Prisoners of Conscience and Holocaust Revisionism:
An  Open Letter to President George W. Bush

By Paul Grubach

December 28, 2005

President George W. Bush
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave., NW
Washington , DC   20500

Dear President Bush,  

In a public statement issued on December 10, 2005 , you called for the immediate and unconditional release of prisoners of conscience by the Syrian authorities, labeling the imprisonment of these individuals as an example of the government of Syria 's ongoing repression of Syrian people. I will quote directly from your statement: “As we commemorate Human Rights Day, we call attention to the continued imprisonment in Syria of Dr. Kamal Labwani and the many other prisoners of conscience whom the Syrian authorities have denied the fundamental right to freedom of opinion and expression.”

Apparently, President Bush, you operate with a hypocritical double standard. You chided the Syrian government for imprisoning Syrian prisoners of conscience, yet under your administration you allow the deportation and imprisonment of the German prisoner of conscience Germar Rudolf.

In Europe and the US , you can openly deny the existence of God. However, if you question and dispute the Holocaust ideology as Germar Rudolf has done, you can suffer severe persecution here in the US and end up in prison in Europe . Germar Rudolf is a German citizen who was forced to flee his native Germany because he has questioned and refuted certain aspects of the Holocaust ideology. In the United States , near Chicago , Revisionist scholar Rudolf was recently torn from his American wife and their child and delivered to Germany .  He is in prison in Stuttgart .

Just as those Syrian intellectuals were imprisoned because of their beliefs and public statements, so too is Germar Rudolf being imprisoned for his beliefs about the Holocaust ideology. You chided the Syrian authorities because they have denied Dr. Labwani and others their fundamental rights to freedom of opinion and expression, yet you are silent about the German government's denial of Germar Rudolf's right to freedom of opinion and expression. You, President Bush, make public protests about the Syrian intellectuals, yet you allow and apparently condone the deportation and imprisonment of Germar Rudolf.

This legally formulated persecution of Holocaust revisionists is in blatant contradiction to the sermons you have given the rest of the world on “human rights and freedom of expression.” As another Holocaust revisionist scholar, Dr. Robert Faurisson, has pointed out: “[A]s long as in the United States, Canada, nearly all of Europe and as far away as Australia the revisionists are subjected either to special laws or tribunals, underhanded police procedures, or methodical vilification by media in the service of certain Jewish or Zionist pressure groups, the Western world will have ever less right to impose lessons of lawfulness, morality or democracy on others.”

I now ask you to live up to your publicly promulgated dictums about “human rights and freedom of expression,” and speak out against the persecution and imprisonment of the Holocaust revisionist scholar Germar Rudolf.

I await your response.

Sincerely,

Paul Grubach