Britons to Iranian Holocaust Conference!

The original letter as sent to The Guardian was this: (you can compare with the edited version):

----- Original Message -----

From: Anne & Henry Klausner

To: letters Guardian

Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2006 11:02 AM

Subject: Iranian Holocaust Conference

Dear Sir/Madam,

Regarding your article of today: http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,1964854,00.html "Britons to attend Iranian Holocaust Conference", a number of points strike me.

The reaction of the British Foreign Office "it is not up to us who travels to Iran" is surely disingenuous. If they so wished, it could be done. Surely tolerating Holocaust denial is not a step in the right direction to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

The Iranians themselves claim that the conference is not meant to be anti-Semitic. However, any Israeli attempt to participate in the conference was rejected (according to today's Ynet http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3336601,00.html).  This is a mystifying move if it is not anti-Semitic, since the bulk of Holocaust survivors today now live in Israel.

Finally, it would seem that the reasoning for holding this conference is because of the commonly held view that Israel's founding was as a reaction to the shame of the world at the Holocaust.  The main object of this exercise is to prove that either the Holocaust didn't happen, or that it was not on the scale claimed by the Jews.  If it could be so proven, then Israel, according to the deniers, by extension has no right to exist.  However the point that the Iranians and other anti-Zionists miss is that Israel's founding had not much to do with the Holocaust. It was a fully functioning democratic state in all but name well before the Holocaust, under the British Mandate, and was initially granted its "right to exist" by the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

This Holocaust "Conference" is nothing more than a malicious attempt to undermine a history of Jewish suffering and separately to deny Israel's right to exist.

Yours sincerely,

Anne KlausneR

Petach Tikva, Israel