The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, IranWire.com and the Arolsen Archives announced a new educational project on “Iranian victims of Nazi persecution” earlier this week.
Founded in 2013, IranWire is a “collaborative news website” run by Iranian diaspora journalists and citizen journalists in Iran, and the Arolsen Archives-International Center on Nazi Persecution, an online archive that fields questions about some 20,000 Nazi victims annually, is based in the German town of Bad Arolsen.
The new collaboration is part of the Sardari Project, which “seeks to engage with young Iranians about the history and lessons of the Holocaust, the dangers of unchecked hatred, conspiracy theories, propaganda and more.”
“The Holocaust was an event of worldwide significance; Jews and other victims of the Nazis came from all corners of the globe,” stated Tad Stahnke, director of international educational outreach in the Holocaust Museum’s Levine Institute for Holocaust Education.
“Helping Iranians look into the historical connections with the Holocaust and Nazi racism is a key part of our effort to underline the global relevance of the Holocaust,” he said.
The project is named for Abdolhossein Sardari, an “Iranian diplomat in Paris who worked to aid Iranian and Central Asian Jews under Nazi occupation in occupied France,” per the museum.
“At a time when we witness horrifying levels of antisemitism, Islamophobia and other kinds of hatred around the world, we at IranWire feel that it is our duty to discuss the lessons of the Holocaust, and how hate speech, hateful ideas and hateful regimes can cause unimaginable tragedies,” stated Maziar Bahari, founder of IranWire.
“The Islamic Republic is the only regime whose leaders regularly deny the Holocaust and invest millions of dollars every year in producing Holocaust-denying and antisemitic productions,” he added. “We are proud to be the only media outlet in the Middle East to regularly produce articles, videos and other types of content about the crimes of the Nazi regime and its allies and their victims.”
