Tehran, Iran, Mar. 01 – A government agency in Iran has launched a new book that sets out to prove the official position that the Holocaust was a “myth” and a “historical lie” that was concocted to justify the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. “The Place of Holocaust in the Zionist Project – Fact or Myth?” is the name of the new book published by the Islamic Revolution’s Documents Centre, a government agency headed by hard-line cleric Ruhollah Hosseinian. It is written by a little known author called Seyyed Mehdi Tarahi.In its Wednesday edition, the hard-line daily Kayhan, which reflects the views of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gave prominence to the new book, the latest in some 300 anti-Semitic books in Persian that adorn Tehran’s bookshops.
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The book, according to Kayhan, studies the “myth of Holocaust and the role it has played in cementing the political and economic basis of Israel”.
Iran’s state-run newspapers have given widespread coverage to allegations by Holocaust deniers who dispute the genocide of the Jews by Nazi Germany after hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed that the Holocaust was a “myth” and threatened that Israel must be “wiped off the map”. In addition to daily articles and commentaries in the government-owned press denying the Holocaust, the chairman of Iran’s cartoonists association, Masoud Shojai, set up a website, www.irancartoon.com, to put on display drawings and cartoons ridiculing the Holocaust.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry has announced plans to hold an anti-Holocaust conference in spring of this year to discuss “unresolved questions” about the Holocaust.