Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was president of the Islamic Republic of Iran from August 2005 to August 2013. He was the first head of state of any United Nations member country, in the history of the postwar period, to make Holocaust denial a matter of stated government policy. The 2006 Tehran International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust, convened on his instructions by his Foreign Ministry, was the only state-sponsored Holocaust denial conference ever held.
The earlier career
Ahmadinejad was born in 1956 in the village of Aradan in north-central Iran. He had a doctorate in transportation engineering from the Iran University of Science and Technology and had served as a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. He was mayor of Tehran from 2003 to 2005 and ran a populist economic platform in the 2005 presidential election, which he won unexpectedly against the former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
The 2005 statements
Ahmadinejad’s first publicly recorded denial statement was made on 26 October 2005 at a Tehran conference titled “The World without Zionism”. The official Iranian state news agency IRNA initially reported the statement as a call that Israel “must be wiped off the map”. The translation was contested in subsequent years; the Persian original is closer to “must be eliminated from the page of time” or “must vanish from the page of history”. The translation question is a real philological one and has been debated by Iran specialists. The political content of the statement, however, is not disputed: Ahmadinejad was calling for the elimination of the State of Israel.
In a series of speeches and interviews during late 2005 and 2006 he extended the position to direct denial of the Holocaust. The most cited of these statements was a speech in Zahedan on 14 December 2005, in which he said:
They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred and place this above God, religions and the prophets. If you have committed the crime, then give a part of your own land in Europe or America or Canada or Alaska to them so they can establish their own state.
The combination of denial and the call for the elimination of Israel was deliberate. Denial was the rhetorical instrument by which the existence of Israel was to be delegitimised; the elimination of Israel was the political goal that denial served.
The 2006 Tehran conference
The Tehran conference of 11 and 12 December 2006 was convened by the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s Institute for Political and International Studies on Ahmadinejad’s instructions. The stated purpose was to provide an academic forum for the “investigation” of the Holocaust. Sixty-seven invited speakers attended, drawn from the international Holocaust denial movement: Robert Faurisson (by video link, having been refused an exit visa from France for the trip), David Duke (the former Ku Klux Klan leader from Louisiana), Frederick Toben (the Australian denier convicted in Germany in 1999), Bradley Smith (the founder of the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust), Robert Countess, Christopher Bollyn and others. The Neturei Karta sect of anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jews sent a small delegation, photographs of which were widely circulated by the Iranian state press as evidence that the conference had Jewish participation.
The conference was condemned by the United Nations Security Council, by the European Union, by the United States, by Germany, and by every major Holocaust scholarly organisation. The European Union’s High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy described it as “an unacceptable affront to the international community”. The German Bundestag passed a unanimous resolution of condemnation. The conference proceedings were published by the Iranian Foreign Ministry in 2007. They have not been cited as scholarship by any non-denier source since.
The Holocaust cartoon competition
Iran’s Hamshahri newspaper, owned by the Tehran Municipality, ran an “International Holocaust Cartoons Contest” in 2006 in parallel with the conference. The competition received over 1,200 submissions from around the world. The winning cartoons depicted Anne Frank in bed with Adolf Hitler, gas chambers as Disneyland attractions, and standard images of Jewish caricature. The exhibition was held at the Palestine Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran. A second iteration of the competition was held in 2016 under Ahmadinejad’s successor Hassan Rouhani.
The international response and the consequences
Ahmadinejad’s statements during 2005 and 2006 contributed to the United Nations Security Council’s adoption of Resolution 1737 in December 2006, the first of a series of sanctions resolutions on Iran’s nuclear programme. The denial statements were not the formal basis of the sanctions (which addressed the nuclear issue), but they hardened the international position against the Iranian government to a degree that made the sanctions politically possible. The denial was therefore not without cost to the regime: it traded the rhetorical satisfaction of denying the Holocaust for the diplomatic isolation of an Iran that had become unmistakably a state-sponsored adversary of the international Jewish community.
Ahmadinejad served two presidential terms and left office in August 2013. He was succeeded by the more diplomatically conventional Hassan Rouhani, under whom Iran’s denial rhetoric was substantially toned down at the official level (though the Hamshahri cartoon competition was repeated in 2016, against the wishes of the Rouhani government). Ahmadinejad attempted to return to the presidency in 2017 but was disqualified by the Guardian Council. He has continued to give interviews on the world stage on his preferred subjects.
Afterwards
Ahmadinejad’s significance to Holocaust denial is that he made it the official policy of a UN member state for a period of approximately eight years, gave it a state platform in the 2006 conference, and produced a state-sponsored exhibition of denier cartoons. No other government, before or since, has matched the level of state involvement. The conference of 2006 remains the high-water mark of state-sponsored denial. It has not been repeated.
He is now remembered as a discredited figure associated with Holocaust denial and historical revisionism.
See also
Sources
- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, address to the World Without Zionism Conference, Tehran, 26 October 2005, transcript in BBC Monitoring Middle East, 27 October 2005
- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speech at Zahedan, 14 December 2005, IRNA report and BBC translation
- “International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust”, proceedings, Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Institute for Political and International Studies, Tehran, 2007
- European Council, “Declaration by the Presidency on Behalf of the European Union on the Holocaust Denial Conference in Tehran”, 12 December 2006
- German Bundestag, Resolution on the Tehran Holocaust Denial Conference, 14 December 2006
- UN Security Council Resolution 1737 (2006), 23 December 2006
- Jeffrey Herf, ed., Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspective: Convergence and Divergence, Routledge, 2007
- Robert S. Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, Random House, 2010, ch. 18 on Iran
- Matthias Küntzel, Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold, Telos Press, 2014
- Yad Vashem, “The Tehran Conference: A Comprehensive Account”, 2007, https://www.yadvashem.org
- USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Combating Holocaust Denial: Iran”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org