HOLOCAUST `DISCUSSION' HATEFUL FARCE.

Byline: JONATHAN DOBRER Local View

THE Iranian government is producing a veritable festival of hate. Not satisfied with an ``art show'' featuring the most obnoxious and offensive stereotypes of Jews, it's moved on to a ``discussion'' of the Holocaust. The cast of characters -- actually mostly individuals without any true character -- is a pack of poor angry wretches who are starved for attention, including former KKK Grand Wizard, convicted felon and candidate for Congress David Duke.

Duke gives lie to the supposed purpose of the conference and its fatuous distinction between Zionists and Jews. Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, says he loves Jews but hates Israel and Zionists. Yet Duke shouts his compassion for the downtrodden Arabs (Iranians are not, by the way, Arabs) by telling them that he feels their pain at being occupied by Zionists because his country (the USA) is also occupied by Zionists.

Among the ''scholars'' they have assembled the main technique is to, in a lawyerly fashion, pick at nits in the Holocaust narrative. ``What if it weren't 6 million?'' If it were ``only'' 5.7 million ... well that would make 6 million a lie. There is one denier who proves that it is all an exaggeration because the trains coming into Auschwitz ``couldn't have carried the number claimed.'' Really?

This will come as news to my mother-in-law who, during the screening of ``Schindler's List,'' reacted with immediate recognition at the sight of the train station at Auschwitz. She and her friend and fellow survivor compared notes on the authenticity of Spielberg's re-creation. But maybe it's an implanted memory, and maybe the numbers tattooed on her arm are only decorative.

The greatest distraction that this conference creates is the charge that Jews misuse the Holocaust to justify everything that Israel or that Jews do. They claim we own our suffering and revel in it -- using it to let us do terrible things to others. This canard twists the deepest meanings of the Holocaust.

The slogan ``Never Again'' that came out of our experience in World War II was not meant just for Jews. It was to be a reminder of the terrible price of hate wherever, and at whomever, it is directed. The tragedy of the Holocaust is not simply that it happened to us, but that it happened, that human beings undertook the systematic destruction of their fellow humans.

Why are we always talking about the Holocaust, even well-meaning non- Jewish friends sometimes wonder: Is it to glory in our martyrdom or to assert some kind of special suffering?

We talk about it because it happened. It happened in the lifetime of people still alive to be witnesses. It happened in nations that should have been immune from such madness. It happened in Christian nations that believe that God chose a Jew in which to incarnate himself. It happened in cultured nations with histories of art, learning, science and reason.

The terrible lesson of the Holocaust, and why we keep touching on it, is the universal nature of our vulnerability -- and the fact that no religion, people or culture is immune from being either the victim or the perpetrator.

With the technology of our time we can do such devastating damage to the world. One wonders if the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not so horrify the world that we stifled our murderous impulses all through the Cold War. Must we relearn the terror of nuclear weapons by using them again? Must we have genocide in every generation or can we see the important truths through the loud denials of those who make human extinction more, rather than less, likely?

The Festival of Hate in Iran is an embarrassment to a great nation, which like Germany has high culture, impressive institutions of learning and a renowned tradition of art -- a nation whose religion's most frequently used words are ``In the name of God the Merciful the Compassionate.''

In the name of God, can we not learn to practice mercy and compassion?

The danger in denying the facts of the Holocaust is that it leaves all of us without its terrible truths -- the truths about what we are capable of doing. How then can we learn if we refuse to remember? How can we look forward with hope if we will not look back with candor?