Indigenization of the Holocaust and the Tehran Holocaust Conference: Iranian Aberration or Third World Trend?

• Published in: Human rights review (Piscataway, N.J.) N.J.), 2009-11, Vol.10 (4), p.505-519
• Main Author: Miles, William F. S.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Anti-Semitism; Asia; Conferences; Congresses and Conventions; Developing Countries; Development Aid; Education; Equality and Human Rights; Globalization; Historiography; Holocaust; Human Rights; Intellectuals; Intelligentsia; Iran; Knowledge; Philosophy; Political Philosophy; Social Justice; Social Philosophy; Terrorism and Political Violence
• ISSN: 1524-8879; 1874-6306
• DOI: 10.1007/s12142-008-0092-0

It is understandable that Iran’s December 2006 hosting of an international conference casting doubts on the historicity of the Holocaust would raise questions about treatments of the Shoah elsewhere in the Third World. In fact, indigenization the Holocaust—the manifold ways in which serious scholars, activists, and writers from Asia, Africa, and Latin America have come to incorporate the Holocaust in their intellectual work—has been positive overall. Within the framework of intellectual globalization, much of the Third World intelligentsia has come to include this most Western of human rights violations within the framework of their own cultures and histories. Although some of the indigenization of the Holocaust is political and instrumental, the deviant variant expressed at the Tehran Holocaust conference is atypical. Governmental respect for the memory of victims of genocide should be considered as an emerging human right.