"Irans president,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, portrays participants like David Duke, the former Louisiana Klan leader, and Robert Faurisson of France, who has devoted his life to trying to prove that the Nazi gas chambers were a myth, as silenced truth-tellers whose stories expose Western leaders as the hypocrites he considers them to be.
Just as Soviet leaders used to invite Americans who suffered racial or political discrimination to Moscow to embarrass Washington, Mr. Ahmadinejad seems to enjoy pointing out that countries like Germany, France and Austria claim to champion free debate yet have made Holocaust denial illegal.
He has also repeatedly tried to draw a moral equivalency between questioning the Holocaust and the decision in Europe last year to publish cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad. It wins him favor at home and across the Arab world for standing up to the West and allows him to present himself as morally superior to the West.
But there is another important point. Mr. Ahmadinejad actually seems to believe that the volumes of documentation, testimony and living memory of the Nazi genocide are at best exaggerated and part of a Zionist conspiracy to falsify history so as to create the case for Israel. As a former member of the Revolutionary Guards, he was indoctrinated with such thinking, a political analyst in Tehran said, and as a radical student leader, he championed such a view.
Now he has a platform to promote the theories and to try to position himself regionally as the reasonable man who is asking hard questions."
Others see an even more ambitious post-Iraq agenda reflected in Mr. Ahmadinejads high profile on the issues of Jews, the Holocaust and Israel.
It is for public consumption in Arab countries, said Mustafa El-Labbad, editor of Sharqnameh, a magazine specializing in Iranian affairs and published in Cairo. It is specifically directed toward deepening the gap between the people and their regimes and toward embarrassing the rulers so that the regional power vacuum, especially after Iraq, can be filled by Iran.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/world/middleeast/14holocaust.html?ref=world