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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/world/middleeast/14holocaust.html
Deep Roots of Denial for Iran's True Believer
[New York Times] Michael Slackman - Ahmadinejad actually seems to believe that the volumes of documentation, testimony, and living memory of the Nazi genocide are at best exaggerated and part of a Zionist conspiracy to falsify history so as to create the case for Israel. As a former member of the Revolutionary Guards, he was indoctrinated with such thinking, a political analyst in Tehran said, and as a radical student leader, he championed such a view. Now he has a platform to promote the theories. Iran's two-day Holocaust conference this week included no attempt to come to terms with the nature of the well-documented Nazi slaughter, offering only a platform to those pursuing the fantasy that it never happened. Some see a more ambitious agenda reflected in Ahmadinejad's high profile on the issues of Jews, the Holocaust, and Israel. "It is for public consumption in Arab countries," said Mustafa El-Labbad, editor of Sharqnameh, a magazine on Iranian affairs published in Cairo. "It is specifically directed toward deepening the gap between the people and their regimes and toward embarrassing the rulers so that the regional power vacuum, especially after Iraq, can be filled by Iran."