Among them, there is also a high rate of news consumption, including antisemitic propaganda such as Holocaust denial and/or minimization, disseminated by the Iranian media (print, electronic and digital), and translated/dubbed into Urdu and/or other major languages spoken by them. The Shias of South Asia (Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan) maintain strong ties with Iran, where they often go for religious studies and pilgrimage. He was known as “Hindi” (Farsi and Arabic for ‘Indian’) in Iran as he came from India. They migrated from Nishapur, Iran, to Kintoor, District Barabanki, India, adjacent to Lucknow, in the late eighteenth century and stayed there until 1830, when Khomeini’s grandfather, Seyed Ahmad Musavi Hindi (1790-1869), moved to Iran. The patronage extended by its Shia Muslim rulers of Iranian origin (1722-1858) to intellectual pursuits attracted Shia Muslim scholars from around the world, including the ancestors of Ayatollah Ruhollah Mussaui Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution of Iran (1979). Although Muslims constitute only 26.36 per cent of the city’s total population of 2.8 million, as estimated in 2011, they have made a strong impact on the city’s culture. It was not just the timing but also the venue that made the films retrospective significant: Lucknow is one of the biggest centres of Shia culture in the world, with a strong connection to Iran. Two hundred cartoons out of the twelve hundred received from over sixty countries, including cartoons that denied or minimized the Holocaust, were exhibited in August of the same year at the Saba Art and Cultural Institute in Tehran, with sponsorship from the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The conference was preceded by a cartoon contest on the Holocaust held by Hamshahri (Fellow Citizen), a national Iranian Farsi (Persian) newspaper, in February 2006. Titled “Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision,” the conference was organised by the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS) and attracted sixty-seven participants from thirty countries, including former Ku Klux Klan leader and Holocaust denier, David Duke, French Holocaust denier, Robert Faurisson, and officials of the neo-Nazi German National Democratic Party (NPD), among others.
The event was a rebuttal to a conference held in December 2006, in Tehran with the aim of promoting Holocaust denial. (Brochure of the Holocaust Films Retrospective) Every two screenings was followed by talks and lectures against Holocaust denial by eminent personalities, including several Muslim intellectuals (Aafreedi 2010). The event was covered by the local press in Hindi and English, the two official languages in India. It ran for fourteen days, during which forty-six films were screened, seen by four thousand people at the two biggest universities in the area. The event was significant because of several reasons: it was the first-ever Holocaust films retrospective in South Asia. In September-October 2009, a Holocaust films retrospective was held in Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, India. Along with Priya Singh, Navras is also the co-editor of Conceptualizing Mass Violence: Representations, Recollections, and Reinterpretations (London and New York: Routledge, 2021). He is also an Assistant Professor at the Department of History at Presidency University in Kolkata, India. Aafreedi is a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), and convener of the Antisemitism in South Asia in Comparative Perspective ISGAP seminar series.
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