Strange Bedfellows

Off Route 75's favorite person is in the news again. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has organized a conference on Holocaust denial, currently underway in Tehran. Of course, Ahmadinejad being a raving anti-Semite, the conference isn't a scholarly exploration of the Holocaust denial movement, but rather a conference devoted to spreading the gospel (so to speak). Among the speakers is former KKK leader and one-time political candidate David Duke.

Given the focus of the conference, who is the last group of people you'd expect to be in attendance? If you said Orthodox Jews, you'd be wrong. As this BBC piece explains, a group known as Neturei Karta (Guardians of the City) is there. Why?

A representative, UK-based Rabbi Aharon Cohen, told the conference he prayed 'that the underlying cause of strife and bloodshed in the Middle East, namely the state known as Israel, be totally and peacefully dissolved'.

In its place, Rabbi Cohen said, should be 'a regime fully in accordance with the aspirations of the Palestinians when Arab and Jew will be able to live peacefully together as they did for centuries'.

Neturei Karta believes the very idea of an Israeli state goes against the Jewish religion.

The book of Jewish law or Talmud, they say, teaches that believers may not use human force to create a Jewish state before the coming of the Messiah.

The group does not deny the Holocaust, but believes that the Holocaust "was being used to legitimise the suffering of other peoples."

Over a PrawfsBlawg, Paul Horwitz offers an interesting perspective on the conference:

. . . part of the ammunition for such a conference stems from European and Canadian laws restricting or criminalizing the denial of the Holocaust altogether. Thus, some of the conference participants from Western nations effectively described the very existence of such a conference as liberating, noting that, for instance, 'We are forbidden to have such a conference in Germany.' . . . Of course, notwithstanding the efforts of the conference organizers to equate 'Western taboos [concerning the Holocaust] and the restriction imposed on them in Europe,' any pressures against Holocaust denial in the United States come solely from social forces, and not from any legal restrictions. By avoiding any legal penalty for stating such wrongheaded ideas, American law both permits such ideas to circulate and strips from their adherents the dignity of martyrdom. They are protected, but they are also at the mercy of the marketplace and likely (one hopes) to be generally ignored as a lunatic fringe. If David Duke were a German, he would be an insurgent and a champion of free speech; here, he is reduced to his natural state -- laughingstock. I'm glad he has to travel to Teheran [sic] to get any attention.

Holocaust denial is an ongoing example of how differently the First Amendment works than less-stringent provisions in other countries. To our benefit, I think.