Holocaust website draws thousands of Iranians. Or maybe not.

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 24 April 2007 00:25.

The Middle East Times ran a nice piece of disinformation on 16th April about the thousands of Iranians who ...

visit a new Holocaust Web site in Farsi run by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, despite their leadership’s questioning the Nazi genocide of Jews, the museum said.”

... The Web site was put online by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem in January, and has so far had some 25,100 visits, including 12,170 from inside Iran, spokeswoman Estee Yaari said.

It includes 20 historical chapters on World War II, the Nazi regime, the systematic killings, and photos from the Nazi death camps and ghettos.

“We believe that making credible, comprehensive information about the Holocaust available to Persian speakers can contribute to the fight against Holocaust denial,” said Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev.

Iran’s firebrand president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has branded the systematic killing of 6 million of Europe’s Jews as a “myth,” and last year Tehran hosted a controversial revisionist Holocaust conference, sparking an international outcry.

Shalev calls the Web site a powerful tool against Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric, which has included calls for the Jewish state to be “wiped off the map.”

So let’s look at this “powerful tool”. It isn’t clear, actually, whether the “25,100 visits” are unique visitors or just hits. I presume that Yad Vashem isn’t too fussy about the difference and these are just hits - in which case the site is doing in three months about half what MR, also a specialised facility, pulls in a single day.

Now, the visitor figure for “Iranians” is less than half of the total. But ... there are up to 40,000 Persian Jews in Iran who might be expected to have a greater than average interest in the site.

So how many Ahmadinejad-apostates is Yad Vashem really celebrating? Based on our profile of visitors I would guess the site receives about 80 unique visitors per day from within Iran. Of those half could easily be Jews, and of the remainder the preponderant majority are there in the expectation of sampling a Jewish deception.

The article quotes two visitor messages of support but doesn’t, of course, specify whether the authors were ethnic Iranians or Jews. However, let us give them the benefit of the doubt. They have had at least two successes for their trouble.

The population of Iran is 71 million. But what the heck, there’s always a bit of good publicity to be got out of it.

Oh yes, and one more thing. Ahmadinejad never said Israel should be wiped off the map. His words were, “Our dear Imam said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement.”

Yad Vashem, being a temple of historical fidelity, really should be able to get that right. If it’s interest was in doing so.

Tags: That Question Again

Comments:

Posted by Correction on Tue, 24 Apr 2007 05:56 | #

A correction: Ahmadinejad’s statement did not mention “wipe off the map” at all. His statement was that the Zionist regime occupying Israel will be removed from the page of time.

Posted by Amalek on Tue, 24 Apr 2007 10:14 | #

Pres. Ahamdinejad *quoted* an old speech by the late Ayatollah Khomeini to the effect that the current Israeli domination of al-Quds (Jerusalem) must ‘vanish from the page of time’. He went on to point out that the USSR had done so, therefore Muslims need not despair of this happening. Juan Cole has shown that the context of the speech was how unjust regimes can come and go *without*, for instance, bunker-busting nukes being used to ‘change’ them.

Pres. Ahmadinejad went on to quote Khomeini’s explicit statement that such a transition—in Jerusalem, not necessarily in all Israel—should be by peaceful negotiation, and that Iran must never initiate war: ‘pre-emptive’, a la Bush and Olmert, or otherwise. This is in line with the remarkably unbelligerent history of Persia over the past two centuries. It never gets mentioned when the Big Lie about wiping Israel off the face of the earth is trotted out.

Currently the spiritual leader of Iran, to whom Ahmadinejad is answerable, has explicitly reaffirmed this doctrine and said in so many words—rendering the country capable of being held to account if its leaders are lying—that Iran has no intention of developing nuclear weapons. The international inspectors have found no evidence that it is building a bomb.

India, which has done so with American connivance, Pakistan, which has nukes and may soon be ruled by mullahs, and Israel, which is outwith all international conventions and brandishes at least 200 armed warheads, are spared criticism. All the hysteria in the US media is about Iran *possibly* having one or two nukes between five or ten years hence, according to the National Intelligence Estimate.

These facts are unknown to the American booboisie, now being primed for war against Iran in the same way that fables about Saddam Hussein’s links with Osama bin Laden, his biological weapons and his nuclear bomb tests set the public up for the illegal, abortive, humiliating invasion and occupation of 2003.

The lies about Iran, like those about Iraq, are chiefly propagated to the US controlled media by MEMRI, a Mossad-front disinfo operation run by Meyrav Wurmser, whose husband David is one of the leading Washington neocons and Mideast ‘special adviser’ to VP Dick Cheney. The so-called liberal antiwar journalistic clique in the States has swallowed this garbage whole and regurgitated it dutifully for almost two years.

Victor Davis Hanson, the neocon military historian, has gone beyond Melanie Phillips-like hysteria about Iran obliterating dear little Israel. He thinks Ahmadinejad is out to destroy the whole planet, Meester Bond:

Although the lynchpin of Ahmadinejad’s crusade is a first-strike success against his near neighbor Israel, the next move is westward to Europe and then on to finish off the hated United States.

American simpletons have to have an ogre-figure for the Two Minutes Hate that precedes every aggressive move of the military industrial complex and the ZOG Congress, and Ahmadinejad—a town planner who was elected against the mullahs’ wishes on a programme of cleaning up internal corruption—is the best simulacrum of a Narzee Dictator/Blofeld figure that the spin doctors can devise… now that OBL has evaded the might and cunning of the hapless hyperpower while failing to bring off any terrorist spectaculars in the homeland for six years.

But Ahmadinejad has shown himself a quick study in the diplomatic game. His open letter to Bush, full of good-humoured point-scoring; his interviews on American TV; his release of the British sailors and marines: these have depicted a more reasonable and genial fellow than the grim turbaned mullahs, the leering unshaven Arafat, the gaunt lurking Osama or the fat Saudi princes who populate Arab Muslim politics. Ahmadinejad just don’t look and sound EVIL enough.

Of course he held a—gasp—‘Holocaust Denial’ conference, but the US sheeple don’t feel that to be quite the ne plus ultra of iniquity that their opinion-moulders conceive it to be. At least, not quite enough of an excuse to unleash tactical nuclear missiles on a country which has largely minded its own business for 200 years.

Posted by Desmond Jones on Tue, 24 Apr 2007 20:59 | #

One should be very careful in giving credence to the words of Juan Cole.

Republican Representative Virgil Goode of Virginia wrote his constituents,

“The Muslim representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran . . .”

The purpose of statements like that of Goode is to mark Muslim Americans as permanent outsiders and to rally bigotted Christians. (Just as the purpose of Tancredo’s remarks is to do the same thing to Latinos). The technique is a fascist technique, of spreading hatred and demanding the ‘purification’ of the body public as a way of whipping up fervor in a constituency. It is shameful, but more, it is very, very dangerous. The United States of America depends for its survival on tolerance of diversity. Bigotry can easily tear it apart.

Islamophobia or Anti-Muslimism is now among the more pressing social pathologies infecting the US. If it becomes established and acceptable, then lots of other forms of bigotry will also grow in virulence. There could end up being blood in the streets.

Posted by Al Ross on Tue, 24 Apr 2007 23:15 | #

For an unconventional Iranian perspective, please see :

http://iranianforaryans.blogspot.com