In Tehran, where else?

President Ahmadinejad's long-promised Holocaust conference opened in Tehran yesterday to an audience including infamous revisionists, racists and anti-Semites. The only speakers who confirmed the Holocaust as a historical fact were a group of rabbis who criticised its use to justify Israeli abuses against Palestinians.

The conference sounds like something of a freak show:

Books by the jailed historian David Irving were prominently displayed.

Mostafa Mohammedi, a Tehran University student who helped set up the exhibition, said: "Between 150,000 and 300,000 Jews died because of the natural causes of war such as famine and air raids. Unfortunately, Iranian schools still teach the official history dictated by the West, but we are campaigning to change that.

David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader, said he was attending the confeence to defend freedom of speech. "We have a Holocaust mafia," said Mr Duke. "It's a shame Iran has to be the nation that calls into question that a world famous historian sits in prison for offering an opinion."

The Australian revisionist Fredrick Töben brought a model of the Treblinka death camp to prove the absence of gas chambers and said he faced arrest on his return.

Iran is an interesting place, though. Ahmadinejad didn't attend the conference's opening; he was getting heckled by students at Amir Kabir university, where protesters shouted "death to the dictator" and burned his photograph.

There's a lot going on in Iran, notwithstanding the looniness, that could be the basis for a brighter future.