Financial Times Editorial - Ahmadi-Nejad is beyond the pale

Financial Times Editorial - Ahmadi-Nejad is beyond the pale
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
Published: December 14 2006 02:00 | Last updated: December 14 2006 02:00


If Iran wishes and expects to be treated as a member of the international community in full standing, and requires its neighbours and adversaries to take into account its legitimate security concerns (as this newspaper has argued they should), then it cannot behave in the way it did this week, by hosting a grotesque carnival of Holocaust deniers, white supremacists, anti-Semites, Jewish millenarians, assorted lumpen-academics and rednecks.

It is simply contemptible to attempt to cast doubt on the most consciously wicked crime against humanity and one of the greatest affronts to civilisation. Does the Iranian leadership think it can in any way advance its interests - much less Iran's national interest - by consorting with neo-Nazis and former leaders of the Ku Klux Klan?

The man behind the Tehran conference to "debate" the Holocaust, President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, is a weird political mixture. Part shrewd populist, part end-of-days mystic, he clearly believes that stirring up sentiment against Israel (and against Jews in general) will deflect popular attention from his near complete failure to fulfil his campaign pledges to end poverty and corruption.

In fact, the event went virtually unnoticed in Iran, whereas internationally it has unleashed a storm of outrage, not least after Mr Ahmadi-Nejad told the conference that Israel's days were numbered.

"Just as the Soviet Union was wiped out and today does not exist, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out," he said.

Students of Iran know that the president is not, by any means, the most powerful man in a complex political hierarchy headed by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the unelected supreme leader, who controls foreign and security policy. Nevertheless, his rantings about the "myth" of the Nazi death camps and calls for Israel to be "wiped off the map" are pressing already very hot buttons in the US and Israel, where there is a raging debate about whether to attack Iran to disrupt its presumed nuclear ambitions.

Mr Ahmadi-Nejad's remarks are damaging in other ways. They give the impression that anti-Jewish bigotry is widespread across the Muslim world. In historical reality, anti-Semitism is a Christian disease. There is no trace of it in Persia's Shahnameh or Book of Kings, while the Koran enjoins believers to respect Jews and Christians as monotheist People of the Book, sharing the common legacy of Abraham. That is not less true because some modern Muslim and Arab leaders prefer to change the subject, from their failure to do anything about Israel's policies and behaviour to crude attacks on the Jewish people.

But Mr Ahmadi-Nejad's cynicism is no less intolerable for that. His superiors should rein him in - before he furnishes justification in the eyes of the world for an attack on Iran.