Word: ahmadinejad
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...Despite his demeanor, Ahmadinejad was in the midst of a tense week, in which he had welcomed delegates to a conference questioning the Nazi Holocaust, taken on students at Amir Khabir University who chanted "Death to the dictator!" and campaigned for candidates in Iranian municipal elections, including his sister, who's running for Tehran city council. In short, it was a typical week for the United States' most prominent and charismatic irritant not named Kim Jong-il, and we discussed all of the events in 2006 that saw Ahmadinejad become a major player on the world stage...
...AHMADINEJAD: Did you read it? My letter had different aims and goals. Many American citizens, in the messages and letters they sent, requested that I bring up my points of view directly. Many of them said that the government of America doesn't let them receive my points of view in its entirety and without distortions. So I talked to them directly...
...bringing together a macabre assortment of neo-Nazis, Klansmen and other right-wing cranks - many of whom would be just as keen to rid Europe of Muslims as the Nazis were to empty the continent of its Jewish population - in Tehran this week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seeks to deny or diminish the reality of the Holocaust. And while that may seem like just another slap in the face of the West, to the extent that anyone in the Arab world takes him seriously, the Iranian president is also doing them a profound disservice...
...Jews of Europe; they are also negating what has been - despite the distance at which it occurred - a defining episode of 20th century Arab history. Trying to negate the Holocaust stokes blind hatred on both sides of the divide, and reinforces the most hard-line positions. That may suit Ahmadinejad's own domestic power game, but it does nothing to help the Palestinians and Israelis find a way out of their endless conflict...
...Ahmadinejad is hardly the first voice in the Middle East to question the basic facts of the Holocaust - even the moderate Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas wrote a Ph.D thesis in the early 1980s in which he claimed that the number of Jews killed by the Nazis was less than 1 million, and that it had been inflated by the Zionist movement to win international sympathy. (Abbas later denied diminishing the Holocaust, which he denounced as "a terrible, unforgivable crime against the Jewish nation, a crime against humanity...