Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Just a month ago Mohammad Ahmadinejad, the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, stood with a former head of the Ku Klux Klan of America, David Duke, in Tehran. This was the first time ever that a Holocaust denial conference was supported by a sovereign state.

Iran is a sorry modern-day inheritor of the great civilisation of Persia. As many Persians in that unnecessarily economically and technologically backward society recognise, this disgraceful conference, sponsored by their country, is a cruel attempt by the mullahs to murder the memory of the six million Jews and five million other people murdered by the Nazis. Iran’s apologia for Nazism, a tyranny all civilised people regard as a paradigm of evil, will leave a longstanding stain on the history of Persia. Normally, Australians and others in the democratic world would ignore such a gathering of cranks, fools and fantasists, but Iran’s nuclear program forces the world to examine the views of its leadership.

Unfortunately, all serious analysts have come to the conclusion that there is a conceptual link between Ahmadinejad’s threats to destroy the Jewish state, of which this sponsorship of the holocaust denial conference is archetypal, and Iranian attempts to acquire atomic weapons. With this disgusting and demeaning lie, especially to many of the people in my electorate who are survivors, Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, seeks to denigrate the suffering of a people even more ancient than his own.

The current leaders of Iran are not guided by the rational considerations that inform the democratic world in Europe, North America or East Asia, or even other authoritarian leaders such as Russia’s Putin or China’s Hu Jintao. Iran’s leaders believe that the Hidden Imam, the ninth century descendent of the Prophet Muhammad, will return to earth whereupon all people will adopt Shiism and they will rule the earth.

Yes, these propositions sound equally mad not just in democracies such as Europe and Australia but even to the communist rulers in China and to the authoritarian leadership in Russia. That is why, to the surprise of the ayatollahs, the UN Security Council, to its great credit, voted for sanctions on Iran on 23 December, just before Christmas. It is true that these sanctions may not be effective in getting Iran to stop its nuclear program, but I commend Australia and all other Western countries for imposing financial sanctions, restricting credits on Iranian banks, to try to slow the march of Iran towards atomic weapons. The nations that have imposed sanctions cannot discount that a majority of Iran’s leadership believe in the imminent return of the Hidden Imam, also known as the Mahdi.

As I said in an article in the Financial Review, it seems the key figures in the Iranian leadership see the destruction of Israel, even if it leads to a world war, as hastening the Mahdi’s return. In Ahmadinejad’s Weltanschauung—a German word meaning world view—even the destruction of large parts of Iran, in a nuclear exchange with Israel, would be a good thing if it brings the coming of the Mahdi. All of the Iranian leadership’s statements making existential threats to the modern Jewish state give the impression that this is their serious view. Hence a supposed moderate, the former President of Iran, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, said that a ‘nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran will leave nothing on the ground in Israel, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam’. These are very dangerous views. We have heard these views before in the history of the world.

Many of the people from my electorate have known all of their lives, as I have known, people who survived the Nazi death camps. Last night a thousand people gathered at the Melbourne Hebrew Congregation at the iconic dome synagogue in St Kilda Road to honour them, their testimony and the six million martyrs. On 30 January 1939, Hitler postured before the baying Nazi deputies of the Reichstag, promising ‘die Vernichtung der judischen Rasse in Europa’, the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe. These people mean what they say.

Apparently, even more than the December UN sanctions on Iran, Western financial disruption of Iran’s lines of credit have caused serious consternation in Tehran. Let us hope so. Australia understands—I have spoken to the Leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister about this and they understand—and I hope the world will understand, when Israel, the Jewish people and the world say, ‘Never again.’ (Time expired)