One of the premises I held as I grew up was to believe that history, as reported to me in my History classes, was factual and accurate. It was an important premise, I believe, that helped me formulate my view of reality and aided me in making sense of what was happening in the world around me.

I happened to grow up in a time when the history of my country was being manipulated by the government. As a privileged white kid, my parents had to by history text books that told me endless stories of how the white people "discovered" South Africa, fought the dangerous, barbarian native black people and subsequently settled in "their" country.

Then, around 1991 I began to realise (along with an awakening of my own mind and cries of a country to be free) that the historical data I had to learn was very one-sided - that history was constituted of multiple perspectives.

When reading of global history in school, one of the global events that was presented as factual and accurate as that of the Holocaust. There was no reason to doubt that:

• The Nazi government had a policy of deliberately targeting Jews for extermination as a people;
• More than five million Jews were systematically killed by the Nazis and their allies.
• Tools of efficient mass extermination, such as gas chambers, were used in extermination camps to kill Jews.

This was until I heard Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speak of the Holocaust as a "myth" . I nearly drove off the road in shock ... that a President of a country (who I assume would need to be of sound mind and faculty to be voted in by a rational public) would be so ignorant as to dispute the validity of an widely accepted event in history and know that such a question would cause a serious stir amongst the Jewish diaspora.

So, I ignored the statement. It was such a ridiculous thing to say.

But that was until my hermeneutic of suspicion caught up with me. Ricouer's work encourages me to have a willingness to suspect and a willingness to listen - essential when working with narrative.

Lo and behold, it turns out that there is a movement of people who call themselves Holocaust Revisioners (others call them "deniers", but they don't seem to like that name for some reason). To get your head around this movement, read the Wikipedia article here.

Ahmadinejad, on 11th December 2006, hosted the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust ... "neither to deny nor prove the Holocaust ... [but] to provide an appropriate scientific atmosphere for scholars to offer their opinions in freedom about a historical issue."

In the words of the inimitable Bill Cosby, "Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight!"

And so Ahmadinejad and his gang are know known as anti-Semitic for casting doubt over the historical events of the Holocaust.

erIenda has asked a pertinent question (in an excellent article): Is it ethical to question the official Holocaust narrative?

The strength of this issue can be gauged by the fact that in many European countries, Holocaust denial has been illegal since shortly after World War II. It was, and is, illegal to question the validity of a historical event!

If you tell your kid not to touch the wet paint, what happens? It is one way to make sure someone questions the validity of an event: tell them that they are not allowed to!