The politics of genocide

The WaPo reports today on an Iranian conference on the Holocaust, billed as "a scholarly gathering aimed at discussing the Holocaust away from Western taboos[.]"

Which is all well and good. An honest discussion about the politics of the Holocaust - without the kneejerk accusations of anti-Semitism - is both important and necessary, I think, in order to even begin to resolve the tangled issues which have roiled the Middle East. Whether the experience of the Holocaust confers upon the state of Israel a special moral status should be open to question. However, the Iranian conference reliquished any notion of credibility when it came out that

the 67 participants from 30 countries were predominantly Holocaust deniers. They included David Duke - the former Louisiana state representative and Ku Klux Klan leader - and France's Robert Faurisson and Australian Frederick Toben, who was jailed in Germany in 1999 for questioning the Holocaust.

One can question the use of the Holocaust as the moral foundation for the Israeli state without denying the enormity of the tragedy for European Jews (and Slavs and Gypsies). However, engaging the argument with the blunt instrument of Holocaust denial reduces the discussion to a highly politicized anti-Semitic caricature which only reinforces the bloody status quo of Middle Eastern geopolitics.