Ok. Last year Ahmadinejad came out and said that he doubted the Holocaust - either that it existed in the scale as historically before or not, that's not the focus.

I'm just... well, surprised to see Iran talk about protecting David Duke and other Holocaust doubters.

Instead of the usual suspects—deputy ministers and the like—the invitees seem to have included David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader; Georges Thiel, a Frenchman who has called the Holocaust "an enormous lie"; and Fredrick Töben, a German-born Australian whose specialty is the denial of Nazi gas chambers. The guest list was selective: No one with any academic eminence, or indeed any scholarly credentials, was invited...

And yet—this week's event has some new elements, too. This is, after all, an international conference, with foreign participants, formal themes ("How did the Zionists collaborate with Hitler?" for example), and a purpose that goes well beyond a mere denunciation of Israel. Because some former Nazi countries have postwar laws prohibiting Holocaust denial, Iran has declared this "an opportunity for thinkers who cannot express their views freely in Europe about the Holocaust." If the West is going to shelter Iranian dissidents, then Iran will shelter David Duke. If the West is going to pretend to support freedom of speech, then so will Iran. Heckled for the first time in many months by demonstrators at a rally yesterday, Ahmadinejad responded by calling the hecklers paid American agents: "Today, the worst type of dictatorship in the world is the American dictatorship, clothed in human rights." The American dictatorship, clothed in human rights spouting falsified history: It's the kind of argument you can hear quite often nowadays, in Iran as well as Russia and Venezuela, not to mention the United States.
Ok... now the inclusion David Duke really lowers the standards on how much attention should be paid to this... but what's the academic merit to all of this?

I won't lie to any of you... I sometimes doubt the final numbers sometimes, 6 million at a time where that would have been a huge city in the US now... but still. Just thought I'd ask if you guys knew how serious this was.

Read more here...

Feeling sorta stupid right now. I just never knew that this was internationally serious.