Muslims, Thinkers And Anti-Semitism

Behind the scenes of Ahmadinejad's holocaust denial conference was the infrastructure of putting on conferences: Calling for papers, arranging facilities, printing programs, registering participants.

These jobs fell to the Iranian Institute for Political and International Studies, or IPIS, which is described by think tank folks as a mainstream Irianian interface with think tanks in other countries. Those think tanks weren't too happy with IPIS' involvement in the conference, reports Haaretz:

Nearly 40 European and North American research institutes will suspend contacts with a leading Iranian think tank that helped organize last week's conference in Tehran of Holocaust deniers, a Paris-based researcher said Saturday.

The institutes, from Warsaw to Washington and beyond, have agreed to suspend ongoing programs with the Iranian Institute for Political and International Studies, or IPIS, according to a statement issued by Francois Heisbourg, who organized the boycott.

It's always a bit surprising for me when I see mundane infrastructure functioning away behind despicable human behavior. Ironically, the same mundane infrastructure was behind both the holocaust and the conference denying the holocaust.

The 40 organizations that are now boycotting ISPS include:

John J. Hamre, head of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington; Volker Perthes, director of Berlin's Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik; Tomas Ries, director of the Swedish Institute for International Affairs; Ognyan Minchev, director of the Institute for Regional and International Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria; Gordon Smith of the Center for International Studies in Victoria, Canada; Eugeniusz Smolnar, director for the Centre for International Relations in Warsaw, Poland; Ross Babbage, director of Australia's Strategy International.

An array of French signers includes Thierry de Montbrial, director of the French Institute of International Relations.

The list is not complete, but I'm not seeing any Russian or Chinese think tanks on the list. Politics tank thinking in those countries. Also missing, of course, are any think tanks in Cairo, Damascus or Islamabad. Are any of you the least bit surprised by the lack of Islamic think tanks on the list?

If you are surprised, here's a good view into the truth of Islamic anti-Semitism, by Ayaan Hirsi, a Somali who served in the parliament of the Netherlands and authored the soon to be released book, Infidel. In today's LATimes, Hirsi discusses what childhood is like in Islamic countries:

As a child growing up in Saudi Arabia, I remember my teachers, my mom and our neighbors telling us practically on a daily basis that Jews are evil, the sworn enemies of Muslims, and that their only goal was to destroy Islam. We were never informed about the Holocaust.

Later, as a teenager in Kenya, when Saudi and other Persian Gulf philanthropy reached us, I remember that the building of mosques and donations to hospitals and the poor went hand in hand with the cursing of Jews. Jews were said to be responsible for the deaths of babies and for epidemics such as AIDS, and they were believed to be the cause of wars. They were greedy and would do absolutely anything to kill us Muslims. If we ever wanted to know peace and stability, and if we didn't want to be wiped out, we would have to destroy the Jews. For those of us who were not in a position to take up arms against them, it was enough for us to cup our hands, raise our eyes heavenward and pray to Allah to destroy them.

Western leaders today who say they are shocked by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's conference this week denying the Holocaust need to wake up to that reality. For the majority of Muslims in the world, the Holocaust is not a major historical event that they deny. We simply do not know it ever happened because we were never informed of it.

Hirsi wonders why all this fanaticism exists, because, after all are only 12 or 15 million Jews and 1.5 billion Muslims. Simple enough: Without Jews, Arab leaders would have no one to blame their failures on and their people's anger would turn to where it belongs: Them.

Related Tags: Islam, Anti-Semitism, Ahmadinejad, Iran