The following are excerpts from a TV discussion with Iranian political analysts Dr. Hasan Hanizadeh(1) and Dr. Ali-Reza Akbari, which aired on Jaam-e Jam 2 TV on December 20, 2005. The discussion began with the subject of the denial of the existence of crematoria at Auschwitz, and went on to explain in detail how Jewish rabbis in Europe used to kill children and take their blood for use during the Passover holiday...

Ali-Reza Akbari: ..."Perhaps the reason... In my opinion, the people who say that the phenomenon of burning Jews on German soil during the World War II crisis is similar to a holocaust do so as a result of propaganda and due to psychological reasons.

"In any event, a case of burning people has been registered in history, when many human beings were burned because of their beliefs. The people who were burned then were, in fact, Christians. They were burned by the people who ruled Yemen, who were Jews. This event took place 400 years before the advent of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula. Since then, the burning of human beings has been termed 'holocaust.'"

Host: "Were there six million Jews at all at that time, who could have been annihilated in the crematoria?"

Hasan Hanizadeh: "First of all, this figure is greatly exaggerated. The number of Jews in the world does not exceed 12 million. Only now, 57 years later, has it reached this figure. Clearly, at that time, considering the dispersion of the Jews, there could not have been six million Jews in Europe alone. In any event, the Zionist lobby and the Jewish Agency use this issue as a club with which they beat and extort the West.

"Unfortunately, the West has forgotten two horrendous incidents, carried out by the Jews in 19th-century Europe – in Paris and London, to be precise. In 1883, about 150 French children were murdered in a horrible way in the suburbs of Paris, before the Jewish Passover holiday. Later research showed that the Jews had killed them and taken their blood. This event caused riots in Paris back then, and the French government found itself under pressure.

"A similar incident took place in London, when many English children were killed by Jewish rabbis. These two incidents still haunt the minds and souls of the Europeans, but due to the growing influence of the Zionist lobby in Europe – or to be precise, the influence of the Jews – these two incidents are, unfortunately, never mentioned."

...The need to deny the Holocaust establishes the importance of the Holocaust. Ahmadinejad and his ilk need to call it a myth because if such a horrror actually happened the moral consequences would be too enormous to ignore. Why else say it's a myth? Denying the historical reality of the Holocaust concedes the moral arguments which flow from it. In much the same way hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue, Holocaust denial is the homage evil men pay to absolute standards of good and evil.

The deniers in the Arab world often tacitly acknowledge this by adding the contradictory argument that if it happened then Israel should set up shop in Austria or Germany.

Of course, all of this doesn't take place in a vacuum. There are other arguments for why Israel should be where it is and there are other reasons why people deny the Holocaust. But a more logically consistent anti-Israel stance would simply accept that the Holocaust happened and, well, so what? But they understand they can't make that argument, at least not on the world stage. We all know that for internal consumption, the Nazis still get a lot of applause in the Middle East...