The Observer

World News

Holocaust conference defies fury

A conference of revisionist historians of the Holocaust is due to go ahead in Jordan today despite an international outcry.

Protests have already led the Lebanese government to ban it from Beirut.

Arab, Jewish and European intellectuals united in condemning the event, 'Revisionism and Zionism', which involves prominent individuals accused of Holocaust denial by their opponents.

The Lebanese Prime Minister, Rafiq Hariri, was forced to appear on CNN to announce the ban after Arab intellectuals condemned the conference organisers as anti-Jewish in the French newspaper, Le Monde. This weekend Ahmed Benani, president of the International Observatory of Palestinian Affairs, called on opponents of the original conference to petition Jordan in protest against its decision to allow the event to be rearranged in Amman. 'The contemporary Palestinian struggle ... should not be associated with Nazi criminals,' Benani said.

The conference is organised by the Swiss organisation, Truth and Justice, and the Institute for Historical Review, a pseudo-academic American think-tank devoted to the claim that the Holocaust was a hoax. It was seen as an opportunity for western revisionists to meet their counterparts in the Islamist movement.