Holocaust Denial and Tehran

WallStJournal ^ | November 3, 2007 | Roya Hakakian

[nuconvert]

Holocaust Denial and Tehran

ROYA HAKAKIAN

Dictatorships bear paradoxes. I came across a set of them 10 years ago, when I hosted a dinner for two female Iranian medical students who'd come to Yale Medical School on a rare academic exchange program. These impressive women had climbed to the top 10th percentile in a man's profession, in a man's country. But I was stunned to learn that -- despite 16 years of education at some of Iran's premiere schools -- neither had ever heard of the word "Holocaust," or thought of Hitler as anything but the German equivalent of Napoleon.

Tehran's Holocaust denial did not begin with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It began in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution and the subsequent miseducation of the entire post-revolutionary generation. The Holocaust did not exist in the textbooks of my two young guests, and there was hardly any literature about it in Persian.

Now, millions of Iranian youths are hearing about the Holocaust for the first time through the airing of a government-sponsored soap opera called "Zero Degree Turn." In it, the Islamic Republic's handpicked director, Hassan Fatthi, breaks the regime's taboos. Beautiful women appear without the Islamic dress code. Men and women also come together, hold hands, and even fall into a fleeting embrace.

In the end, however, the program offers little more than an aesthetically pleasing venue for the regime's usual diatribes. Its linchpin is a conspiracy theory: Two Israeli agents assassinate the chief rabbi of Tehran to frighten the Iranian Jewish community into leaving Iran for Israel. The noble chief of the Iranian embassy in France, Abdol Hossein Sardari, who facilitated the escape of hundreds of Iranian and French Jews by providing them with Iranian passports, is portrayed as a mere opportunist motivated by bribes.

The good news is

[nuconvert]

If you would like to read more, you can do so here.....

http://www.israelforum.com/blog_article.php?aid=1079351

[DManA]

The other extreme, in some popular history in this country, WWII is being converted into the patriotic war to free the Jews.

[Savage Beast]

The indoctrination of Iranian students is eerily similar to the indoctrination of American students in U.S. schools.

Were it not for alternative sources of information, e.g. the internet, talk radio, et al., Americans would be subjected to endless, uninterrupted Leftist propaganda--from the "Newsmedia", Hollywood, and academia--with no opportunity to know the truth.

Fortunately, we have alternative sources of information, but--make no mistake--the Left, and notably its Political Machine, the Democrat Party, will stop at nothing to destroy them and to silence all voices of dissent. These are the American Mullahs. Their religion is the Decadence that is the Left, and they are no less fanatic in their worship than are the Mullahs of Iran.

If Leftists can--and they are trying--they will establish a Leftist theocracy in America as ruthless and uncompromising as the theocracy of Iran.

[nuconvert]

I Agree

[Gengis Khan]

Also Holocaust Denial and *cough(Turkey)*cough.

[gandalftb]

Iranian denials are older than that. In 1973 my college roomate was Iranian and said that it was a zionist story used to create Israel. Although other non-Iranian Muslims I got to know privately told me that Iranians were the worst bigots, and known for being liars and cheats, something I came to know by experience.