Iran to Host Holocaust Conference

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for an international conference on the Holocaust. A Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman said, “Iran’s Foreign Ministry has decided to hold a conference on the Holocaust to assess its scale by scientific means and discuss its consequences.” The event will be sponsored by Iran and the Organization of the Islamic Conference “in consultation with other countries to pursue this issue.” The goal will be to examine scientific evidence supporting the Holocaust.

Given that he has already publicly declared the Holocaust a myth, any guess what conclusions Ahmadinejad will reach at the end of the conference? We can only faintly hope that moderate Muslim states will use this conference as a vehicle to condemn Iran’s efforts at Holocaust denial.

UPDATE: Niall Ferguson has an interesting article on the Great War of 2007 that compares the parallels of the 1930s to today. Here is a taste: “The devastating nuclear exchange of August 2007 represented not only the failure of diplomacy, it marked the end of the oil age. Some even said it marked the twilight of the West. Certainly, that was one way of interpreting the subsequent spread of the conflict as Iraq’s Shi’ite population overran the remaining American bases in their country and the Chinese threatened to intervene on the side of Teheran. Yet the historian is bound to ask whether or not the true significance of the 2007-2011 war was to vindicate the Bush administration’s original principle of pre-emption. For, if that principle had been adhered to in 2006, Iran’s nuclear bid might have been thwarted at minimal cost. And the Great Gulf War might never have happened.”