To the Editor:

Shiraz Dossa's essay on last year's Holocaust conference in Iran is filled with misrepresentations and simple factual errors, and demonstrates an appalling willingness to whitewash Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's universally recognized history of Jew-baiting and Holocaust denial.

There is no doubt that the Tehran conference was specifically convened to promote the view that the Holocaust is a hoax that Jews invented and imposed on the entire world. Although many of the Arab and Iranian participants at the conference were content to lambaste "global Zionism" for its role in promoting the "Holocaust story," six out of the seven major sessions of the two-day conference featured speeches by well-known Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis from western countries—including David Duke, Robert Faurisson and others—who attended the conference as guests of the Iranian government. The Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS), which convened the conference and invited the deniers, is directed by a branch of the Iranian Foreign Ministry—a fact that can be ascertained simply by looking at the IPIS website.

Nor was this the first time that Iran had sought out western Holocaust deniers to help propagandize its populace with anti-Jewish and anti-Israel messages. In the year leading up to the conference, Iran's semi-official Mehr News Agency broadcast interviews with at least six international Holocaust deniers. Several Iranian universities received as guest lecturers two Holocaust deniers who lugged with them a scale model of Auschwitz specially customized to omit the presence of gas chambers. All this, as well as Mr. Ahmadinejad's public attacks on Holocaust history, was public information well before the IPIS conference.

To our knowledge, Dr. Dossa was the only scholar from a mainstream western university to attend the conference. No doubt the organizers were delighted by the prestige his institutional affiliation lent the proceedings. Whether out of malice or foolishness, it is a service Dr. Dossa continues to willingly provide his hosts in Tehran.