The term Holocaust refers to the period in the 1930s and 1940s when Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party took power in Germany. As part of inflicting a crushing defeat on the working-class movement, the fascists demagogically charged that Jews were responsible for the acute capitalist economic crisis, and the regime unleashed a deadly drive against them, first in Germany and then in other European countries conquered by the German army. Jews were driven into concentration camps to be killed, compelled to do forced labor, or subjected to grotesque experiments. Trade unionists, communists, opposition political figures, gays, and the disabled were also killed or imprisoned.

The conference in Iran featured various apologists for the Nazis dressed up as “scholars” engaged in academic study of what took place under the fascist reign of terror in Europe.

French professor Robert Faurisson said the Holocaust “never existed.” Frederick Töben of Australia insisted that “claims … about the mass gassings and burnings [are] a physical impossibility.” He brought with him a model of the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp, which he said was too small to have killed the 1 million Jews estimated to have died there. Georges Thiel of France called the Holocaust “an enormous lie.” American rightist Bradley Smith of the Committee for the Open Debate of the Holocaust said, “Gas chambers never existed.”

Photos and posters were also displayed, including some of piles of dead bodies with captions saying the victims had died of typhus, not gassing in concentration camps.

“The Holocaust is the device used as the pillar of Zionist imperialism, Zionist aggression, Zionist terror and Zionist murder,” Duke told the Associated Press. He elaborated on this view in an interview during the conference with Wolf Blitzer of CNN.

Duke told Blitzer, whom he labeled “a Jewish extremist,” that U.S. foreign policy is controlled by Israel. “We have a war in Iraq because Israel wanted that war, not for American interests,” the rightist said. He attributed Washington’s course toward war in Iraq to certain U.S. government officials and other figures with Jewish names “like Wolfowitz, Feith, Wurmser, Kristol, Abrams—we can go on and on. It sounds like a Jewish wedding. They have set American policy and they have hurt American interests in the Middle East. Just as I have said for years, as Walt and Mearsheimer of Harvard have said, it’s a fact. And we are dying right now in Iraq because we’re there for Israel’s interests.”

Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer published a paper last year, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” contending that a Jewish lobby determines Washington’s foreign policy, a line also espoused by some liberals and middle-class leftists.

This argument by Duke and others is 100 percent reactionary. The central figures in the U.S. administration who have driven the imperialist war in Iraq—President George Bush, Vice President Richard Cheney, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and others—are not Jewish, nor are they “dupes” of some Jewish conspiracy. They are carrying out a war that the U.S. capitalist ruling class needs in order to more effectively compete with its imperialist rivals in Europe and Japan.

The state of Israel was established by the U.S. and British governments after World War II to better crack down on workers and farmers in that region and protect imperialist plunder of their oil resources.

Duke tried to prettify the Jew-haters’ gathering as a “free speech” event, noting that in many countries in Europe, reactionary legislation makes it illegal to deny that the Holocaust happened.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad struck a similar note. He told the conference, “For 60 years talking about the Holocaust was a crime in the West but now there is a serious debate about the Holocaust in the media and also in political and popular meetings.”

But this event was not about scholarly debate or academic freedom. It was an assembly of apologists for the Hitler murder machine. It was designed, as all such anti-Semitic campaigns are, to obscure the real source of war, exploitation, and oppression—capitalism—and blame it instead on the Jews.

The Iranian regime did not call this conference because of an upsurge in anti-Semitism among the Iranian people. In fact, a protest by students in Tehran shortly after the conference included the demand “Forget about the Holocaust—Do something for us!” This was a reference to the fact that unemployment among Iranian youth graduating from college remains very high. The government has sought to divert attention from such facts by blaming Israel and Jews worldwide for the conditions Iranians face. The regime also hopes to increase its standing in the Middle East as the most militant opponent of Israel.

Imperialist governments from Washington to Berlin are having a field day by pointing to the “Holocaust conference” as one more reason to deny the Iranian people the right to develop nuclear power and to further the claim that Iran is a major terrorist threat. The reactionary event gave a handle to defenders of Israel to falsely label all its opponents as anti-Semitic. It helped defenders of imperialism divert attention from the real source of anti-Semitism: crisis-ridden capitalism.

Ahmadinejad told the conference, “The Zionist regime will disappear soon, the same way the Soviet Union disappeared.” Then, “humanity will achieve freedom.” But linking the progressive struggle of the Palestinian people for their homeland to the likes of David Duke and the Nazis only strengthens the Israeli government and its false assertion that it is protecting world Jewry from annihilation.

Moreover, class exploitation and national oppression will not disappear if there is no Israel. As long as capitalist classes are in power, including in Iran and other countries in the Middle East, workers and farmers there are condemned to poverty and oppression. The road to end these conditions starts with working people relying on their own collective action, independently of all capitalist parties and governments.
 
 
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