ATLANTA - 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, 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's undergraduate college, said the university is creating a $2 million endowment to help enhance the Web site. ...
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The Web site provides the legal and historical documents from the trial where right-wing British historian David Irving sued Lipstadt for libeling him in her book 1994 book "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault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.
If there is ever going to be reform in the Arab and Muslim worlds, the Internet is going to be an important component.
This is a great idea.