13 December 2006
Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said that Israel would suffer the same fate as the USSR. Receiving participants of the so-called Holocaust conference, including a number of revisionist historians, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, he stated: "When I said what was in the mind of the nation, that this regime (Israel) would disappear, the Zionist network attacked me a lot. But just as the Soviet Union was wiped out and today does not exist, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out." British prime minister Tony Blair slammed the Tehran conference as "shocking beyond belief", while the United States described the meeting as "an affront to the entire civilized world."
The Vatican also issued a statement of condemnation which pointed out that the Nazi genocide against the Jews was a historical fact that served as a warning to people to respect each others' rights. "The last century saw an attempt to exterminate the Jewish people, which led to the killing of millions of Jews of all social categories merely because of the fact that they belonged to that people," the statement said.
Ahmadinejad, who has described Holocaust as a "myth" and cast doubt on the scale of the slaughter, did not repeat his previous comments but complained that the Holocaust was being used as a pretext by Israel. "Whether the Holocaust occurred or did not or whether it had vast dimensions or not, it has become a pretext to create a base for aggression and threats for the countries of the region," he said. He told the participants, including a sect of ultra-Orthodox Jews who believe the creation of Israel was an abomination, that researchers and students should get together and examine the Holocaust in more detail. Papers delivered on the last day of the conference included "A Challenge to the Official Holocaust Story", and "Holocaust, the Achilles Heel of a Primordial Jewish Trojan".
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