Iran's conference on the Holocaust provoked strong responses in the West yesterday, with the Vatican, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel joining the chorus of voices expressing disgust for the attempt to deny the Holocaust. The broadcasts from Tehran drew uncharacteristically harsh responses from Europe's usually restrained media outlets. "Criminal Denial" was the headline of yesterday's editorial in The Times in what may have been a hint to the British legislature to follow in the footsteps of France, Austria and Germany and make denial of the Holocaust a crime.

The international criticism did not deter the Iranians. Yesterday, conference organizers announced that their campaign is only beginning. The next stage is to be an international committee of experts to determine "the true dimensions of the Holocaust."

Yehuda Bauer, professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has consistently claimed that the Iranians seek to prepare the ground for a second genocide of the Jewish people. He says that on the tactical level they are trying to recruit not only the Muslim world but also the European extreme right. According to Germany's weekly magazine Der Spiegel, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad already has fans among German skinheads, some of whom waved Iranian flags at the World Cup soccer championship held in Germany last summer. Leaders of the German National Party were invited to the Tehran conference but the German government blocked their visit.

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Bauer agrees that the wide media coverage of the conference facilitates Iranian efforts to disseminate doubt about the Holocaust. A similar storm erupted after Ahmadinejad called for wiping Israel off the map.

It is the conference participants who are reaping the direct rewards of their media exposure: Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, former Australian beauty queen Michele Renouf, the ultra-Orthodox followers of Rabbi Moshe Hirsch and of course the professional Holocaust deniers. Until recently it seemed as if this aging, pathetic gang, consisting of no more than 20 people, was bound for extinction.

"We thought they were finished," staff of the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism said yesterday. In February, an Austrian court sentenced British historian David Irving to three years in prison. His colleagues Ernst Zuendel and Germar Rudolf are in Germany, waiting for their trials to end. If convicted they could be sentenced to five years in prison. Roger Garaudy is ill and unlikely to recover his strength. Robert Faurisson, the oldest Holocaust denier who is still active, was on the brink of desperation a year ago, when the Iranians tried to interest him in the conference idea.

"Most of my colleagues are in prison, in exile or in a delicate situation," Faurisson wrote to the conference organizers in a letter whose contents were exposed in Haaretz. Faurisson suggested that instead of holding a conference, Ahmadinejad should create an institute for the denial of the Holocaust.

The Holocaust denial conference in Tehran may make it necessary to re-evaluate the effectiveness of criminalizing denial of the Holocaust. The laws passed in Germany, Austria and France in the 1990s made a significant contribution to delegitimizing denial in the West and dealt a serious blow to the activities of Holocaust deniers. They did not succeed, however, and perhaps even encouraged, the unholy alliance between the deniers and the Iranian regime. In addition, these laws aid the deniers in presenting themselves as victims and the dark regime in Iran as the defender of academic freedom of expression.