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Why the neo-Nazis salute Iran’s President

Allister Heath

Wednesday, 31st May 2006

Would-be appeasers of Iran ignore its religious intolerance

Hjalmar Schacht, the Nazi economics minister, had many unusual interests but one was especially telling. He was fascinated with the theory, famously enunciated by King Darius the Great, that the Persians were of Aryan lineage, and argued that this made them the Nazis’ natural allies. So when in 1935 Shah Reza Pahlavi renamed his country Iran, which means Land of the Aryans in Farsi, he helped seal a pivotal alliance.

Seventy years later a shared anti-Semitism has spawned a new entente between Germany’s now thankfully small band of neo-Nazis and Tehran. Nazi thugs have promised to march in support of Iran at the Iran–Mexico World Cup match in Nuremberg on 11 June. In return, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad chose an interview with the German media at the weekend to question once more the reality of the Holocaust, and to say that if it did really happen, the Jews should be removed from Israel to Europe.

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