RELATED:Should suspected Nazi war criminal be extradited? Yad Vashem struggles to teach Holocaust to Arabs Yad Vashem program aims to teach Chinese about Shoah "I turn to the Persian people," Yaakov (Jackie) Handeli, a Holocaust survivor from Thessalonica told journalists at Yad Vashem. "Let them see me and invite me to Iran. I am the sole member left of my entire family, and only because I was born Jewish, nothing else."Ahmadinejad has at various times both denied the Holocaust and acknowledged it, albeit only to attack it as a pretext for the existence of Israel. Ahmadinejad's virulent rhetoric on the Holocaust is often tied to his calls to eradicate "the Zionist regime," both seen as preparing the ideological ground for attacking the Jewish state.In 2006, Teheran sponsored what it called the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust, which then Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said was called to provide “an appropriate scientific atmosphere for scholars to offer their opinions.” In fact, the 67 attendees included an array of people denying that six million Jews were systematically killed by the Nazis during World War II. Eldad Pardo, an Iran specialist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, said Holocaust denial in Iran ran deeper than presidential statements. Iranian anti-Semitism stemmed both from the traditional Shi'ite outlook on Jews as "impure" and a more modern, Fascist version of anti-Semitism imported from Europe."There‘s certainly a need for this new YouTube channel," Pardo told The Media Line. "Since 2005, when Ahmadinejad came to power there has been a noticeable intensification in anti-Semitic rhetoric. No Iranian President has spoken like this before."
