Changes in the wind for Iran?
A conference of Holocaust deniers was recently held in Iran. Sponsored by the Iranian government, the assembly consisted of an international group of deniers, including some luminaries like white supremacist David Duke of the United States, a ragtag group of academics from all over the world who have made a career denying the Holocaust, a group of professional anti-Semites and, strangest of all, a group of Orthodox rabbis from the United States who are virulently anti-Israel.
If this conference hadn’t been sponsored by an oil-rich nation with international ambitions, it might be easier to write it off as a collection of racist wackos out to grab some headlines and probably raise some money for a variety of fringe causes. However, because this was sponsored by a nation, which has ambitions to join the nuclear club and apparently has the means to do it, what happened has to be viewed in a different context.
What’s strangest about this conference is the fact that the Holocaust is a documented reality. The death toll is not based on rumor or anecdote. To the contrary! The Nazis were compulsive record keepers. Every individual-Jew or gentile, gay or gypsy, communist or political opposition, retarded or disabled-was carefully categorized, given a number that was tattooed onto an arm and recorded in ledgers, and then systematically murdered. The Germans of the Third Reich were bureaucratic to the core and no one could be murdered in Nazi Germany without the proper paperwork. There are buildings filled with documentary evidence, including films made by the Nazis, documenting every step of the entire process, all of which came out at the war crimes trial after World War II.
My own experience is personal. In the 1960s I was going through my grandmother’s papers after she died and I came upon a letter written in French, in 1940, from her daughter, my aunt, who was living in Paris at the time. The Germans had just entered Paris and apparently the Jews knew they were in mortal danger and had to get out into the countryside where it was somewhat safer. She told my grandmother in the letter that her husband and young son had already left to go into the south of France, into the area controlled by the Vichy government where they thought they would be safer. She and their young daughter would soon follow once he was settled. None of them made it. The next document was from the French government indicating that she had been shipped to a holding camp at Nancy in France from where she was deported to a death camp. The documentation was all very proper and very official-stamped, signed and recorded.
The question is why would Iran go through with a conference in which it would appear they had almost nothing to gain other than international derision? My judgment is that the Iranians are playing to a different audience than the United States or Western Europe, or any of the educated nations of the world. They’re playing to their ultra conservative base in Iran and the surrounding Arab countries. This position of Holocaust denial is part of a strategy to de-legalize and marginalize Israel, as a precedent to something. But to what end?
To answer that question you have to interpret what they say. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran has said recently that he expects Israel to be “wiped off” the map in the foreseeable future. This seems to be a warning to the world that once Iran has a nuclear capacity, it intends to do something with it. This is a serious and frightening prospect.
When I read about the conference, I was deeply depressed. I could see a nuclear exchange exploding in the Middle East. Then history took a strangely unpredictable turn. This week, Iran held municipal elections all over the country and by all appearances this hard-line, anti-Semitic strategy by the Iranian archconservatives seems to be backfiring. In the election, in which the turnout of 60 percent is high by any standards, the conservatives appear to be losing ground and a more moderate group looks to be gaining some power.
According to the international press, the economy in Iran is in poor shape, despite the oil revenues. Many of the younger generation are deeply disenchanted and the poll results represent some indication of widespread dissatisfaction.
It would be a mistake to read too much into these poll results but, at the same time, it’s apparent that there are some changes going on in Iran. Their politics are much more complex than just “the axis of evil” theory that is popular around Washington D.C. We should not judge too quickly or act too quickly. Iran is far from settled on a policy and ironically it seems to be one of the few nations in the Middle East whose citizens actually go to the ballot box to make political decisions. The high turnout in this election is significantly more than we get in our municipal elections, and it may be that the Iranian electorate understands the dangerous territory that the ultraconservatives are carrying their country into. Of course, it’s too early to tell, but it appears that interesting changes are taking place in Iran. What we have to do is be cautious, watch and wait, and most of all, start a dialogue.