[lbo-talk] Ahmadinejad's letter

martin mschiller at pobox.com
Thu May 11 11:22:01 PDT 2006


On May 11, 2006, at 7:30 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


> If Ahmadinejad can try to build a good relation with Iranian Jews and
> reach out to Jewish leftists in the diaspora, it will be even better.
> That will strengthen his support for Palestinians and flummox
> Washington. But, so far, his flirtations with Holocaust revisionism
> have done the opposite and given ammunition to imperialists: "The head
> of Iran's Jewish community, Haroun Yashayaei, has sent a letter
> complaining to President Mahmud Ahmadinejad over his Holocaust denial
> comments"

Ahmadinejad's letter to the US president contained the following.

"After the war, they claimed that six million Jews had been killed. Six

million people that were surely related to at least two million families. Again let us assume that these events are true. Does that logically translate into the establishment of the state of Israel in the Middle East or support for such a state?"

Do you see this as conciliatory re the Iranian jewish community?

Personally, I find that the holocaust has been mythologized in the sense that it hasn't been studied to expose the sequence of events and development of social attitudes that led to it's occurrence - studies that might dispose of the recent arguments that consume lists like this about the use of terms like 'fascist', 'fascism' or 'genocide'.

As a child I was extremely confused about how my german surname associated me with the holocaust. Pictures of desolation and shrines to atrocity are not very enlightening about the processes that were employed to bring about the event. Popular history of the holocaust and the social attitudes that permitted it to happen are missing. Exposing the devices that were used to generate the social prejudices is necessary. Shirer's "Rise and Fall ..." is the nearest that I've come to any attempt in this direction.

I've always felt that the root historical cause (of jewish scapegoating) was the jewish refusal to adapt to a state religion, and our (US) present circumstances vis a vis state religion make better popular information about factual holocaust history necessary. Perhaps Ahmadinejad's suggestion about exposure of historical accuracy might be considered - unlike the Iran Jewish community insistence upon it remaining a festering wound. (following)

"[Ahmadinejad]"We have proposed that if you [Jews] didn't lie then you should allow a group of independent and fair researchers to come and talk to people in Europe, see the documents [on the Holocaust], and inform the nations about the results of their research on the myth of the Holocaust."

Iranian Jewish Society head Yashayaei says in his letter, which is dated 26 January, that the holocaust is not a myth but remains "an infected wound for Western civilization.""

Martin



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