Poland Welcomes Ahmadinejad With Open...Contempt

Ahmadinejad's plan to send a delegation to Poland to investigate the Holocaust has triggered a mixed reaction.

A mix of anger, contempt, disgust...

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."

..."We will never allow the delegation headed by Ahmadinejad to visit this centre," the museum [of Auschwitz] 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."

Apparently Poland is not alone in having issues with Ahmadinejad. There was a meeting over this past weekend of the European Jewish Congress and they had some ideas of their own:

Leaders of thirty-eight Jewish communities from around Europe called for the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be declared “Persona Non Grata Ad Personam” in European territory, during the European Jewish Congress (EJC) Extraordinary General Assembly, held Sunday, February 19th, 2006 in Vienna.

Austria currently holds the presidency of the rotating Council of the European Union, and as part of the General Assembly, a delegation led by EJC President Pierre Besnainou met over the weekend with the Austrian President Dr Heinz Fischer and Prime Minister Dr. Wolfgang Schüssel, to discuss both the Iranian President’s declarations calling for the destruction of Israel and his statements denying the Holocaust, as well as the future of European Union funding of a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.

According to the article, they got reassurances on Hamas, but it was the typical boiler-plate.

The EJC apparently started in 1986 and sees itself as a Jewish EU, but I haven't heard of them before. They do have a list of the 40 members here -- a map where you can click on any of the 40 countries listed and get some basic information on things like: Demography, History, Community, Culture and Education, Religious Life, Israel, Sites (geographical not virtural), and contact info.

Assuming Poland keeps to their refusal to allow Iran's Holocaust delegation in, Poland's actions will have more influence that the EJC.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Iran and Ahmadinejad and EJC and Holocaust and Poland.