
Iran is not alone in its efforts to deny the Holocaust. It joins a long list of racists and demagogues who have tried to say the Holocaust never happened. And Iran did not invent the strategy of calling for more openness in discussing the issue.
As Emory University’s Dr. Deborah Lipstadt has described in convincing detail, Holocaust deniers use a strategy of distorting the truth in order to further their ideological objectives. The key point to examine when one listens to their exhortations for academic freedom is that theirs is not an argument in pursuit of learning the truth. They are not seeking to enhance the world’s body of historical knowledge. Their denial that the killing of six million Jews ever happened is a key element in a political effort to distort the truth in order to achieve political goals.
Hitler’s almost successful efforts to exterminate the Jewish people have been studied and documented to such a degree that no legitimate scholar any longer questions them.
The evidence of a one of the greatest crimes in history is overwhelming, from the eye-witness testimony from victims and perpetrators, to the physical evidence from gas chambers used to kill and the ovens used to dispose of bodies, to mountains of documents from the Third Reich and bits of information about the lives of millions of people killed in Europe’s death camps during World War II. True scholars now focus not on whether it happened -- which was conclusively answered decades ago -- but why.
Deniers, however, persist. That’s because claiming the Holocaust did not happen is a useful tool when pursuing other objectives. And those objectives always involve some form of intolerance, from anti-Semitism to generic racism.
Take Iran, for example. When the country’s new rabble-rousing president called the Holocaust an “invention,” he had already called Israel a “tumor” that should be “wiped off the map.”
Iran’s president now joins a group of Holocaust deniers, many of whom, incidentally, would refuse to sit in a room with an Iranian, a Muslim, an Arab, or a Jew.
We already know about the Holocaust. The matter still open for debate is what to do about the danger Ahmadinejad and his regime pose to the world.

Frida Ghitis writes about world affairs. She’s the author of “The End of Revolution: a Changing World in the Age of Live Television.”