AJC Calls Norwegian Lawmaker's Holocaust Denial Appalling

["Ari Gordon" <gordona@ajc.org>]

AJC Calls Norwegian Lawmaker's Holocaust Denial Appalling

March 22, 2011 - New York - AJC has voiced dismay over the unwillingness of
a Norwegian legislator to renounce his open denial of the Holocaust.

"The Holocaust is the most documented genocidal crime in history," said AJC
Executive Director David Harris. "For anyone, especially a European
politician, whose country was occupied by the Nazis from 1940 to 1945, to
question the veracity of the systematic Nazi murder of six million Jews is
simply incomprehensible."

Anders Mathisen, the Norwegian Parliament member, told the newspaper
Finnmarken that "there is no evidence the gas chambers or mass graves
existed." His own Labor Party criticized Mathisen for his views on the
Holocaust.

"One wonders what truly motivates someone like Mathisen to project such
basic hatred of the Jewish people, so much that he insists on denying the
most tragic period in our modern history," said Harris. "The sooner
Norwegians encourage him to leave the Labor Party and parliament, and
perhaps meet with survivors and liberators of the death camps, the better
for all."

>Ari M. Gordon
>Special Advisor 
>Interreligious and Intergroup Relations
>American Jewish Committee
>165 E56th Street
>New York, NY 10022
>(212) 891-6717