| This has potential to be humorous. |
A two-day conference on the Holocaust, starting in Tehran tomorrow, has attracted considerable suspicion abroad. The Foreign Affairs Ministry, which is running the event, says 67 international researchers will attend, including some from Britain and Germany. Mr Ahmadinejad has been condemned on the eve of the conference by Mahmoud al-Safadi, who was sentenced to 27 years by Israel for throwing Molotov cocktails during the 1988 intifada. In an open letter to the Iranian president, he says that Mr Ahmadinejad's stance is a "great disservice to popular struggles the world over".
"Perhaps you see Holocaust denial as an expression of support for the Palestinians," he writes. "Here, too, you are wrong. We struggle for our existence and our rights, and against the historic injustice that was dealt us in 1948."Our success and our independence will not be gained by denying the genocide perpetrated against the Jewish people, even if parts of this people are the very forces that occupy and dispossess us to this day."
Mr Safadi says that reading the works of Arab intellectuals helped convince him that the Holocaust was a historical fact.