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| By: Associated Press |
| Published: September 7, 2006 |
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The International Auschwitz Committee said Wednesday that it thanked German Chancellor Angela Merkel for ignoring a letter in which Iran's hard-line president questioned the Holocaust and Israel's right to exist.
The committee's president, Noach Flug, sent a letter to Merkel thanking her for showing an "unambiguous attitude...toward Holocaust survivors and the Jewish people," by ignoring the letter and voicing her support for Israel, according to spokesman Christoph Heubner.
The statement comes after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent Merkel a letter in July devoted largely to criticizing Israel and questioning the Jewish state's right to exist.
Merkel refused to respond to Ahmadinejad's comments, and stressed in an interview shortly afterward that Israel's right to exist remains a cornerstone of German policy. A government spokesman called the statement on Israel "unacceptable."
In the letter to the chancellor, sent Monday, Flug called Merkel's decision to ignore the letter an "appropriate decision."
"The Iranian government under the leadership of the president is striving to gain nuclear weapons, and at the same time makes new racist statements daily, while its paves the way to not only deny the Holocaust, but also to justify a new mass extermination of the Jewish people -- this time in Israel," Flug wrote.
Flug has recently appealed to Ahmadinejad to make a trip with Holocaust survivors to Auschwitz, one of several extermination camps that Nazi Germany set up on occupied Polish territory. Up to 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were killed there.
Ahmadinejad in the past has labeled the Nazi Holocaust a myth, and called for Israel's destruction, statements which Germany has consistently criticized. |
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