The government of Israel on Monday strongly condemned Iran for hosting an international conference questioning whether the Nazis used gas chambers to kill Jews during the Holocaust.

The foreign ministry called the conference, which opened Monday in Tehran amid international protests, a "shameless initiative taken by the Iranian government."

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the destruction of Israel and compared it to Auschwitz, is "falsifying the past and the present," said the foreign ministry in a statement.

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"The statements and acts by the Iranian president are clearly counter-factual and stand in stark contradiction to history, as endorsed unanimously by the international community," it said.

"By denying or questioning the Holocaust, the most extreme form of genocide to date, [Ahmadinejad] is challenging the essence of the notion of universal human rights, which was developed by the international community after - and because of - the Shoah," added the statement.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert earlier Monday called the convention "a disturbing event which shows the depth of hatred and the radical fundamentalism within the Iranian government."

Meanwhile, the Simon Wisenthal Center on Monday called for signatories to a petition to the United Nations condemning the conference. The center has also organized a convention "simultaneous to the Tehran hate-fest," it said, called Witness To The Truth.

The center's conference will operate by video conference in Los Angeles, New York and Toronto, and will bring together "Holocaust survivors whose first hand accounts of the horrors of the Nazis' Final Solution will expose and debunk the deniers."

Jewish rabbis were present at the Iranian government-sponsored event, entitled "Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision," alongside academics from Europe, where some countries have made it a crime to deny the Nazi killing of 6 million Jews from 1933 to 1945.

The organizers, the Iranian Foreign Ministry's Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS), say the two-day conference has drawn 67 foreign researchers from 30 countries.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said that if the conference decides that the Holocaust did in fact take place, Iran will endorse this conclusion.

The U.S. State Department, German Foreign Ministry and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan have expressed deep reservations regarding the event, which was initiated by the Iranian Foreign Ministry. Some 67 guests from 30 countries have been invited to attend.

The event has also drawn widespread criticism from Holocaust survivors, Jewish organizations and human rights group.

In Israel, the official Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem issued a statement on Monday condemning the Tehran conference as an attempt to "paint [an] extremist agenda with a scholarly brush."

"The Iranian governments pseudo-academic conference, 'Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision,' is an effort to mainstream Holocaust denial and must be unequivocally rejected," Yad Vashem said in its statement.

Mottaki dismissed the foreign criticism as "predictable," telling conference delegates in a speech that there was "no logical reason for opposing this conference."

The conference was initiated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who has said that the killing of six millions of Jews by the Nazi regime during World War II was a "myth" and "exaggerated."

"The aim of this conference is not to deny or confirm the Holocaust," Mottaki said in his welcome address. "Its main aim is to create an opportunity for thinkers who cannot express their views freely in Europe about the Holocaust."

Mottaki is scheduled to read a message from Ahmadinejad at the conference later on Monday.

IPIS chief who opened the conference said the gathering seeks to provide an opportunity to discuss the Holocaust in what he called "freedom."

Sessions at the two-day conference were to include "Holocaust: Aftermath and Exploitation" and "Demography: Denial or Confirmation?"

Among the participants was U.S. academic David Duke, a former Louisiana Republican Representative and Ku Klux Klan leader. He praised Iran for hosting the event.

"There must be freedom of speech, it is scandalous that the Holocaust cannot be discussed freely," said Duke. "It makes people turn a blind eye to Israel's crimes against the Palestinian people."

French writer Georges Thiel, who has been convicted in France for spreading revisionist theories about the mass extermination of Jews, said the Holocaust was "an enormous lie."

"Jewish people have been persecuted, that is true, they have been deported, that is true, but there was no machinery of murder in any camp -- no gas chambers," he said.

Participants also included at least five rabbis clad in long black coats and black hats, some wearing badges depicting the Israeli flag crossed out.

"We came here to put the Orthodox Jewish viewpoint regarding the attitude to the Holocaust," said British Rabbi Ahron Cohen.

"We certainly say there was a Holocaust, we lived through the Holocaust. But in no way can it be used as a justification for perpetrating unjust acts against the Palestinians."

The conference has upset Iran's 25,000-strong Jewish community, said Moris Motamed, the sole Jewish representative in Iran's parliament.

"Denying it [the Holocaust] is a huge insult," he told Reuters. "By holding this conference, they [the government] are continuing to insult the Jewish community."

Many Iranians admitted to embarrassment about the event, which follows Iran's decision to hold a competition for cartoons about the Holocaust in October.

Israeli Arab says request to attend summit denied
An Israeli Arab said on Monday that Iran had refused him permission to attend the conference, where he had planned to confront those who deny the Nazi genocide took place.

Khaled Mahameed, a Muslim lawyer who last year opened a Holocaust museum geared to Arab audiences in theb religiously mixed town of Nazareth, said he tried to attend the event and debate those who deny Nazi Germany slaughtered 6 million Jews.

But he said his visa application in neighboring Jordan was turned down.

"I am disappointed because I wanted to go to the conference and confront those who denied the Holocaust had taken place," Mahameed, 44, said.

Mahameed's community is descended from Arab residents of British Mandate Palestine who stayed on during the 1948 war of the Jewish state's founding. Hundreds of thousands of other Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled during the fighting.

Mahameed noted that many Arabs resent Israel, seeing it as a shelter for Holocaust survivors that was created with the backing of Western nations seeking to expunge guilt for inaction during World War Two.