Iran holds Holocaust conference

Well, after the fiasco this past September. Mr. Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President, has amazed us once again with the gathering of a Holocaust Conference this week in Tehran. Quoting from BBC's article and Independent:

President Ahmadinejad's long-promised Holocaust conference opened in Tehran yesterday to an audience including infamous revisionists, racists and anti-Semites. The only speakers who confirmed the Holocaust as a historical fact were a group of rabbis who criticised its use to justify Israeli abuses against Palestinians.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has questioned the scale of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews died.

Its main aim is to create an opportunity for thinkers who cannot express their views freely in Europe about the Holocaust

Participants include a number of well-known "revisionist" Western academics. American David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, is to present a paper.

But a number of Jewish rabbis are also there. One, British Rabbi Ahron Cohen, said he had come to the conference to put the "Orthodox Jewish viewpoint" across.

"We certainly say there was a Holocaust, we lived through the Holocaust. But in no way can it be used as a justification for perpetrating unjust acts against the Palestinians," he said.

I totally agree with what the rabbi said. I know Holocaust doesn't justify the oppression of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, but it does not give an excuse to deny it. Mr. Ahmadinejad will only further widens the existing rift between the west and east, and put Iran in an awkward position once again for its defense of the Palestinian and Iraq issue.

Once you've seen the horror, sorrow and misery the European Jews had to endure during World War II, I promise you that you would not wish to deny it in any way or form. This catastrophic event is something which we should remember by heart and hope the lesson learned would not allow it to repeat on the future generations. It is those who deny it are the true supporters of an oppressive regime and it is those who back it are the true followers of gender inequality and human rights abuse.

This also holds true for all other historic human rights violation, especially on Japan's repeatedly denial of the Nanjing Massacre and the use of women prisoners as "comfort women" during WWII.

History is a wonderful subject, it allows us to reevaluate our past mistake and improvise for the better. We should all learn from history for the betterment of the next generation. This is especially true with the current events, particularly in Global Warming. One well-documented example of how we could learn from the past is in Jared Diamond's book Collapse, where he examined historical evidences on what caused glorious societies of the past to collapse and how these could be correlated to today's world. It's an interesting and intriguing read. I highly recommend it for those who has an appetite for historical facts.