SMITH'S REPORT
 
 
 
 
 
America's Only Monthly
Revisionist Newsletter
 
 
 

 
- Number 36 -
October 1996

Contents

• Garaudy brings revisionism to the Arabs; Abbe Pierre stands fast in France
• Smith and David Irving speak at IHR special meeting
• A tale of two Harvards
• From ordinary groundling text to cyberspace: how is it done?
• Notes on the culture wars
• Letters
• and more!

and now... our front page!

Garaudy brings revisionism to the Arabs; Abbe Pierre stands fast in France

    Roger Garaudy, the 83-year-old French intellectual currently being prosecuted in France for the revisionist chapters of his book on Zionism, has defied his accusers by boldly bringing his theses to the attention of the Arab world. This summer the former French Communist Party theoretician traveled to Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt to discuss that book, Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israelienne (The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics), which has now been translated into Arabic (the booklet is available in either English or French from CODOHWeb).

    Garaudy, who converted to Islam in 1982, was received in government circles, and met as well with religious leaders, intellectuals (including, reportedly, the Egyptian writer and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz) and journalists.

    Garaudy is undoubtedly the most influential Westerner ever to bring the revisionist case against the Holocaust story to the Islamic world. Esteemed as an intellectual, a long-time anti-imperialist, and a Muslim (although not a radical Islamist), Garaudy makes a revisionist connection to Muslims and Arabs that to date has been doubly difficult for other revisionists. Doubly difficult because their Western, Christian heritage and perspective has hampered understanding; while at the same time, their Middle Eastern listeners, predisposed to accept all things anti-Zionist, have either viewed the Holocaust story as simply one more among many Jewish hoaxes or sins, or been disposed to accept the reality of the myth (sometimes even lamenting that Hitler didn't "finish the job").

    Roger Garaudy talks as an Arabist and a Muslim. In place of sterile Jew-baiting, his book Founding Myths offers a thoroughgoing critique of the victors' justice at Nuremberg, and a 38-page documented summary of the case against the Holocaust story. This last, which has led to its author's prosecution, clearly shows the hand of Robert Faurisson, and offers to Arab readers an excellent introduction to the case for Holocaust revisionism, in a context (a famous French Muslim intellectual's attack on the theological and theoretical underpinnings of Zionism) that will surely make the book a bestseller. (The Holocaust revisionist section of Founding Myths, completed just last year, supplies an excellent review for even knowledgeable revisionists in the West, and a fine introduction for newcomers.)

    In the meantime, over the summer in France, the machinery of the French state clanked forward in its preparations for the trial of Roger Garaudy under France's Loi Gayssot, which makes it a crime to challenge the Holocaust story. The trial is currently scheduled to take place before the end of the year. The charges against Garaudy and the usual book distributors' smother-out have not entirely prevented the sale of his booklet (which is published by Pierre Guillaume, longtime publisher of Robert Faurisson and other revisionists): as of July, over 17,000 copies of Founding Myths had been sold. (As this issue of SR goes to press, we learned that a Japanese edition is being planned.)

    Scarcely less interesting than the saga of Roger Garaudy has been the continuing odyssey of Henri Groues, the Capuchin monk, former member of the French National Assembly, activist on behalf of the homeless and immigrants, and winner of the Balzan Prize for humanity, peace and brotherhood between peoples, who is renowned in France and elsewhere as the Abbe Pierre, a code name Groues assumed during his wartime work with the French resistance. As related in Smith's Report #33 (June 1996), Abbe Pierre, an old friend of Roger Garaudy, at first praised Founding Myths, then withdrew his remarks under intense pressure from his old friends among the Jews, the left, in the Catholic hierarchy and in the French establishment.

    But he refused to condemn Garaudy, the condition for the readmission of the octogenarian priest, who helped numerous Jews flee France to Switzerland during the war, to the good graces of the various Jewish or humanitarian agencies which expelled or condemned him, including Emmaus, which the Abbe Pierre had founded in 1949 as an international association of hostels for the needy.

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