Today's WTF Moment

comes in the NYT article on Iran's Holocaust Denial conference. It's really the last line of this excerpt, which is the last line of the piece as published:

Despite the promises of open-mindedness, when one participant talked about the scholarship confirming the Holocaust, his views were quickly dismissed.

That speaker, an Iranian historian, Gholamreza Vatandoust, from Shiraz University, said, “Some facts about the Holocaust have been documented.” But he was criticized immediately by Robert Faurisson, a French academic, who said he had never found documents to support the Holocaust.

One of a few ultra-Orthodox rabbis at the conference, Moshe Ayre Friedman from Austria, said, “I am not a denier of the Holocaust, but I think it is legitimate to cast doubt on some statistics.”

Ultra-Orthodox Holocaust denial? Well I never. So who is he? First, his middle name is Arye, not Ayre--does no one proofread at the Times anymore? He opposes the creation of the state of Israel--he's THAT Orthodox. When told that G-d himself would be catering the event, he said "I'll just have fruit." (OK, an old joke.) And here's his picture, courtesy of Al Jazeerah, lighting a candle for Arafat: http://www.aljazeerah.info/News%20Photos/2004%20News%20photos/November/5-7n.htm: scroll down. Oh the unruly multiplicity of the world, which is always much weirder than our accounts of it.

Nuttiness on this order is not amusing, of course. What's surprising is that there's not a whole lot more on this fellow when I google him. Why's that? It would seem that an ultra-Orthodox holocaust denier would be sort of a natural man-bites-dog affair, and in the news a bit more often than he turns out to be. Must remember to lexis-nexis him....