More Holocaust Denial

And these people think by just talking they can get somewhere with him:-

Over the objections of the administration and Jewish groups that boycotted the event, Mr. Ahmadinejad, the man who has become the defiant face of Iran, squared off with the nation’s foreign policy establishment, parrying questions for an hour and three-quarters with two dozen members of the Council on Foreign Relations, then ending the evening by asking whether they were simply shills for the Bush administration.

Never raising his voice and thanking each questioner with a tone that oozed polite hostility, he spent 40 minutes questioning the evidence that the Holocaust ever happened — “I think we should allow more impartial studies to be done on this,” he said after hearing an account of an 81-year-old member, the insurance mogul Maurice R. Greenberg, who saw the Dachau concentration camp as Germany fell...

And Haas is Jewish!

The decision by the council’s president, Richard N. Haass, to invite Mr. Ahmadinejad to the session touched off a rare outcry protest in an organization whose meetings are usually as staid as the portraits of long-forgotten diplomats on its walls.

Mr. Haass, who ran the policy planning branch of the State Department during Mr. Bush’s first term, first had to fend off senior administration officials who had argued that he should not give Mr. Ahmadinejad the legitimacy of a hearing — especially with the likes of Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser under President Bush’s father, or Robert D. Blackwill, who directed Iraq policy at the White House under Condoleezza Rice.

“It’s fair to say that Dr. Rice thought this was a bad idea,” one senior State Department official said. “A really, really bad idea.”

So did leaders of several Jewish groups, whom Mr. Haass invited — and who promptly asked if the council would have invited Hitler in the 1930’s. “Some of us considered quitting to make it clear how offensive this is,” said Abraham H. Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who was one of the Jewish leaders whose attendance Mr. Haass sought.

But after a flurry of phone calls, including with Elie Wiesel, the writer and Holocaust survivor, they decided against a mass resignation — particularly after the council made the session a “meeting” rather than a dinner. (There were light hors d’oeuvres on the side; Mr. Ahmadinejad never touched them.)

“It is more offensive to break bread with the guy,” Mr. Foxman said. “I thought dinner was crossing the line.”

And he goes on:-

When Martin S. Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel, told Mr. Ahmadinejad that Iran “did everything possible to destroy’’ efforts to bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the president said, “If you believe Iran is the reason for the failure, you are making a second mistake.’’ Why, he asked, should the Palestinians be asked to “pay for an event they had nothing to do with’’ in World War II, saying that they had nothing to do with the systematic killing of Jews — if those killings, he added, had happened at all.

“In World War II about 60 million people were killed,’’ he said at one point, when pressed again on his refusal to accept that the Holocaust happened. “Two million were military. Why is such prominence given to a small portion of those 60 million?’’

A few minutes later, he asked a question himself: “In the Council on Foreign Relations, is there any voice of support for the Palestinians?’’

So, I sent the NYT this letter:-

In his verbal sparring with Martin S. Indyk during his meeting with the Council on Foreign Relations, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rhetorically asked "Why should the Palestinians be asked to 'pay for an event they had nothing to do with' in World War II, saying that they had nothing to do with the systematic killing of Jews" (Sept. 21). However, they certainly did play a part in the Holocaust.

As a result of three years of anti-British and anti-Jewish terror between 1936 - 1939, the Arabs of Palestine, in addition to killing over 500 Jews, so influenced British colonial policy that the gates of Mandate Palestine were closed to the Jews attempting then and later to flee Hitler and the Nazi 'final solution'. Out of 11 million Jews marked for death, the British permitted but 75,000 immigration certificates during the war.

Moreover, the leader of the Arabs of Palestine, Mufti Haj Amin El-Husseini, took refuge in Berlin, met with Hitler, expressed his ideological unity with Nazism, broadcast Arab-language support throughout the Middle East and personally mobilized Muslim troops in the Balkans and elsewhere to participate in the Holocaust.

I hope not all members of the CFR were fooled by Ahmadinejad's disjuxtapositioning.