It is easy to become numb to an outrage. But what just happened in Tehran – the Holocaust denial conference – really requires us not to give in to numbness. Anyone who seriously wants to question the fact of one of the greatest crimes in human history is a monster. Period. That such a person now controls a country that is trying to seek nuclear weapons should concentrate the mind. Anne Applebaum gets it right, as she often does:
Iran is serious ‚Äî or at least Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is deadly serious. Holocaust denial is his personal passion, not just a way of taunting Israel, and it’s based in his personal interpretation of history. Earlier this year, in a distinctly eerie open letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, he lauded the great achievements of German culture and assaulted "the propaganda machinery after World War II that has been so colossal that [it] has caused some people to believe that they are the guilty party." Such views hearken back to the 1930s, when the then-Shah of Iran was an admirer of Hitler’s notion of the "Aryan master race," to which Persians were meant to belong. Ahmadinejad himself counts as a mentor an early revolutionary who was heavily influenced by wartime Nazi propaganda. It shows.
The London Times has also recognized this new low.
The Dish 