A long and winding road

From the 1940's to today. From the San Francisco Chronicle comes this historical timeline:

Denial of Holocaust nothing new in Iran
Ties to Hitler led to plots against British and Jews

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has shot to the forefront of Holocaust denial with his rabble-rousing remarks last month. But it's more like self-denial. The president of Iran need only look to his country's Hitler-era past to discover that Iran and Iranians were strongly connected to the Holocaust and the Hitler regime, as was the entire Islamic world under the leadership of the mufti of Jerusalem.

Iran's axis with the Third Reich began during the prewar years, when it welcomed Nazi Gestapo agents and other operatives to Tehran, allowing them to use the city as a base for Middle East agitation against the British and the region's Jews.

Key among these German agents was Fritz Grobba, Berlin's envoy to the Middle East, who was often called "the German Lawrence," because he promised a Pan-Islamic state stretching from Casablanca to Tehran.

Relations between Berlin and Tehran were strong from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933. At that time, Reza Shah Pahlavi's nation was known as Persia. The shah became a stalwart admirer of Hitler, Nazism and the concept of the Aryan master race. He also sought the Reich's help in reducing British petro-political domination.

So intense was the shah's identification with the Third Reich that in 1935 he renamed his ancient country "Iran," which in Farsi means Aryan and refers to the Proto-Indo-European lineage that Nazi racial theorists and Persian ethnologists cherished.

Emphasis mine. And don't forget Arafat's enlistment by the KGB just after the war, the years he spent in Moscow and then returning to the 'holy land' to be the 'leader' of the 'palestine' people despite his being an Egyptian. The Russians didn't like the fact that a Democracy was growing in an area that had lots of oil but was ostensibly ruled by feudal waring tribes. They needed a way to destabilize Israel and they did their job very very well -- it is still chugging along today, years after the supposed demise of the KGB and a few years after Arafat's death from AIDS. And do go and read the article -- I posted a short excerpt but it just gets better and better and better -- the stuff that conspiracy theories are made of but this time, it is real and documentable from lots of different source materials.