Reply to the Media Lynching of Abbe Pierre and Roger Garaudy



Samizdat Roger Garaudy
1996 (June)

No "Right to Reply" (yet written in our law) was granted to me by the media when they discharged the worst lies against my book, "The Founding Myths ofIsraeli Politics."

I was walled up in silence.

Only Abbé Pierre dared raise his great voice.

By enacting laws that limit freedom of expression, the French State has ceased to be a State of Law. In particular, the Gayssot Law restores the law, abolished after Vichy, that defines questioning of official truth as a criminal offense (délit d'opinion ). In fact, this law restores discrimination against anybody who does not submit to "one-track thought" and to the cult of "politically correct" taboos imposed by American leaders and their Western mercenaries, especially the Israelis.

After this imposed silence, here is my reply to the "witch hunt" lobby, the guardian of taboos.

Machination of a Lynching:

Not a word of refutation about the collaboration of Zionist leaders withHitler.

In the flood of insults unfurled against Abbé Pierre and myself, no argument was produced to refute the proofs I provided of each accusation in my book against Israeli politics.

For example, the collaboration of Zionist leaders (who became Israeli leaders) with the Nazis, since the Haavara agreements allowing Jewish billionaires to transfer their German capital to Palestine.

Then there was the collaboration of the Zionist Betar, in Hitlerian uniforms and under the flag of the Star of David until 1938 (during 5 years under the Hitler regime).

Then there were the propositions of collaboration, including military, made by Itzhak Shamir to the Hitlerian authorities in 1941. And until the negotiations with the "Jewish Agency" to provide Hitler with 10,000 trucks with the single condition that these trucks be used solely on the Eastern front against the Soviet Union, so as to achieve a separate peace with the United States and England, thus fulfilling the dream of the Western "allies", viz., to use Hitler to crush the Soviet Union (see the proofs of this collaboration with Hitlerism in my book, "Founding Myths of IsraeliPolitics" (pp. 65-90).

Not a word on Israeli terrorism.

No word to question my analysis of Israeli state terrorism from the massacre of 237 civilians in Deir Yassin by Begin's troops, to the massacre of Arabs praying in Hebron by Baruch Goldstein; the assassination of Comte Bernadotte and of Lord Moyne, who were guilty of denouncing at the U.N. the terror against the Palestinians driven out by the hundreds of thousands from their villages and their desecrated and bulldozed cemeteries; to the aggression against the Suez Canal planned by Sharon and Perez with General Challe(future leader of the coup in Algier); the massacre of thousands of Lebanese civilians by Sharon in 1982 and his responsibility, together with General Rafael Eytan, for the killings of Sabra and Chatila; the occupation, after the "Six Day War" of whatever remained of Palestine and also of South Lebanon, of the Syrian Golan.

To the Israeli leader, the UN resolutions condemning these occupations were not worth "the paper they were written on": Resolution 181 of 1947 stipulating the partition of Palestine; resolution 242 of November 22, 1967, requiring "the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the occupied territories"; resolution 338 of October 22, 1973, reiterating this demand after the Kippur War; resolution 425 condemning the occupation of Lebanon. Like the one (adopted unanimously) of July 4, 1967, on the annexation of Jerusalem. On March 12, 1991, the French foreign minister, M. Roland Dumas, stated in an interview with "Le Monde," "The Security Council has taken a total of 197 resolutions concerning the Arab-Israeli problem and 34 concerning the Palestinians. All these resolutions remain a dead letter."

The first, dealing with the partition, was dismissed by Ben Gourion as "a piece of paper." For 50 years, the Israeli leaders, irrespective of their party, have put themselves above international law. They are not afraid to make public their project of disintegration of all Arab states in the region, as they did in 1982 in the magazine, "Kivounim" (see pp. 203-204 in my book, "The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics.")

Nobody has contested my analysis of the control of American politics by the Israeli "lobby" and of the financing of the State of Israel as a proxy of American politics in the Middle East.

The Scorned "Right to Reply"

Not even an attempt at refutation. With a naive cynicism, Vidal-Naquet wrote in "Le Monde" of April 4, 1996: "The day we accept one of these gentlemen in a public debate on television or in a colloquium of historians, they will have won the game. They are considered as a school. We have to absolutely bar them from such activities." It is in the name of this "principle" that I was refused any "right to reply" by all the newspapers, which told brazen lies about my book. Yet the "right to reply" is written in the laws. And this goes from "La Croix" to "L'Humanité," passing by "Le Monde,""Libération" or "Le Journal du Dimanche." Similarly, none of the 3 television channels let me speak directly, but they set up caricature montages, never allowing me to answer the slanders. It is significant that they all spoke with the same voice, that of a "litany of hatred" using the same jargon to accuse me of "negationism," a word that does not exist in any French dictionary, for lack of being able to define what is being denied.

It is as though the watchwords came from the same central agency of lies and hate that led General de Gaulle to say, "There exists in France a powerful Israeli lobby, exerting its influence most notably in the information world."

In 1978, a former president of the World Jewish Congress, Mr. Nahum Goldman, asked President Carter "to break the Jewish lobby," which he considered "a force of destruction, an obstacle to peace in the Middle East."

During the Gulf War, Mr. Alain Peyrefitte wrote in "Le Figaro" of November 5, 1990: "Two powerful pressure groups push for the outbreak of the conflict: 1) The Jewish lobby, playing an essential role in the transatlantic media; 2) The business lobby (to revive the economy by the war)."

The Witch hunt

To burn me on the stake, a magic word "negationism" replaced the Middle Ages' accusation of those who dealt with the devil and thus deserved the stakes: "witchcraft."

Like the word, "negationist," that of Shoah (which means extermination in Hebrew) comes, too, from the litany of hate. It was popularized by Lanzmann's film, financed by Menachem Begin (author of the "crime against humanity" in the massacre of hundreds of civilians in Deir Yassim), who invested 850,000 dollars in this "project of national interest."

The witch hunt started in "Le Monde" (which, since it has been rescued from its financial difficulties by other investors, is no longer the newspaper of Beuve-Mery or Jacques Fauvet).

"Roger Garaudy negationist" was the headline of an article in the book section of January 26, 1996.

The rumor spread like the slander in the Barber of Seville. It already occupies 4 columns in "Libération" of January 31st: "Roger Garaudy joins the'negationists'".

With time, exaggerations increase. In "Libération" of May 8, 1996, where the headline stretches across the whole page: "Negationism is reassessment."

The same obsession spreads through the whole gamut of the press. From"L'Humanité" of January 25, 1996, which hypocritically pities "a man whose humanism left its mark on an era" and became a "racist," to "La Croix" of February 2, 1996, which was saddened by "the suicidal drowning of a man who might have been the witness of an era" had he not gone to "the most servile madness of antisemitism."

Obviously, my past bothers them. Three months after being decorated with a war medal as a soldier against Hitler, I was arrested on September 14,1944. When we rose against Nazism prior to the existence of deportations in Germany, we were sent to the Sahara. I was subjected to 33 months in a concentration camp, together with the founder of "LICA" (International League Against Antisemitism, which became "LICRA," International League Against Racism and Antisemitism), Bernard Lecache, with whom I gave lectures about the prophets of Israel to our atheist companions. Upon my return, I received the deportation medal. This is what the LICRA people call today a "neo-Nazi"!

Struggle Against All Fundamentalisms

I fought all fundamentalisms as an organizer of Christian-Marxist, then Christian-Muslim dialogues. In 1970, I was expelled from the Communist Party (of which I was one of the theoreticians and leaders) for declaring that "the Soviet Union is not a socialist country"!

In my last three books, I have analyzed, one after the other, 1) RomanCatholic fundamentalism in "Do We Need God," where I wrote, despite the anger of some people, that Jesus could not be the founder of reigning theologies of domination; 2) in "Greatness and Decadence of Islam," I denounced "Islamism" as a sickness of Islam; 3) finally, in "The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics," I analyze the "Zionist heresy" that replaces the God of Israel with the state of Israel and thus, through tribal nationalism, renounces the universalist faith of the great Jewish prophets.

My critiques of Christian and Muslim fundamentalisms naturally raised polemics, which is normal and fruitful. But with my last book, I was touching a taboo, and this time, lacking arguments, they called the police.

Naturally, all the provincial press orchestrates the rumor. It crosses borders, for the Zionist organization has a worldwide network. In Canada,the World Jewish Congress succeeds in banning my lectures (on other topics.But it is the man that must be demonized!) In Switzerland, the LICRA leader, Vodoz, asks the courts to press charges against me. The international press spreads the same slander as the French press, exported, for example, by Finkelkraut in "Corriere de la Sera" in Italy and "El Mundo" in Spain. From the "New York Times" in the United States to "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" in Germany, the same chorus sings the same song.

The Magic Word that Kills

"Negationist," negation of "SHOAH." The same supranational vocabulary serves to "banish" me, as Joshua would say.

Let us see what I "DENY":

  1. Nowhere do I deny Nazism's crimes or its persecution of Jews. It is an attack against my honor to attribute to me a "denial of crimes against humanity." My book does not cease denouncing "the monstrous objectives of Hitler (pp. 62, 251), their savagery (p. 97); these "immense crimes do not need lies to reveal their atrocity (p. 54). After describing "the horrible conditions that resulted in tens of thousands of victims," I conclude: "Such was the martyrdom of Jewish and Slavic deportees and the ferocity ofHitlerian masters treating them as slaves without any human value" (p. 257).

  2. I add (p. 257), "These crimes cannot be underestimated, nor can the unspeakable suffering of the victims." "Doubtless, the Jews were one of Hitler's preferred targets because of his racist theory of the superiorityof the Aryan race" (p. 152).

  3. As for the lies instituted at Nuremberg:
    4 million dead at Auschwitz (according to a Soviet report) and the successive "revisions" of historians; 2 million, according to Zionist historian Poliakov in his "Litany of Hate"; 1 million, 250 thousand, according to another Zionist historian, Raoul Hilberg (p. 160 in my book). Bedarida, Director of the Institute of Contemporary History at CNRS reached the conclusion that "the number of 4 million does not rest on any serious basis and must not be kept." "The number of about one million dead is corroborated by all specialists because they agree on a number of victims that varies between 950,000 and 1,200,000" (Le Monde, July 23, 1989).

  4. My "revisionism" that my detractors (none of whom read my book) call "negationism" without saying what I deny is nothing but the resumption of "revisions" of "all the specialists" (as Bedarida says), which led in 1994 to replace the plaque that said 4 million (in Auschwitz) with one that says "a little over one million" (p. 159). I add: "It is not a matter of establishing a macabre counting."

  5. The assassination of one single innocent, whether he is Jewish or not, is a crime against humanity (which I repeat, p. 257).

  6. As for the "gas chambers," I clearly said that no tribunal, neither Nuremberg nor those that followed it, have ever sought to examine this crime weapon. Expert opinions exist, namely that of the engineer Leuchter, a specialist in the United States, of gas chambers built in 6 states for those sentenced to death. His investigations at Auschwitz-Birkenau led him to radically negative conclusions. "One would have expected the detection of higher rates of cyanide in samples taken from the alleged gas chambers (due to the larger quantities of gas used in these places) than in the control samples taken from the disinfection chambers. Since the opposite is true, it is imperative to conclude that these installations were not execution gas chambers."

  7. Given in Malden (Massachusetts) April 5, 1988 by Fred A. Leuchter Jr., ChiefEngineer.

Subsequent studies by other experts in Cracow in 1990 and in Vienna did not produce any new findings.

Since I am not a chemist or a biologist, I cannot decide. I simply say in my book (p. 150) that I am surprised that these reports were not published and openly debated. The only attempt to refute them was a book by Pressac, subsidized by the Klarsfeld Foundation, which curiously enough, nobody refers to. Even Pressac, in his 1993 book, does not even cite the LeuchterReport, while at the same time he triumphantly refutes it.

Concerning the interpretation of the "final solution" and the "gas chambers," my book states clearly these problems.

  1. According to the official theory, Hitler might have given the extermination order. However, in a colloquium on "revisionism" in February 1982 at the Sorbonne, Raymond Aron and Jacques Furet stated in the closing press conference: "Despite the most scholarly research, no Hitler order to exterminate the Jews was ever found."

  2. We are told later that the order was given at the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942. In the January 30, 1992 issue of "Canadian Jewish News, "Yehuda Bauer wrote that this interpretation of Wannsee is silly.

  3. Pressac is the latest scourge of revisionism. On p. 114 of his book, "Les Crématoires d'Auschwitz," he refers to "the Wannsee Conference on the driving back of the Jews towards the East."

  4. Was there a "coded language?" In the absence of proof, this is suggested by Nicolas Weill (after many others) in "Le Monde" of May 6, 1996.

  5. Pressac maintains that public works projects did not use any coded language: "Contrary to what is said, there was never a camouflage." (Quoted by LaurentGreilsamer in "Le Monde" of September 26 and 27, 1993.)

  6. After being hailed as a savior of the extermination propagandists, he became more and more suspect: he destroyed their "coded" interpretations of Wannsee. He questioned their "testimonies" refuting Hoss, commander of Auschwitz, the main witness, and Eichmann, too (pp. 41 and 132).

  7. He contradicted their Dantesque interpretations of "Sondermassnahmen" (special measures): contrary to what was believed, these terms have no criminal connotation (p. 107).

  8. He ridicules the numbers given by Wallers, of Jews passing through Auschwitz: "It is obviously inexact." (p. 147)

  9. Is it a matter of a repenting or camouflaged "revisionist?"

  10. While waiting for this technical debate, I stand by what is clearly established: the odious watchword of the Nazis, "all the Jews out ofEurope!"

  11. The execution of this plan was initially realized by pushing back Jews toward the East under such inhuman conditions that tens of thousands succumbed. Then, as it was clearly written and asserted, after the war and victory, all European Jews shall be deported to an African island(Madagascar was mentioned, following the fall of France).

  12. This project was already monstrous enough so that even the first stages of its execution cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews.

It is always this objective: the deportation to an African ghetto which was considered as the "final solution," and it is pure barbary.

As to "the extermination," during his 10 years of absolute rule, four of which were over all of Europe, Hitler had all the time to realize it, and fortunately, despite all the indisputable massacres, the Jewish community, though decimated, remained in Europe among us.

Then what do I deny?

I deny that the Zionists assume the power to minimize Hitler's crimes by reducing them to the indisputable persecution of Jews. His drive for expansion and conquest resulted in 50 million dead, of which 16 million were Slavs, Russians and Polish, as Pope John Paul II recalled in Miami.

What I deny, what I fight, is the will to remember only one category of victims and to hedge the language so as to conceal contempt for others.

This leads to an inversion of even the meaning of our history, to the negation of the resistance of the overwhelming masses of our people to the Nazi occupation and to the handful of renegade, ruthlessly ambitious collaborators put in power by Hitler's invasion. During the first years of the liberation, "deported" meant resistance fighter. Today, through perversion, "deported" would only mean Jewish victims.

The massacre of a large number of Jews is indisputable, but why call it "genocide"? Genocide means extermination ("There remained no survivor" as it is said in the book of Joshua, telling of the conquest of Canaan). This is unquestionably boastfulness, since the majority of the Canaanite population survived. But if, as Francois Bedarida pretends in "Le Monde" of May 5 and 6, 1996, "the invocation of Joshua by Roger Garaudy seems to me an intellectual stupidity," [note 1: this new tone of language was set in "Le Monde" by Kouchner (the comic actor who carried a rice bag in a Somalian port in order to attract the attention of the media) who called me "bastard."] because "it was put together many centuries after the fact and based on fairly embellished traditions." If this is the case, would Mr.Bedarida explain to us why the Bible that is distributed to young Israeli soldiers with, since 1990, a preface by the Grand Army Rabbi, Gad Navon, stresses the book of Joshua? Its characteristic is the extreme chauvinism underlying the antagonism between Jews and other peoples, to the point of presenting Abraham as "the father of the Jewish nation" standing on one side, and the whole world on the other.

This is what gives Joshua an extreme relevance, all the more as to this Bible, transformed into a nationalism manual, where every stranger is an "enemy," an Atlas has been added where every young soldier can find a map of all the land of Israel, including not only Judea and Samaria but also Jordan, with a glorification of the GOD of armies, who gives victory over the enemies in order "to reenforce the combative spirit of soldiers."(Source: Haaretz of January 22, 1996. Article of Yaron Ezrahi about "the chauvinistic preface of the Bible currently distributed to Israeli soldiers.")

Without denying the extent and the horror of massacres of Jews and other opponents (3.5 million Russian prisoners died in captivity said Bedarida in the same article of "Le Monde"), I reject this "Apartheid of the dead." Under the theological name of Holocaust, it makes the martyrdom of Jews irreducible to any other.

By its sacrificial character, it could be integrated into a divine project in the manner of the crucifixion of Jesus in Christian theology (p. 156 of my book).

But such discriminations are inherent to the heresy logic of political Zionism, breaking off with the grandiose universalism of the Jewish prophets.

According to the founding father of Zionist heresy, and to Professor Klein, Director of the Institute of Comparative Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the notion of a Jewish state is incompatible with any true democracy. The definition of "Jewish" is given by Professor Klein in his book, "Le caractere juif de L'Etat d'Israel" (Ed Cujas, Paris, 1977) as it is formulated in the "Law of Return," the fundamental law of 1950, article 4b: "A Jew is considered any person born to a Jewish mother or converted according to halakah." A racial criterion and a parochial criterion. All others are second class citizens.

A true democracy cannot exist in a state based on such discrimination. Not in a "Christian state" where Jews, non believers, Muslims and even non catholics would be second class citizens, even enemies to destroy, as the Crusaders did (by pogroms of Jews along their way to the holy land, where they would massacre the Muslims) or to organize Saint Bartholomews against the Protestants, or today where every Muslim immigrant is a potential terrorist.

Neither can there be "democracy" in a "Muslim state," where Christians cannot worship GOD in a church or Jews in a synagogue, and where their rights are not equal to those of all other members of the nation.

One Goal: Gag Abbe Pierre and Garaudy

Being unable to find in my book any trace of antisemitism, a negation or even a minimization of Hitler's crimes towards the Jews or any other opponent of the regime, my accusers had only one recourse: the question of justice at the Nuremberg Tribunal fell under the blow of the Gayssot-Fabius Law.

After dooming me to public prosecution as a "negationist," they try to silence me by resorting to the police and to a gag law.

It is true that the court of one-track thought is subject to abrupt variations. On Sunday, April 28, 1996, the Grand Rabbi Sitruk, speaking on "Jewish Radio," thought it useful to "assemble historians to debate the Shoah." Abbe Pierre, hoping for a dialogue, was quickly disappointed. He said in "Libération" of May 2, 1996: "The Grand Rabbi accepts what LICRA refuses." Monday, April 30, Rabbi Sitruk declared on Europe 1: "There can be no debate on the Holocaust" and that "historians have given definitive proofs." [Note 2: This led Max Clos, one of the rare journalists who, even in his criticism, managed to save the honor of his profession by commenting that "the notion of 'definitive proof' irrespective of the subject is offensive, for these were the practices of totalitarian regimes such as those of Hitler and Stalin."]

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