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Ahmadinejad expected this year by Chavez in Caracas
CARACAS (WJC)—Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has said that he expected his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to visit Venezuela by the end of the year.
Chávez made the announcement on his weekly television and radio broadcast “Aló Presidente” while flanked by Iran’s ambassador to Venezuela, Amad Sobani. The Venezuelan leader visited Ahmadinejad in Tehran in September. Venezuela has built close relations with Iran in recent years, including the signing of numerous agreements to cement economic, political and military cooperation.
“Iran is attacked like us by the empire,” Chávez said during the program, referring to the United States. “We are accused of exporting terrorism, but they are the killers.” Iran’s spreading influence in South America has been causing concern both in the United States and Israel.
Israeli President Shimon Peres is expected to raise those concerns during an official visit to Brazil and Argentina, which are home to the largest Jewish populations in South America. Israel has not had diplomatic relations with Venezuela since
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January, when Chávez expelled the Israeli ambassador to protest against Israel’s war in Gaza. Peres is scheduled to give the first speech ever by an Israeli official to the Brazilian Parliament. He is leading a delegation that includes Israel’s tourism minister, business leaders and senior members of the Israeli defense industry.
Gathering plans protest if denier Irving comes to New York City
NEW YORK (Press Release)–The notorious Holocaust denier and antisemite David Irving is to give a secretive lecture in New York City this weekend and Holocaust survivors are calling for peaceful protest against “this person of hate and his hateful ideas.”
The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, representing 80,000 families across the country, underscored that Irving’s appearance in New York, home of the largest Survivor community in the nation, was “morally repellent and particularly offensive.”
The American Gathering is alerting venue owners to the possibility of inadvertently renting space to David Irving. He is on a so-called book tour and does not allow attendees to know where he will be until a few hours before the event.
Last month, he and his white supremacist friends tried to hijack the City Hall in Jackson, Mississippi for his talk. Following an appeal from the American Gathering to the mayor, Irving was a no-show and moved his “talk” to a Ridgeland hotel while warning that he would still be coming to New York. In Mississippi, he told the local newspaper that, “We sat around plotting as neo-Nazis do, [and] finding synagogues we can set on fire and tombstones that we can throw around.” A few weeks later in Palm Beach, his meeting ended with two attendees getting into a knife fight in an adjacent parking lot.
Irving is considered one leading advocates of Holocaust denial in the world. In 2000, Irving, who calls himself a Holocaust revisionist, sued Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for libel for calling him a denier and antisemite. The British courts found that Irving was an “active Holocaust denier,” as well as an antisemite and racist, and that he “associates with right-wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism.” The judge also ruled that Irving had “for his own ideological reasons persistently and deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence.” Irving was later jailed in Austria, in 2006, for his abhorrent views.
Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering said, “In making news of Irving’s planned appearance public, we hope to alert managers of public spaces of Irving’s surreptitious methods of engaging them. We believe that his message of hate should be protested and confronted by all peaceable and lawful means.”
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