Fun Fact #9: Iranian President Speaks at Columbia U

Two delightful questions posed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at Columbia University today:

I'm not entirely sure he proclaimed the Holocaust as fiction, but if he doesn't question it entirely,

he certianly questions its cause, timing and effect.

"My first question was, if, given that the Holocaust is a present reality of our time, a history that occurred, why is there not sufficient research that can approach the topic from different perspectives? Our friends refer to 1930 as the point of the departure for this development; however, I believe the Holocaust, from what we read, happened during World War II after 1930 in the 1940s. So, you know, we have to really be able to trace the event."

Is he saying that he thinks the Jews were imprisoned for some just cause, but the advent of WWII invoked Nazi Germany to exterminate their prisoners?

My question was simple. There are researchers who want to push the topic from a different perspective. Why are they put into prison? Right now there are a number of European academics who have been sent to prison because they attempted to write about the Holocaust, so researchers from a different perspective, questioning certain aspects of it -- my question is, why isn't it open to all forms of research? I have been told that there's been enough research on the topic. And I ask, well, when it comes to topics such as freedom, topics such as democracy, concepts and norms such as God, religion, physics even or chemistry, there's been a lot of research, but we still continue more research on those topics. We encourage it. But then why don't we encourage more research on a historical event that has become the root, the cause of many heavy catastrophes in the region in this time and age? Why shouldn't there be more research about the root causes? That was my first question.

Hmmm... that's enlightening! "Why are they put into prison?" He's searching for Hitler's "just cause". Well, pardon me, but I think it's pretty well documented... to the hilt.

"And my second question -- well, given this historical event, if it is a reality, we need to still question whether the Palestinian people should be paying for it or not. After all, it happened in Europe. The Palestinian people had no role to play in it. So why is it that the Palestinian people are paying the price of an event they had nothing to do with?"

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Palestinians aren't paying for the Holocaust... they're paying for their own terroristic acts... no?