The homepage of Yad Vashem's Farsi siteYad Vashem, the Jewish people's memorial to the Shoah in Jerusalem, recently launched a Farsi-language site with information about the Holocaust. Since it went online about two weeks ago, more than 20,000 people have accessed the site, including 6,000 from Iran. This is equivalent to the number of people who access the English-language site every year (Ha'aretz).
The Farsi site contains a history of the Holocaust as you might see it at the Yad Vashem museum, beginning in the late 19th century and including information about such events as the 1881 and 1905 anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia (see the first page). It covers the period of Hitler's rise to power and has a detailed section on such markers as the Nuremberg Laws. From there, it proceeds via the appeasement of the 1930s to the outbreak of World War Two, the literal ghettoization of the Jews in Poland, the murders of the Einsatzgruppen during the invasion of the USSR, the Wannsee Conference, and the extermination camps. The whole effort strikes me as a great response to appeal directly to Iranians, many of whom in any case believe that Ahmadinejad's negationist games are not only damaging to Iran's reputation but also morally reprehensible.
I would greatly appreciate hearing some reviews from those of you who read Farsi!
I am sure something like this has been attempted before, but perhaps it is worth another try to launch a similar site on the Armenian Genocide in Turkish.
2 comments:
President Ahmadinejad's real views are summarized on this website: ahmadinejadquotes.blogspot.com
Sure. Are you really trying to dispute Ahmadinejad's denial of the Shoah? I think it is well documented, and even on that site, you have plenty of very equivocal statements.
Just the other day, Ali Larijani was in top form with this kind of equivocation - from the Sueddeutsche Zeitung:
Er verstehe ,,die Empfindlichkeiten‘‘ nicht, wehrte sich Laridschani und versuchte, die auf ihn gerichteten Pfeile umzudrehen. Dabei nahm er für die Leugner des Holocaust ,,Meinungsfreiheit‘‘ in Anspruch und legte sich selbst nicht fest. ,,Ich spreche weder dafür noch dagegen‘‘, sagte er und fügte hinzu, ,,es gibt wichtigere Dinge‘‘
Paraphrase: Larijani defended those who denied the Holocaust and refused to express his own opinion in response to the question whether he negated the genocide of millions of Jews during WWII. "I am not for or against it," he said, "there are more important things."
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