To the naked eye, it might seem like today's big newsmakers are the Saints, William "Icebox" Jefferson, and Harry "Road Block" Lee. In fact, however, another local personality has reared his moderately ugly, poorly face-lifted head halfway around the world: in Tehran, at a conference on the Holocaust organized by the Iranian Foreign Ministry's Institute for Political and International Studies:
[Iran's] foreign ministry had said that 67 foreign researchers from 30 countries were scheduled to take part. Among those speaking today are David Duke, the American white-supremacist politician and former Ku Klux Klan leader....
Mr. Duke's remarks late this afternoon are expected to assert that no gas chambers or extermination camps were actually built during the war, on the ground that killing Jews that way would have been much too bothersome and expensive when the Nazis could have used much simpler methods, according to an advance summary of his speech published by the institute.
"Depicting Jews as the overwhelming victims of the Holocaust gave the moral high ground to the Allies as victors of the war, and allowed Jews to establish a state on the occupied land of Palestine," Mr. Duke's paper says, according to the summary.
The full speech is quite a read. Here's a sample:
...I know that the Zionist extremists lead my country to catastrophe in the Mideast and elsewhere around the world. I know that the Palestinian people, the Lebanese people, even the American people have been sacrificed on the altar of the Holocaust. It is the chronic media and government playing of the Holocaust that has blinded our eyes to new holocausts and new outrages.
As a truly patriotic American I oppose Americans being killed or maimed by the thousands in Iraq in war not for America, but for Israel. I am here because I love my country and oppose those who lead America and the world to ruin on behalf of Zionism. In Iraq too, Americans and countless Iraqis have been sacrificed on the ideological altar of the Holocaust, for the Holocaust and its chronic recital is used the justification of any Israeli treachery or crime against humanity.
The Zionist influenced [sic] media in America and Europe is trying to mislead the U.S. and Iran toward a war that would be catastrophic for your country, for my country and for the world. Here too images of a Holocaust against Jews are used to justify and promote a terrible war against Iran that would constitute new Holocaust, one against the Iranian people and indeed for all of us in the world.
I'm sure the Jews and gypsies and homosexuals will all get their turn at the microphone, though.
