French Trial Unleashes Mideast Revolt against Holocaust Cult

The trial in Paris this January of French intellectual Roger Garaudy for authoring the Holocaust revisionist book The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics has sparked an unprecedented explosion of support for revisionism across the Middle East.

Political, intellectual, professional, labor and religious leaders, as well as ordinary citizens, have spoken out, demonstrated, and given their support to the 84-year-old convert to Islam. In doing so, they have defended the right to question the Holocaust story and have begun—many for the first time—to study revisionism, not only in published texts, but also on revisionist sites on the World Wide Web, including CODOHWeb—the world’s first website to post Garaudy’s book in its entirety.

The first evidence that the Garaudy trial would be different from the trials of Robert Faurisson and other revisionists in France came a couple of days after the trial’s beginning on January 8, when the Agence France Presse reported that the Palestinian Writers Association had expressed its solidarity with Roger Garaudy’s “courageous fight for creative freedom.”

On the next day, January 11, a support committee for Roger Garaudy was set up in the Gulf state of Qatar, and it called for the Arab world to take action “against the intellectual terrorism of the Zionists.” Meanwhile, the newspaper Al-Khaleej (Dubai), in the neighboring United Arab Emirates, launched a campaign on behalf of Garaudy, calling for donations and messages of solidarity in a frontpage appeal.

These were only the first boulders, however, in what became over the following weeks, as the Agence France Presse reported, “an avalanche of support” for Roger Garaudy’s stand against Zionist oppression and against the Holocaust mythology that buttresses it. On January 12, Sheikh Ahmad Kaftaro, the highest Sunni Muslim authority in Syria, spoke out against the French effort to muzzle Garaudy, and Iran’s Islamic Human Rights Committee pronounced: “This trial is a demonstration of disrespect and non-conformity to the practice of free speech.” Prominent Lebanese attorneys, including the president of the Beirut bar association (“It is not acceptable that freedom of opinion be treated as a crime”), rallied to Garaudy’s cause, as did the Union of Arab Journalists, which pointedly asked European journalists to defend Garaudy’s right to freely express his opinion.

Garaudy himself addressed, via satellite, a demonstration held at the House of Youth in Doha on January 12; on the same day he published a letter of thanks in Al-Khaleej, warning: “Zionism, with its aggressive, colonialist policies and claims to eternal domination of Jerusalem, could detonate a world war.”

Evidently this was music to the ears of Sheikha Zayed ibn Sultan Al-Nahayan, the wife of the president of the United Arab Emirates: on January 14 the Agence France Presse reported that she had donated $50,000 to Garaudy’s defense (the maximum fine for denying “crimes against humanity” under the idiotic law under which Holocaust revisionists are prosecuted in France is 300,000 francs, or $50,000). In the following days came the public support of:

• the Arab Organization for Human Rights in Jordan, which supported Garaudy’s “freedom in everything he has written” and lamented that France “has fallen under the Zionist influence which is deep-rooted in some sectors of European society”;
• one hundred sixty members of Iran’s parliament, who signed a petition backing Garaudy;
• one hundred Palestinian writers, who demonstrated for Garaudy in front of the French Cultural Center in Gaza;
• the Egyptian Labor Party, which held rallies denouncing the two hundredth anniversary of Napoleon’s Nile expedition—and the trial of Roger Garaudy;
• the Kuwaiti Society for Human Rights, which addressed a letter of protest to the French ambassador;
• the Sudanese bar association;
• the Syrian bar association;
• and last, but not least, Egypt’s Nobel laureate in literature (1988), Naguib Mahfouz, who wrote in Al-Ahram Weekly:

  I was amazed to learn, in connection with the tried of the French Muslim thinker, Garaudy, of the existence of a French law according to which it is a crime to question facts relating to the Holocaust. France is a country which tolerates atheism; yet it is a crime to doubt the existence of the Holocaust, or the number of Jews killed…. How did a simple historical event come to acquire such an aura of sanctity?…. I find this law baffling—a contradiction in terms. Human disasters are historical events which must be studied again and again. The understanding of such events cannot be monopolized. No researcher can be tried and found guilty for his or her work.

Meanwhile, in mid-January CODOHWeb began experiencing a surge of hits, or accesses of the site, that added up to an increase of nearly thirty percent above normal visits. Webmasters David Thomas and Richard Widmann puzzled over what might be the source of the upsurge at first, but they soon learned that a high number of the new visitors to the site were from the Middle East.

As a result, CODOHWeb has linked with revisionist web sites in the Mideast, offering our vast array of revisionist scholarship, including: state-of-the-art articles on the Holocaust; the complete text of Garaudy book; our popular page, “The Tangled Web: Zionism, Stalinism, and The Holocaust;” and links to our friend Ahmed Rami’s big Arabic language site operating out of Sweden. (For more on the Internet aspects of the Garaudy affair, see Internet Roundup, p. 6.)

The four sessions of the actual trial of Roger Garaudy were heavily attended by both opponents and supporters of the former French Communist, including such revisionist friends of CODOH as the Japanese journalist Aiji Kimura and of course Robert Faurisson, whose work served as Garaudy’s chief inspiration. Garaudy’s defense team was led by Jacques Verges, a well-known advocate who has defended Klaus Barbie among other notable clients.

In court Garaudy was inclined to attempt to shift the focus of his book toward opposition to Israeli aggression (which to be sure occupies a considerable part of it) and away from Holocaust revisionism. In the opening sessions, he seemed under considerable strain during cross examination, but brightened later as the Islamic nations of the Middle East rallied to his side. Toward the end of the hearings, some fifteen knife-wielding members of the Jewish “youth” group, Tagar, came at young revisionists on the street near the court building after the revisionists had bested them, but the police intervened and there were no serious injuries.

A verdict is promised for February 27. One doesn’t envy France’s Holocaust mullahs their dilemma here: convicting Garaudy could make of him an even greater martyr. Acquitting him would show that the Loi Gayssot can be defied—to the applause of the Arab world!

The Garaudy affair attracted prominent coverage in France, exceeding that of any single revisionist trial to date, as well as drawing considerable coverage by such international news services as Agence France Presse and Reuters. American news media lagged (to no one’s surprise), but the Garaudy trial and the uproar it unleashed in the Middle East did find echoes here and there in U.S. reporting, particularly in connection with the visit of Palestine’s Yasir Arafat and Israel’s “Bibi” Netanyahu.

While Netanyahu grumbled cryptically on The Larry King Show about the rising tide of “Holocaust denial” among the Arabs, Arafat discovered that he had more than the West Bank of the Jordan to worry about, when the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum proved to be part of the Israeli-occupied East Bank of the Potomac, and refused to admit him in his capacity as chairman of the Palestinian Authority. CODOH considered presenting Arafat with its critique of the Museum’s failings, but had no one on hand on short enough notice to make the presentation (a shortcoming we’d like to repair—candidates for a future such role in the Washington area, please drop us a line).

The fallout from the Garaudy affair is still drifting downward at this writing. To be sure, its immediate significance may be overshadowed by news of the Clinton affair(s) and by the military attack on Iraq that the U.S. government appears to be readying. Nevertheless, for the first time, Holocaust revisionism seems to have caught fire throughout the Middle East. Muslim nations, often reviled for intolerance in the West, have caught the fetid scent of the hypocrisy of European and American intellectuals on this one. They are beginning to look carefully at the Holocaust and the role it plays in Western society. We predict that it won’t take too many pages of Founding Myths or too many visits to CODOHWeb or to Ahmed Rahmi’s linked, Arab-language Radio Islam website before they decide that the Holocaust story is both a sacred cow and a golden calf—and a loaded pistol aimed at them and us.

Six years ago, Ahmed Rahmi told a conference of the Institute for Historical Review that bringing Holocaust revisionism to the Arabs was like pushing on an open door— in other words, they were so predisposed to believe the worst of the Zionists that they disbelieved the Holocaust without any focus or intellectual purchase. As of this January, the door to Holocaust revisionism in the Middle East is still open, but people from all walks of life are standing in it to greet us Holocaust revisionists warmly and appreciatively.

For that thanks must go to Robert Faurisson, who has fought a lonely, bitter fight, with many a financial, career, and physical sacrifice, to put the academic case for Holocaust revisionism to France and the world, and to Roger Garaudy, who combined Holocaust revisionism with anti-Zionism to make it understandable and palatable to Muslims, and in his eighties risked fine and imprisonment for his book Founding Myths.

CODOH is proud of its role in being first to publish Roger Garaudy’s potentially epoch-making book in English, on CODOHWeb, and of its role in offering the very best of revisionist scholarship to the burgeoning numbers of inquirers throughout the Middle East who have flocked to our website. We thank you, our supporters, whose steady help by way of donations and purchases has enabled us not only to keep truth alive but to make it strong and make it grow, in America—and around the world.

[Your contribution of $25 (or, if possible, an even more generous donation) will get you a copy of the first English translation of Roger Garaudy’s The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics, printed directly from the international CODOHWeb site, with spiral binding and clear cover, including the annexes and additional material, and at the same time help CODOH to continue spreading the good news of Holocaust revisionism.]