God Yes, Holocaust No

This is a review of a book which, as far as I am aware, has never been reviewed in the mainstream North American press, even though it caused a sensation in Europe when it was published in France. Its title is The Founding Myths of Modern Israel, and it was written by the French scholar Roger Garaudy.

The only reason we can read it now is that it has been put out in English by the Institute for Historical Review in California (assuming, that it isn't seized by the Canadian censors as ''hate literature). It is of course a myth that we have a free press. Certain subjects are taboo, and in many “democracies” punishable if they cross the line of approved opinion. That includes questioning the six million figure of Jewish deaths in the Holocaust. Any German who does so soon sees the inside of ajail. And the unceasing flood of propaganda from Hollywood and the liberal media ensures that “Holocaust deniers” are seen as “racists,” “neo-Nazis,” and knaves, even though they may not deny that the Jews were persecuted and died in their thousands under the Nazis.

As Garaudy states: “The only arguments that have been used against the [Holocaust] revisionists have been refusal to debate, physical attack, censorship, and repression.” He should know. In 1998 a French court fined him $40,000 for having written Founding Myths, which he calls a ''heresy history.”

An Egyptian Nobel Laureate in literature wondered at the time why it is that you can deny the existence of God, but not the Holocaust as described by the ax-grinders. That applies also here in Wimpland, where you can find yourself up before a ''human rights commission” for doing so.

Garaudy shows that it is not Judaism that is at fault but Zionism, and he expresses no hostility to Jews as such. Judaism is a humanitarian religion, he says, while Zionism can be, and has been, ruthless nationalism. That is what explains the brutal expulsion of Palestinians from what used to be their country, plus the outrageous attacks on Lebanon involving thousands of deaths, not to mention murderous actions like the one in 1948 on Deir Yassin, designed by Menachem Begin to terrify Palestinians into fleeing.

Begin became a prime minister of Israel, yet was described by the first prime minister, Ben Gurion, as “clearly a Hitlerian type. He is a racist willing to destroy all the Arabs for the sake of the completeness of the country, sanctifying all means for the sake of the sacred end … “

Interestingly, too, Garaudy compares the view that the Jews are “God's chosen people” with Hitler's view of the superiority of the German race.

Yitzhak Shamir, another terrorist who became a prime minister, tried to collaborate with the Nazis. The persecution of the Jews took second place to the creation of Israel. “The [Zionist] preoccupation with building a strong Jewish state made them much more anti-British than anti-Nazi,” states Garaudy. It was in 1941 that the British arrested Shamir “for terrorism and collaboration with the Nazi enemy.” He is at pains to point out, however, that the great majority of Jews were active in the fight against Hitler. Still, Shamir's early antics were not something we heard much about once Israel became a state.

Garaudy also deals with “myths on the Holocaust” that are put out daily by the propaganda machine, the main purpose of which is to make it dangerous to challenge Zionist policies.

There was, he states emphatically, no Hitler order for the extermination of the Jews (which is not to say that he thought that Hitler was some kind of Teutonic Boy Scout); Rudolf Hoss, the commandant at Auschwitz, was beaten to a pulp in order to make him say that he had overseen the killing of over twoand-a half million Jews; and no “final solution” was decided at the Wannsee Conference.

Others have been convincing on the same points. Robert Faurisson, Europe's leading revisionist, was run out of his university. He was also hauled before the French courts and nearly killed by Jewish thugs. Deny God, yes, deny the six million of the Holocaust, no.

Unfortunately for his critics, Garaudy's whole background is anti-Nazi. He fought in the French Army in 1940,joined the Resistance after the defeat of France, became a prominent Communist deputy in the French National Assembly, rejected Communism in 1968 and converted to Islam, but, it is stated in the Foreword, “has never ceased to proclaim his anti-racialist, internationalist, and socialist beliefs”.

Founding Myths has been denounced by the Zionist Organization of America and other Jewish groups as “the number one threat to Israel.” Which is a confession that what Garaudy has to say must have some substance to it. It is also a proclamation that revisionists must be silenced and ruined.