with an Iran address to operate without the same censorship applied to other political websites.
Nazicenter.ir was a Farsi language site sprinkled with photos of Adolf Hitler and other German Nazi leaders.
The website was also packed with anti-Semitic rhetoric, despite the fact that the regime officially condemns anti-Semitism and insists it is only anti-Zionist.
The site did not appear to be widely recognized or supported. It showed a registry of only 1,245 subscribers this week.
Since the regime’s filtering system blocks thousands of political websites, it was curious that this one was allowed to operate freely.
But shortly after its existence was publicized Saturday, the site went dead Monday.
It is possible that the regime’s censors did not know about it initially. The censors pursue keywords like “feminism” and “protest” to block sites. The censors may simply not have thought about “Nazi” as a word worth blocking. So, the presence of the site did not necessarily represent approval, especially since it was quickly axed once it was publicized.
The website included an alleged quotation from Ayatollah Khomeini asserting that Iranians are Aryans and as good as any other racial groups around the world. The Iran Times could not establish if that is an accurate quote.
In the 1930s, when Hitler was trying to curry favor with the government of Reza Shah, German propaganda declared that the word “Iran” was derived from “Aryan” and that Iranians were fellow Aryans. But the word Aryan fell into disrepute and has rarely been used other than dismissively since the end of World War II.
The website included a discussion forum that was blanketed with virulent anti-Jewish comments.
The site explained that its chief goal was to counter “the story of the Holocaust, which, without doubt, has been taken advantage of in contemporary history.” That remark was in keeping with regime rhetoric that ranges from outright denying of the Holocaust to questioning it. A major propaganda theme of the regime is that there is no freedom of speech in the West because people are thrown in jail there for denying the Holocaust.
The ground rules for commenting on the site made very clear that it was loyal to the revolutionary regime in Tehran. The rules said, “All members must respect the current laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” Members also must promote “the expansion of Iranian nationalism” and “show the ugly and repressive face of Zionism, which rules the world’s media who have hidden its true face.”