Editor's Letter

The Threat Is Real

The Iranian president's vile
reinforces the anti-Jewish lies
taking root around the world.
We must stay vigilant and
expose this dangerous drum-
beat. To dismiss it is asking
for trouble.

If that outrage wasn't enough of a cloudburst of revisionist
history, consider his argument to the West. "If you committed
the crime begins a translation by the Washington-based
Middle East Media Research Institute, "it is only appropriate
that you place a piece of your land at their disposal — a piece
of Europe, of America, of Canada or of Alaska — so the Jews
can establish their own state. Rest assured that if you do so,
the Iranian people would voice no objection."
The Iranian president's vile reinforces the anti-Jewish lies
taking root around the world. We must stay vigilant and
expose this dangerous drumbeat. To dismiss it is asking for
trouble.
The Washington-based Muslim Public Affairs Council
denounced Ahmadinejad, but also to no avail. He knows the
Iranian press is state run so he controls what the Iranian peo-
ple hear. Iranian moderates have no recourse to the ruling •
regime. Ahmadinejad's election last June blunted Iranian
reform efforts to temper the Zionist- and West-bashing ignit-
ed amid the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the shah's over-
throw.
Iran's supreme authority, Ayatollah Ali Khamenel, fuels the
presidential oratory by urging Palestinian terrorists to re-
stoke their fight to rid Jerusalem of Israelis. Ayatollah Ali

Meshkini,- head of the Iranian Assembly of Experts, chimes in
that Zionists "invented a false claim" known as the Holocaust
and made the world believe.
Some political observers believe Ahmadinejad is trying to
parlay a rising tide of Western criticism in the wake of his
rhetoric into support at home for Tehran's nuclear ambitions.
AhMadinejad, of course, is the same despot who, in
October, called Israel, "this stain of disgrace" to "vanish from
the center of the Islamic world." He staged anti-Israel rallies to
propel his wrath. And he's serious.
Denying the Holocaust, a seminal disaster in Jewish history,
is an essential first step to allowing such barbarity to recur.
It's no wonder that the step was taken in such a bastion of
hatred as Iran, now a Middle East power in the wake of Iraqi
dictator Saddam Hussein's capture by U.S.-led coalition
forces.
Ironically, revisionist thinking floods France and Germany,
which lay dubious claim to a spurt in attacks on Zionism and
Jews yet also have been quick to condemn Ahmadinejad's
rants.
For eyewitness evidence of Hitler's fury, I offer the memoirs
of my good friend Sam Offen, 84, of West Bloomfield. The
German brand for "concentration camp:' KL, marks his left
wrist. In his book When Hope
Prevails: The Personal Triumph
of a Holocaust Survivor, he
recounts the waning days at
Gusen: "Acute diarrhea, vomit-
ing and dehydration sapped
the little strength we had left.
We lived with death constantly
and were constantly humiliat-
ed. In the morning on the way
to the latrine, we found many
corpses lying on the ground.
The skeleton-like bodies could
Sam Offen: a survivor
not even make it all the way
there. We, the living ones, were
ordered to pick them up and stack them like wood."
The Nazis never lost their thirst for terrorizing Jews at this
camp in German-occupied Austria, even as the allies neared,
Offen writes.
Revisionism can't erase what the Holocaust perpetrated.
Can the sane world leadership imagine the future if Iran's
Holocaust-denying rulers ever managed to stock a nuclear
arsenal? I pray that the European Union's potential support
for international diplomatic sanctions against Iran isn't hol-
low. Though lukewarm to Jewish interests, the E.U. remains
pivotal to keeping Tehran nuclear free.

,

FOR

PO INT S TO P O ND ER. .

T

he Holocaust is a European myth that the West
advanced after World War II to create the State of
Israel in the center of the Muslim world. The German
death camp called Auschwitz had no crematoria. Jews needed
the world to believe that Hitler tried to annihilate European
Jewry so they could deflect attention from the blood libel they
carried'out in 19th-century Europe:
killing kids in Paris and London to
extract their blood for Pesach use.
So claimed the Iranian president and
his Islamic cleric cronies this month.
They 'doubted that 6 million Jews even
lived in Europe at the time of Nazi
Germany.
If Europe insists that the Holocaust
Robert A. Sklar happened, it should be held accountable.
The Palestinian people shouldn't have
Editor
had to suffer for 55 years following their
expulsion from Israel, Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad declared to followers in Zahedan on Dec. 13.

Has Holocaust denial made
Jew-hating more palatable?

TENDER

Is Iran finally deserving of
U.N.-authorized sanctions?

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December 29 • 2005

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