International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust

Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki said the conference sought "neither to deny nor prove the Holocaust... [but] to provide an appropriate scientific atmosphere for scholars to offer their opinions in freedom about a historical issue".

[1] Participants included David Duke, Moshe Aryeh Friedman, Robert Faurisson, Fredrick Töben, Michèle Renouf, Ahmed Rami and Yisroel Dovid Weiss of Neturei Karta.

[3] The Holy See condemned it, the United States administration of George W. Bush called it an "affront to the entire civilized world," and British Prime Minister Tony Blair described it as "shocking beyond belief.

"[4] Historians of the Holocaust attended a separate conference in Berlin organized in protest against the assembly in Iran, calling it "an attempt to cloak anti-Semitism in scholarly language.

[8] Manouchehr Mottaki, then foreign minister of the Ahmadinejad government, said the purpose of the conference was not to reject or accept the historical reality of the Holocaust.

[10] Its objective was to create "suitable scientific research so that the hidden and unhidden angles of this most important political issue of the 20th century becomes more transparent.

The conference served not only to question and deny Israel's right to exist and to provide a forum for Holocaust denial but was also an attack on the West and its values more generally.

"[25]The event opened on December 11, 2006, and was organized and hosted by the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs's Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS).

[8] The Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying: "The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon the same way the Soviet Union was, and humanity will achieve freedom [and] elections should be held among Jews, Christians and Muslims so the population of Palestine can select their government and destiny for themselves in a democratic manner.

"[28] Aharon Cohen told the conference: "There is no doubt whatsoever, that during World War II there developed a terrible and catastrophic policy and action of genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany against the Jewish people, confirmed by innumerable eyewitness survivors and fully documented again and again...The figure of six million is regularly quoted.

[22] Richard Krege maintained diesel exhaust gas chambers to be an "outright lie," and showed a model of the Treblinka extermination camp to illustrate this.

"[49] A number of Arab journalists in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom criticized the conference, arguing that it included unqualified non-historian speakers, spread the hate and propaganda of an extremist Iranian government, defended the heinous crimes of the Nazis, damaged Iran diplomatically at a time when its foreign relations were difficult, and reflected a lack of human and cultural sensitivity.