May 11, 1996
Dear Abbe Pierre, Dear Roger Garaudy,
I am saddened by the flood of hatred and contempt heaped upon you. This
reveals the feeling that many carry in their hearts. Remember, Abbe Pierre,
a devoted man, dragged in mud, will enhance your value (in the eyes) of
the one who judges and condemns.
And you, Roger Garaudy, you have a twofold luxury: in the eyes of the French,
you incarnate two phobias -- communism and Islam. One would think you do
it on purpose.
You have proved that you love the Jews infinitely more than those who give
lessons. But here you are, you also love the Palestinians and Arabs in
general, the majority of whom are Muslims, but sometimes Christians. All
Palestinian or Arab brothers who, for generations, have been humiliated,
colonized, dispossessed, bashed, imprisoned, starved. And you have reason
to love them and to want justice and peace for them.
Nobody understood (and nobody explained, either) that it is because of
them that you embarked on the mad enterprise that consists in trying to
explain (to the ignorant and to people who do not want to know) the consequences
of the horrible extermination of Jews, or the fate of the Arabs, who had
nothing to do with Polish or Russian pogroms, the Dreyfus Affair, the concentration
camps, or the Nazi extermination. And yet, it is they who are dispossessed.
What is contested is not the abjectness and horror of antisemitic massacres,
it is their use to justify the creation and permanent expansion of the
State of Israel and to cover up mad injustices. To make of "Auschwitz"
a political argument to support Israel is to run the risk that this argument
be contested. And when the historical reexamination of the Nazi period
is refused, when the files are closed, is not that really to prevent the
questioning of the legitimacy of the State of Israel and its behavior?
Yet history will prevail. One day, everything will be known.
Thank goodness that it was a Jewish historian (for whom I have great respect)
who wrote 30 years ago in "Les Temps Modernes" a marvelous article,
"Israel, Colonial Fact?" Is he right or wrong? And if it is true
that the colonization of Palestine was devised by the Zionist movement
a hundred years ago, during the height of the colonialization period, is
there no reason to doubt that this colonial domination will end like the
others? It is better to think about it than to curse. Has not Arafat agreed
to pay a heavy price for peace? And, to a certain extent, the Israeli pacifists,
too? Rabin included?
Are "negationists" the Nazis of today who want to revise history
in order to give good reason for the Nazis of yesterday? I will never believe
(after reading Abbe Pierre's declarations and R. Garaudy's book) that these
brothers have converted to Nazism.
It is said that the theology of Abbe Pierre is "obsolete." I
know others who are even more so, and who could do better to be more modest.
As for you, my two brothers, the struggles you are waging, at your age,
to raise the consciousness of all those who need it, compel respect and
contribute to hope.
Pastor Roger Parmentier