15 December 2006
Dozens of foreign diplomats gathered at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem to condemn a conference held in Iran earlier this week which questioned the Nazi genocide of Jews. Envoys of some 40 states, attending a Yad Vashem conference entitled "Holocaust denial: paving the way to genocide", criticized Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinejad. Richard Jones, the US ambassador to Israel, said that "for those people to say that the genocide did not occur is a real blow to humanity, a blow to civilization." Jones linked Ahmadinejad's attacks against the Holocaust and Israel to Iran's controversial nuclear program, which many suspect is aimed at developing an atomic bomb. "It is all part of his goal of creating a smoke screen to divert world attention away from what Iran is trying to do in pursuing nuclear weapons," the US envoy told the AFP news agency.
Belgium's ambassador Danielle del Marmol echoed Jones's words: "Ahmadinejad's declarations are absolutely despicable and unacceptable. I find it amazing that a politician could go this far in his absurd statements. All European states, all the states that realize these despicable statement must react." Iran drew a barrage of international condemnation for holding the two-day conference to examine questions first raised by Ahmadinejad over the mass murder of six million Jews during World War II. Cameroon's ambassador to Israel Henri Etoundi Essomba said that "the world must oppose the message coming from Tehran whose goal is clearly to wipe out the state of Israel. We condemn it."
Former Israeli justice minister Tommy Lapid, who survived the Budapest ghetto in Hungary, issued a warning for the world not to turn a blind eye to Iran's statements as it did to Adolf Hitler's rabid anti-Semitism. "If the European countries missed the opportunity to understand what Hitler was saying, they and the world should believe what the Iranian president is saying now. He means business. You are now in Yad Vashem, there should not be an additional Yad Vashem." Rita Weiss, a Holocaust survivor who lost her entire family at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, told the conference: "I came here today to express my rage at Ahmadinejad's nerve. Forty-eight of my relatives were murdered in Auschwitz in June 1944. Where are they? What happened to them? Where have they disappeared? They have no grave. They turned into smoke, ashes and dust," she said.
Read about the WJC's campaign to Stop the Iranian Threat
