Emory planning Holocaust site in Arabic

Site which focuses on debunking Holocaust denial also to be in Farsi.

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
holocaust conference 298 (photo credit: AP)
holocaust conference 298
(photo credit: AP)
Emory University is planning to translate a professor's Web site on Holocaust denial into Arabic, Farsi and other languages common to countries where anti-Semitic views are widespread. Professor Deborah Lipstadt, who runs the site Holocaust Denial on Trial (www.hdot.org), said she hopes the translations will provide resources to people who have no historical accounts of the Holocaust in their native tongue. "I'm convinced that there are people in predominantly Muslim countries, especially in the Middle East, who are being inundated with Holocaust deniers' claims and don't know that the deniers are fabricating and distorting," she said in a news release. She pointed to last week's gathering of Holocaust deniers in Iran - an event supported by Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - as evidence that such viewpoints are gaining strength throughout the Muslim world. Robert Paul, dean of Emory College, said the university is creating a $2 million (€1.52 million) endowment to help enhance the Web site. The site's stance on anti-Semitic views could create some security concerns for the university, he said. "That's always a threat, but that's the risk you take in a free society," he said in a telephone interview. The university will use scholars in its various foreign language departments to do the translation. The Web site provides the legal and historical documents from the trial where right-wing British historian David Irving sued Lipstadt for libeling him in her book 1994 book "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory." In a highly publicized 2000 decision, a British court ruled in Lipstadt's favor and declared Irving a Holocaust denier and racist. Earlier this year Irving was sentenced to three years in an Austrian prison for denying the Holocaust - a crime in the country where Hitler was born. The enhanced Web site will include a subject-specific resource guide with all information in Farsi, Arabic, Russian and other languages. It also will have lesson plans on the Holocaust for teachers.