It is always notable when countries choose to honor foreigners as heroes. Often, this is done for religious leaders, such as the various Luther memorials. Washington, D.C. has several memorials to foreigners who came to lead American soldiers in the Revolutionary War. Sometimes such memorials are gifts from the native country of the hero, such as the memorial to Muhammad Taragai Ulugbek in Riga, a gift from Uzbekistan or the memorial to Benito Juarez a gift from Mexico and to Bernardo de Galvez, a gift from Spain, both in Washington, D.C.

Today is the 100th anniversary of the death of Howard Baskerville, an American martyr for constitutionalism in Iran. He is still honored in Iran in that he is known throughout the country and there are several schools named after him. Baskerville died in Tabriz in 1909 during a protest against the new shah's repeal of the 1906 constituion. He had gone there after graduating from Princeton to teach for the Presbyterian school. He lead a 150-man contingent of soldiers and students in the nationalist side in a brief conflict with royalist forces. There is a small memorial at his grave in the Armenian cemetery in Tabriz.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdSO6N7b2Z8
http://www.iranian.com/History/Aug98/Baskerville/
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/opinion/18calafi.html?th&emc=th

Although today is the 65th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack, the most interesting memory news in the paper this morning are the reports of the upcoming conference (10-11 December) in Iran to investigate the history of the Holocaust. Under the title of "Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision," the conference will be under the auspices of the Institute for Political and International Studies, part of the Iranian foreign ministry. 67 participants from 30 countries have been invited to attend.

Themes are to include the nature of Anti-Semitism, Jews in Iran and in the Islamic world, Zionism, freedom of conscious, the extent of the Holocaust and the existence of the gas chambers. That last item is a common trope among Holocaust deniers. The so-called Leuchter Report, easily available on the web, which supposes to disprove the possibility of gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp, has long been a centerpiece of their claims that the Jews were not murdered en masse at Nazi concentration camps. See http://www.nizkor.org/faqs/leuchter/ for a discussion of the Leuchter Report from a critical perspective.

The Iranian conference cannot be assumed to be a scientific, historical, academic conference of the usual sort when considered against the background of recent inflamitary remarks by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. While Iranian vice foreign minister Mohammadi denied that the conference implies denial of the Holocaust, he question the fairness of making the Palestinians pay the price.

Read about it in today's Süddeutsche Zeitung or online in the Guardian.

With all the goings on in Lebanon with Hezbollah and the politics around Iran at the moment, I thought it would be interesting to put up a memorial a student of mine found in Tehran. It is a memorial to the suicide bombings in Beirut in 1983, but it isn't for the Marines and French rangers. It is for the bombers! You can find a larger version of it and more pictures from the same cemetery at the Behesht Zara cemetery page at "Sites of Memory".

Since the memorial text is in English, it is obviously intended for world-wide consumption. It might mean defiance and provocation, but the wording amounts to a admission that the Islamic Republic advocates the use of suicide bombings. The attack on the U.S. embassy is not mentioned, however, only the two barracks attacks, so here at least they are only glorifying attacks on military targets.