December 13, 2006
Media Announcement — For Immediate Relase
JCRC condemns the Holocaust-denial conference now taking place in Teheran organized by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Participants in the conference include former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and Holocaust-deniers from around the world. Holocaust-denial, which seeks to minimize or negate the genocide by Nazi Germany of millions of Jews during World War II, is a form of anti-Semitism.
According to Rev. Doug Huneke, Pastor of the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tiburon who researches, writes and speaks about Christian rescuers during the Holocaust and is the author of The Moses of Rovno, the biography of late San Francisco resident, Herman Graebe, and a significant German Holocaust-era rescuer,
“…the Teheran conference calls Mr. Graebe and the thousands of rescuers liars: that what they witnessed they did not really witness and the atrocities about which they testified did not really occur. Worse, President Ahmadinejad dares to tell the survivors that their experience was a fantasy. There is no morality or truth in this man’s assertions. The aim of the conference and the deniers is to further the causes of their hatred and their desire to destroy Israel and all things Jewish — curiously, the same goals as Hitler.”
President Ahmadinejad has repeatedly called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” and for the ethnic cleansing of Israeli Jews. The Teheran Holocaust-denial conference is another step in a well planned process; creating a suitable background and public set of mind open to the spread anti-Semitism globally and the de-legitimization of the State of Israel. JCRC calls upon all people of good will to fight this insidious and dangerous global propagation of anti-Semitism.
—Yitzhak Santis
Director, JCRC Middle East Project
The Jewish Community Relations Council is the central public affairs arm of the organized Jewish community, representing more than 80 synagogues and Jewish organizations in the Bay Area on pubic affairs issues.
JCRC is a beneficiary agency of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties and the Jewish Community Federation of the Greater East Bay.