Editorial: Appalling beyond belief

Thursday, Dec. 14, 2006 | 7:21 a.m.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has renewed his ongoing, sick tirade against Israel by hosting a two-day gathering this week of people who deny the Holocaust ever happened.

In greeting participants who gathered in his office Tuesday, Ahmadinejad said that "humanity will achieve freedom" once Israel ceases to exist, adding that Western society had sought to dominate the Middle East through Holocaust propaganda.

It was earlier this year that Ahmadinejad called for the destruction of Israel. It's frightening to think what a man with this mind-set could be capable of if he had a nuclear weapon.

It is outrageous that the Iranian government sponsored a conference designed to promote the lie that the systematic murders of more than 6 million Jews during World War II was somehow a myth. To get an idea of the kinds of "scholars" who would attend such a sham conference, one was David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

The death camps where men, women and children were worked literally to death, the mass graves, the chambers where prisoners were gassed and the ovens where their bodies were cremated still exist. Tens of thousands of survivors still walk among us. Their ordeal is a very dark, and very real, part of history that cannot be forgotten, rewritten or revised - no matter how distant it becomes. And the ravings of a madman such as Ahmadinejad can't change that.