Inviting Ahmadinejad to the Holocaust Museum would be a smart move for Bush

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has expressed at least three opinions about his favorite subject, the Holocaust: (1) it’s a myth; (2) it’s humorous, and therefore a fitting subject for a cartoon contest; and (3) it’s real, but he doesn’t trust the reporting of historians and must see substantive evidence with his own eyes.

His visit to the United Nations on September 19 and 20, during which President Bush will also address the UN, is an opportunity for Bush to call Ahmadinejad’s bluff by inviting him on a tour of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.  No red carpet, no state dinner—just a solemn invitation to witness a massive collection of the solid documentation that “Holocaust scholar” Ahmadinejad has repeatedly claimed to be seeking.

Such an invitation would generate a repeat of the same heated debate that ensued in 1998 when the Clinton Administration wanted to take “peace partner” Yasser Arafat through the museum (permission was eventually granted, but Arafat’s staff said he did not have time for the visit). The opposing views were summed up well during a friendly on-air debate between conservative White House correspondent/radio-show host Les Kinsolving and liberal journalist Ellen Ratner. Wouldn’t it be a horrific disgrace, Kinsolving asked, to allow the world’s worst terrorist mass murderer to visit the Holocaust Museum?  “I’d take Hitler through there,” replied Ratner.   

These clashing viewpoints were echoed earlier this year in the reactions of Europeans to one of Ahmadinejad’s obscene “educational” inquiries. On February 20, Italy’s AFI reported:

Poland harshly criticised Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's announcement that he would send a delegation to the European country “to verify the real dimension of the Holocaust.” The influential Warsaw-daily Gazeta Wyborcza defined “inadmissible” the hypothesis of a visit by the delegation to former concentration camps “to look for information supporting an absurd and hallucinating thesis” Polish foreign minister Stefan Meller for his part called “crazy the Iranian committee's idea to go to Auschwitz-Birkenau to count the dead.”

The committee managing the museum of Auschwitz also said it was against the visit.

“We will never allow the delegation headed by Ahmadinejad to visit this centre,” the museum said in a statement. “We preserve the memory of over one million victims and mean to block the way to anyone wanting to shed doubts on the Holocaust.”

Ironically, less than a week earlier, a German Muslim cultural institute that condemns Ahmadinejad as “a disgrace for all the world’s Muslims” dared him to visit Auschwitz. “In this place of horror he can again deny the Holocaust, if he has the courage,” declared a spokesman for the Islam-Archiv-Deutschland Central Institute.

Both sides have a valid point. The presence of a mass murderer like Arafat or Ahmadinejad in a death camp or a Holocaust museum would, in a sense, defile it; yet isn’t the highest purpose of such sites to educate the ignorant, the misinformed, and the bigoted?

Ignore or invite? Sometimes the answer can include both. Earlier this month, the Associated Press reported:

The International Auschwitz Committee said Wednesday that it thanked German Chancellor Angela Merkel for ignoring a letter in which Iran's hard-line president questioned the Holocaust and Israel's right to exist.

The committee's president, Noach Flug, sent a letter to Merkel thanking her for showing an “unambiguous attitude...toward Holocaust survivors and the Jewish people,” by ignoring the letter and voicing her support for Israel, according to spokesman Christoph Heubner.

Yet the same article reveals, “Flug has recently appealed to Ahmadinejad to make a trip with Holocaust survivors to Auschwitz.”

A similar kind of invitation by Bush, of course, would not be intended to “change” Iran’s president but rather to shine a spotlight on his dangerous fanaticism while the world is watching. Ahmadinejad has enhanced his stature over the past year by playing a clever public-relations game in the form of letters to Bush, debate challenges, and the “60 Minutes” interview. A US public-relations counteroffensive is overdue.

Would it be a “moral outrage” to conduct any kind of relationship with a murderous, thoroughly evil regime? Such a question is now irrelevant, since that line has already been crossed. Just last April, the White House hosted Chinese President Hu Jintao, whose genocidal regime had just days earlier raided a Christian church meeting and reportedly arrested and tortured 80 pastors.

This week’s magnified spotlight on US-Iran relations also offers Bush a valuable opportunity to reach out to the freedom-craving majority of Iranians. As Dr. Manouchehr Ganji, Secretary General of the Organization for Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms for Iran (derafsh.org), recently wrote,“What the democracy movement in Iran needs is for the European Union and the United States to speak with one voice and adopt a common policy of support for its operation in Iran.…Today, at least 70 percent of Iranians would help the democracy movement succeed if they could be convinced that it has the support of the West for the long haul.”

 The slogans chanted by Iranian student protestors during 1990s protests—“Liberty or death” and “Long live liberty, death to despotism”—trace their origins to the 1906 Iranian Constitutional Revolution that captured the imagination of much of the world beyond Iran. What better time to visibly and loudly commemorate that shining moment, and show solidarity with its courageous heirs, than during its centennial anniversary?

Finally—and painfully—now is the time to strengthen the American bond with the Iranian democracy movement by officially apologizing for the US role in the 1953 overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a figure beloved by these young idealists (but hated by the mullahs—Ayatollah Khomeini refused to allow a street to be named after him). It is vital to make the distinction that it was not “we,” the American people, who committed this evil act (despite attempts by some on the America-hating far left to assign collective blame), but rather a lawless element of a government agency two generations ago. An apology from the US government to the people of Iran, like President Clinton’s apology for slavery, would be a healing, bridge-building act that has no downside and is the right thing to do. 

Is it conceivable that President Bush would apologize on our behalf for the evil actions of a handful of bad apples? He already did once, in his apology for the abuses committed at Abu Ghraib prison. He can do so again.

As it now stands, it is virtually inevitable that the US or Israel will need to take the dangerous defensive step of knocking out Iran’s nuclear facilities in the near future. (“Pre-emptive war” would be a misnomer for such an attack, since Iran has been waging a decades-long, one-sided war, killing countless innocent Israelis, as well as Americans, Argentines, French, etc., through its Hezbollah and Hamas proxies, without ever being struck back.) The only alternative to war is to encourage and strengthen the tens of millions of pro-democracy Iranians while shrewdly exercising creative diplomacy to expose the evil lunacy of Ahmadinejad to a world still largely in denial.