Iran launches website to undermine Holocaust

BERLIN, GERMANY: Iran has started a website with cartoons on the Holocaust aimed at undermining the historic dimensions of the mass murder of Jews during World War II, Fars news agency reported Thursday.

The site - http://holocartoons.com - is financed by a non-governmental cultural foundation and mainly based on a cartoon book on the Holocaust published in 2008 which contained satirical cartoons and texts aimed at questioning the Holocaust and how the issue was allegedly used by Israelis.

The website, which opens to the Pink Panther Theme by Henry Mancini, reportedly wants to continue challenging the issue and show that "the killing of 6 million Jews in the Second World War known as the Holocaust was a sheer lie."

"The site is dedicated to all those who have been killed under the pretext of the Holocaust," Fars reported, referring to Palestinians who, according to Iran, were killed under the Holocaust pretext.

The Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Centre in Jerusalem said in response that the website was "yet the latest salvo emanating from Iran that denies the facts of the Holocaust and attempts to influence those who are ignorant of history."

"The vulgar and cynical approach of the website, a combination of Holocaust denial and distortion, illustrated with antisemitic caricatures, further illustrates Iran's disregard for reality and truth vis-a-vis the Holocaust, Jews and Israel," Yad Vahsem said in a statement issued Thursday afternoon.

Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran has not acknowledged Israel as a sovereign state and even refrained from using the name Israel, instead referring to the Jewish state as the "Zionist regime".

The tensions reached a peak in 2005 when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad started his anti-Israel tirades, calling the Holocaust a "fairy tale".

Iran hosted a Holocaust conference in Tehran in December 2006 which was attended by prominent anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi figures.

Ahmadinejad and other Iranian officials argue that while publishing insulting cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad and humiliating the sentiments of over one billion Muslims is considered by the West as press freedom, an investigation of a historic event is considered a crime.

Ahmadinejad further says that even if the Nazi's mass murder was true, those responsible for the crime should be punished but Israel should not be allowed to use it a pretext to turn the Palestinian territories into a second Holocaust.