Questioning the Israeli Spin

Ignoring reactions from the West, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is determined to challenge the accepted narrative of the Holocaust. In his last message to a conference called "Holocaust: West's Holy Lie" in Tehran, Ahmadinejad stressed that questioning the Holocaust is akin to attacking the heart of the Zionist regime. This statement does not derive from Ahmadinejad's philosophy or historical investigations but from his political convictions.

The main purpose of the Iranian president in questioning the Holocaust is to show how a historical event has been perverted to pursue the colonialist objectives of the Israeli regime or what is referred to as the "Holocaust Industry". This, however, has been wrongly implied to be Iran's efforts for wiping Israel off the map.

This allegation is not backed by the country's history. Iran has not attacked any country in the last few hundred years and its officials, especially after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, have stressed that the country is seeking peace with all nations, except the Israeli occupying regime.

In fact, Holocaust has become the Israeli cause célèbre which continues to bring numerous benefits to the regime from the international community.

This is while the Islamic Republic of Iran has been threatened with military attacks by a number of enemies, with Israel topping the list.

The root cause of this enmity is not historical. Many Israelis consider post-revolution Iran inimical to the regime's existence. They have been fed the lie that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons solely to use them against Israel. The Western media, working under the influence of the lobbies, have played an important role in rallying the world public opinion against Iran.

According to the Wikipedia website, 90 percent of the world's media market is owned by nine conglomerates, which constantly present Iran as a regional threat to its Arab neighboring countries.

For example, the insistence of the Iranian president on defending the country's legitimate right to nuclear technology and defying western pressure has been manipulated to present Iran as a threatening and destabilizing force. This trend has continued ever since the Islamic Revolution's victory in 1979.

The first clear example of this media spin was the wrong translation of President Ahmadinejad's statement on Israel. In his speech at the "World without Zionism" conference in 2005, he said, "The Imam (Khomeini) said that the regime occupying Beit-ul-Moqaddas (Jerusalem) must vanish from the page of time."

And the Western media mistranslated the sentence as "Israel must be wiped off the map".

Professor Juan Cole of University of Michigan said soon after that Ahmadinejad did not say he was going to "wipe Israel off the map" because no such idiom exists in Persian. Cole said, "He did say he hoped its regime, for example the Jewish-Zionist state occupying Beit-ul-Moqaddas, would collapse."

This shows how the media can affect public opinion by distorting news. The same goes about his comments on the Holocaust.

Most Israelis have a different perspective about themselves. Some of them believe that the occupied territories are their ancestral heritage occupied after the invasion of Muslims more than 1,400 years ago. Therefore, they believe, it has to be taken back from the people living there and that's why they call it "Homeland of the Jewish People". This concept is enshrined in the Israeli national policy and touted by many of its public and national institutions.

Codified in the "Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel" in 1948, the Knesset turned it into a law in 1950 by giving every Jew throughout the world the right to come to this occupied territory.

Adi Liberman from Bar Ilan University, Israel's second largest academic institution, believes that God made a covenant with Prophet Abraham, saying: "To your descendants, I have given this land, from the river of Egypt as far as the great river of Euphrates." She said Israelites have been exiled and scattered for the last 3,000 years and that Jews have the right to come back to their "homeland" for the same reason. If that was the case, why does the Israeli regime pay Jews and offer incentives to lure them to the occupied lands?

The simple fact is that historical links do not create any right. An example is Iran some 2,500 years ago when the Persian Empire controlled Israel, Turkey, Rome, Afghanistan, Greece and many other regional lands. Should Iran claim that these countries belong to it today? The answer is clear. No!

"Self-victimization" has been one of the tools used by the Israeli regime to translate its objectives into reality. Researching the historical roots of the term "anti-Semitism" clarifies the fact that some radical conservative Jewish groups invented it to play victim and attract public support. The main reason for inventing this term is to suppress all criticism.

Muslims and Christians have also been subject to the same attacks and discrimination throughout history, but they never rebuffed them as anti-Semitism. The truth is that Muslims, Christians and Jews can live together peacefully, as they have proven it historically.

Moreover, Iran today is home to the most populated Jewish community in the Middle East, after Israel. But the problem with the leaders of the Israeli regime is that they kill Palestinians in the name of fighting terror. They expel and massacre Muslim Palestinians from their own lands under the excuse of providing security to Israeli civilians. This has been denounced by even human rights groups and activists inside Israel.

A recent analysis from Middle East Economic and Political Analysis Company suggests that Israel withdrew from the West Bank to gain a Jewish majority.

"In the long run, Israel will have no choice but to leave the West Bank," notes a recent article.

"On numerous occasions, Israeli politicians such as Shimon Peres and Tzipi Livni have maintained that Israel would have to withdraw from the West Bank in order to maintain Israel's Jewish majority."

In summation, Israeli politicians have no choice but to reconsider their colonialist policies toward Palestinians, because these policies are not sustainable. If that does not happen, Ahmadinejad's prediction that the Zionist regime would disintegrate like the apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Union will become a reality.