UPDATE: Germany now admits it backed the Anti-Israel Summit.

Last month Germany's foreign and economics ministries hosted a conference that became a mouthpiece for anti-Semitic Iranian propaganda and a call for Israel's destruction. I have never seen a buck passed from one agency to another as fast as I did watching German agencies trying to pass the blame for this latest bit of anti-Semitism to come from the nation of Germany.

Now it emerges that the German government bankrolled the hatefest.

The German government has admitted it was deeply involved in funding last month's conference here on the Middle East, and reports indicate it suggested inviting former Iranian deputy foreign minister Muhammad Javad Ardashir Larijani to speak at the gathering, where he called for the destruction of Israel.

At the Third Transatlantic Conference - whose stated purpose was to address "common solutions" in the Middle East - Larijani said the "Zionist project" should be "canceled" and argued that Israel "has failed miserably and has only caused terrible damage to the region."

Jens Plötner, a spokesman for German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, told The Jerusalem Post over the weekend that the Foreign, Economics and Research ministries and Chancellor Angela Merkel's office transferred funds to the Hesse Foundation for Peace and Conflict Research, which he said had proposed inviting Larijani. The grant was made from a fund for "civil society projects."

To include any Muslim nation in the terms "civil society" is indecent to say the least. When just one of the 57 Muslim nations start to show any form of civil rights and religious freedom in their lands then you may start to call them civil. Until then they have to be termed barbaric and depraved.

Bernd W. Kubbig of the Hesse Foundation, the principal organizer of the conference, refused to provide the Post with a transcript of the event in which Larijani said, "Denial of the Holocaust in the Muslim world has nothing to with anti-Semitism. And President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has never denied the Holocaust."

However, Ahmadinejad has consistently questioned the authenticity of the Holocaust, and he invited well-know Holocaust deniers to the "World without Zionism" conference held in Teheran in 2005.

See how they lie. Ahmadinejad not only denied that the Holocaust ever happened, but said so openly:

"They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred and place this above God, religions and the prophets," Ahmadinejad said in a speech to thousands of people in the Iranian city of Zahedan, according to a report on Wednesday from Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting.

"The West has given more significance to the myth of the genocide of the Jews, even more significant than God, religion, and the prophets," he said. "(It) deals very severely with those who deny this myth but does not do anything to those who deny God, religion, and the prophet."

This was just one example. There are many more.

Why would Germany invite an Iranian to such a conference? What would be in it for Germany other than oil?

A weeklong investigation by the Post indicates that the German government has been intensifying its business and political relations with Iran in 2008. With the exception of 2007, Germany has remained Iran's No. 1 European Union trade partner over the years. Economists attributed the decline in 2007 to private-sector complications in Iran, and not to German political policy.

In the first quarter of 2008, Iranian-German business mushroomed to €1.35 billion, an 18% increase when compared with the first four months of 2007. Germany supplies a technology-starved Iran with sophisticated equipment for its energy sector and growing infrastructure. Total German export trade to Iran has consistently hovered around €4b. each year.

Siemens, the electrical giant, maintains a robust yearly trade of between $500m. and $1b. with Iran. The German company Wirth, according to Emanuele Ottolenghi, director of the Transatlantic Institute in Brussels, "sold tunnel-boring equipment to Iran for its Ghomroud water project." While such heavy earth-moving machines can be used to build underground nuclear weapons facilities, the German government approved the deal for the machines, which critics consider to be a telling example of "dual-use" equipment.

It's good business for the Germans to give into Iranian sentiments. They stand to make a fortune. But they also made a fortune stealing the homes, businesses and eventually the lives of the Jews of Europe. Maybe they are just longing for the good old days.