Germany un-invites Iranian Holocaust denier

The Hanns-Seidel Foundation had invited Dr. Seyed Rasoul Mousavi to a conference in Bavaria next week.

By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL JPOST CORRESPONDENT
Berlin holocaust memoria (photo credit: AP)
Berlin holocaust memoria
(photo credit: AP)
The Hanns-Seidel Foundation, a German government institution affiliated with the Christian Social Union, a part of Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling coalition, invited an internationally known Holocaust denier to a conference in Bavaria next week. He has now been un-invited. Dr. Seyed Rasoul Mousavi, of the Iranian Foreign Ministry and director of the Institute for Political and International Studies at Teheran's Center for Central Asian and Caucasus Research, was asked to deliver a talk on "Nuclear Proliferation as seen from Iran" in Wildbad Kreuth, near Austria, next Tuesday. He also spoke at the "World without Zionism" Holocaust denial conference in Teheran in 2006. Mousavi opened the Teheran conference, which drew some of the world's best known anti-Semites and proponents of Israel's destruction. Dr. Klaus Lange, head of the International Security Politics division at the Seidel Foundation, told The Jerusalem Post that Mousavi had now been disinvited. A spokesman for the Merkel administration told the Post that Mousavi's scheduled appearance prompted Dr. Erich Vad, a defense expert in Merkel's cabinet, to inform the foundation that he would cancel his own presentation if Mousavi attended the event. The presence of Mousavi at the government-financed conference might not have been noticed if the pro-Israel blog Lizas Welt had not placed the Seidel conference invitation on its Web site. The invitation and roster of participants from China, Pakistan and the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency seemed shrouded in secrecy and did not appear on the Seidel Foundation's Web site. When questioned why an Israeli expert was not invited to speak, the foundation's Klaus Lange said Seidel planned to hold a second expert forum next year and wanted to separate the "problematic nations" (Iran, Pakistan, India and China) from countries such as the US and Israel. Lange added that he was "personally convinced" that Iran was developing a nuclear bomb and distrusted the Iranians' assertion that their nuclear enrichment program was for civilian energy use.