If President Obama really wants to reach out to Muslim world, here’s something he should look for ways to reach out and stop cold: Yet another round of Holocaust denial, from Iran’s Holocaust-denier-in-chief, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Now running for re-anointment (as my colleague Michael Ledeen points out, “re-election” isn’t really a word that applies), Ahmadinejad repeated on Wednesday his claim that the Holocaust was a “big deception.”
This is quite horrible enough, coming from a strutting, messianic, nuclear-obsessed despot belonging to a regime that would like to blot out Israel.
But Elie Wiesel — a Nobel laureate and a survivor of the Holocaust in which six million Jews were murdered — offers a theory even more chilling about why Ahmadinejad, while setting the stage for a second Holocaust, finds it so compelling to keep denying that there ever was one. Speaking at a Hudson Institute luncheon in New York on April 30th, Wiesel offered his view that Ahmadinejad is after his own monstrous version of personal glory:
Wiesel said his guess is that Ahmadinejad “wants to enter the history books as the only one who destroyed the Jews.”
Ergo — according to Wiesel’s theory — in Ahmadinejad’s scheme of the universe, there is no room to admit that Hitler already set the bar.
Wiesel went on to warn that there is a chronic tendency to think such things could never happen, to believe that fanatics such as Ahmadnejad, or his patron Ayatollah Khamenei, don’t really mean what they say. Wake up, says Wiesel: Ahmadinejad “is clear. He means it.”
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