Holocaust deniers gather in Iran for conference

Now from Tehran comes a state sponsored conference on denial of the Holocaust. The cast includes some unlikely visitors to the Islamic capital, including David Duke, former head of the Ku Klux Klan, and most unlikely , a group of Jewish rabbis.

What on earth can Ahmadinejad think he is accomplishing by gathering together the wretched refuse of the scholarly world, and invoking the spirit of  David Irving, the discredited historian now serving a jail term in Austria? Truly, this represents an unearned martyrdom for Irving, whose views were discredited in a long and famous libel trial involving the historian Deborah Lipstadt. Had Irving not been jailed, he would have been on the way to a well deserved obscurity.

Holocaust deniers may raise interesting questions, but mostly they don't, and there is very little payback in engaging in conversation with them as such conversation is rarely, if ever, produces anything except bigoted monologue. . And as for Ahmadinejad- his claims to provide a haven for free speech would be more credible if say, he were to host a conference on the democratic ideal in the theocratic state, or the role of theocracies in the history of warfare. Then we might listen, but not to this errant nonsense.