Roger Garaudy

Right to Reply

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 of Israeli Politics."

I was walled up in silence.

Only Abbe 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 (delit 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 with Hitler.

In the flood of insults unfurled against Abbe 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 Israeli Politics" (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'Humanite," passing by "Le Monde," "Liberation" 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 "Liberation" of January 31st: "Roger Garaudy joins the 'negationists'".

With time, exaggerations increase. In "Liberation" 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'Humanite" 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, 19440. 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) Roman Catholic 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 of Hitlerian masters treating them as slaves without any human value" (p. 257).

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 superiority of the Aryan race" (p. 152).

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).

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."

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

2. 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."

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

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 Leuchter Report, 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."

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.

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

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.

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

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).

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

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

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

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

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).

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, nonbelievers, 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 "Liberation" 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."]

Then the cries of triumph rose to hound me: "Roger Garaudy is under investigation for contesting crimes against humanity" is a headline in "Le Monde" of April 27, 1996. The Zionized "L'Humanite" rejoices that Garaudy is charged under the Gayssot Law that punishes "questioning of crimes against humanity." Pierre Aidenbaum, the president of LICRA, set the tone in his press release of April 24, 1996: "Some can no longer hide their antisemitism under the cover of antizionism. In our country, this has been decided by the courts."

Yes, Mr. Aidenbaum, this has been decided by the courts and precisely to convict your "LICRA," which seeks to make believe that Zionism which is politics is identical with Judaism which is a religion. I recall only the sentence rendered by the High Tribunal of Paris on March 24, 1983 (upheld by the Appeals Court) in the lawsuit filed by LICRA against Father Lelong, Pastor Matthiot, Jacques Fauvet (Le Monde) and myself: "In view of the fact that this is lawful criticism of the politics of a state and of the ideology that inspires it, and not a racial provocation, the court dismisses the suit and orders LICRA to pay the legal costs."

What Nourishes Antisemitism is Not to Denounce its Crimes, but to Commit Them

My struggle against the Zionist politics of the State of Israel that feed antisemitism is an integral part of my unremitting struggle against antisemitism, which is a crime justifiably punished by law.

Zionism against Israel

The worst enemy of the prophetic Jewish faith is the nationalist, racist and colonialist logic of tribal Zionism, born of the nationalism, racism and colonialism of 19th century Europe. This logic, which inspired all the colonialisms of the West and all its wars of one nationalism against another, is a suicidal logic.

There is no future or security for Israel and no peace in the Middle East unless Israel becomes "dezionized" and returns to the faith of Abraham, which is the spiritual, fraternal and common heritage of the three revealed religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

This is why, after so much trash published in "Le Monde" by the Kouchners, the Vidal-Naquets and others, Bedarida or Weill, the record of infamy is held by Claude Imbert, who likened my book to the "Protocol of the Elders of Zion" in "Le Point" of May 4, 1996. While on p. 249, I analyse the mechanism of fabrication of this vile falsehood (which I refuted in detail in a preceding work, "Palestine, Terre des messages divins," Ed. Albatros, 1986, pp. 206-212).

For slanders of this type, I demand the "right to reply" from "Le Monde," "Liberation," "Parisien," "Journal du dimanche," "La Croix," "L'Humanite." They all refused me this right, recognized by law. This shows the power of the lobby. In fact, those who deny the "crimes against humanity" are precisely the newspapers, radio and television stations, almost the entire media, where nobody dared to designate, as "crime against humanity," the shelling of ambulances carrying wounded children, the deliberate bombardment of a UN camp resulting in over 100 civilian deaths, the pounding of Beirut and all of the coastline by Israeli warplanes. To them, there is no "crime against humanity" when it does not affect Jews.

A crushing UN report shows that it was a deliberate criminal action, supervised and controlled by a helicopter. All of this is treated as a blunder of some air force captain, or some technical mistake, excusing the real villain, the government of Israel and its military command, as it acted in Sabra and Chatila, whose main culprit, Ariel Sharon (recognized as such by the Kahn Commission of Inquiry), was immediately appointed minister in charge of precisely the establishment of "colonies" in the occupied territories (despite UN condemnation and the violation of international
law).

All of this shows the diversionary role of the lynching by the media of Abbe Pierre and of myself. The day of the shelling of Cana, the front page headline of the largest French newspaper announced the crime of Cana in the same character type as "the mistake of Abbe Pierre" and not the reality: "Shimon Peres' crime against humanity."

The day this criminal was received in Paris with great pomp, and when "Likud of France" welcomed in Paris another criminal, General Rafael Eytan (who knowingly let the massacre of Sabra and Chatila take place, and who is now #2 in Likud) with a hymn to the Messiah, the newspapers' headlines announced "Abbe Pierre is expelled from LICRA" for his support of Garaudy.

A Very Powerful Lobby in the United States

Such unanimity is a testimony to the existence and power of the lobby.

First, because it is an organ of the State of Israel. Its status appears in the Law of November 24, 1952 of the "World Zionist Organization." Articles 5 and 6 specify its attributes.

Article 5: "The State of Israel counts on the participation of all Jews in all Jewish organizations in building the State" (Israel Government Yearbook. Jerusalem, 1953-54, p. 243).

In the United States, this powerful lobby is officially credited in the Capitol. It is AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee). Zionist leaders in the United States do not hide their role. In the 23rd Congress of the World Zionist Organization, Ben Gurion stated clearly: "The collective obligation of all Zionist organizations in all nations to help the Jewish State in all circumstances is unconditional, even if such an attitude is in conflict with their respective nations" (Jerusalem Post, August 17, 1952). (See my book, p. 206.)

An example of this power is when Senator Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, summarized on CBS television on October 7, 1973 his investigation of the lobby, saying: "The Israelis control politics in Congress and in the Senate." He lost his senate seat in the following elections.

A Very Powerful Lobby in France

In France, this pressure is not lesser but is less blatant.

For example, while in Israel, the Grand Rabbi Sitruk declared to Shamir (who proposed an alliance with Hitler in 1941): "Every French Jew is a representative of Israel. Rest assured that every Jew in France is a defender of what you defend" (Le Monde," July 12, 1990). But upon his return to France, he added "without necessarily thinking of double allegiance" (Le Monde," July 13, 1990). That could be a mistake!

More recently, July 16, 1995, under the leadership of the same grand rabbi, Chirac declared: "The criminal madness of the occupant was assisted by the French people and the French government." This is a double denial of General de Gaulle's attitude.

General de Gaulle refused:

1. All legitimacy to the "puppets" of Vichy, which he never considered as a state: "I proclaimed the illegitimacy of a regime that existed at the discretion of the enemy." (Memoires, I, p. 107). "There did not exist a properly constituted French government." (I, p. 388). "Hitler created Vichy." (I, p. 389.)

The leaders of CRIF (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France) enthusiastically welcomed this denial. They expressed an "intense satisfaction to see the highest French authority recognize the continuity of the French State between 1940 and 1944." All the parties and all the press from "Le Monde" to "L'Humanite" fall in behind.

2. De Gaulle did not have such contempt for the French people: "The vast majority of the French people, far from accepting the regime imposed by violence and treason, considered the authority of Free France as the expression of its wishes and its will" (I, p. 394). And he added, as proof, the uprising of the people of Paris: "Four years of oppression did not crush the spirit of the capital. The treason was no more than vile scum on a body that remained healthy" (III, p. 442). "Our people never gave up, not even in the worst moments" (III, p. 194).

In the recent lynching of Abbe Pierre and of myself, the lobby power was asserted not only in the media, but even in the Church. We learned from "L'Humanite" (!) of April 30, 1996 that "Henri Hadjenberg, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF), requested that the Church hierarchy in France take a position on the book of negationist Roger Garaudy and the support given to him by Abbe Pierre."

The Church bowed immediately. Hadjenberg pronounced his diktat on April 29. A text was published immediately by the Episcopate "deploring the engagement of Abbe Pierre on the side of Roger Garaudy."

Hadjenberg said that he was satisfied by the position of the Church of France that on Monday "marginalized Abbe Pierre." The same day, LICRA expelled Abbe Pierre because he "maintains his support for Roger Garaudy."

The Nuremberg Taboo: An Inverted Dreyfus Affair

What is this media racket?

In other words, what do I deny in what they call, in the jargon, "negationism"?

It is sufficient to read the book in order to see that I do not deny the crimes against humanity committed by Hitler -- due to his bloody racism -- against the Jews. He accused them of being the authors of the October Revolution (he coined the phrase, "Judeo-Bolshevism") and of being the masters of international capitalism. This is a criminal double demagogy: First to please the West as a rampart against communism, and second, for internal consumption, to appeal to the masses. His main trump card was the Treaty of Versailles of 1918, which bled Germany dry. The great English economist Lord Keynes stated in his book, "The Economic Consequences of Peace" (1922): "With this treaty, you will have war within 20 years!"

Here, too, the Nuremberg Tribunal's designation of "crimes against peace" did not indict those who facilitated the rise of Hitler, thus allowing the butcher of people to pass for a savior of his people.

What I deny is that the Nuremberg Tribunal set a legal precedent and served as a criterion of historic truth, while many scholarly revisions have shown how distorted its deliberations and procedures were. (See my book, pp. 91-150.)

My criticism of the "principles" of Nuremberg is based on:

a) The very definition of the Tribunal, given on July 26, 1946 by its Presiding Judge Robert Jackson, Attorney General of the United States: "The Allies are technically still in a state of war with Germany. As a military tribunal, this tribunal represents a continuation of the Allied nations' war efforts."

b) The emergency statutes of this Tribunal (put together in London on August 8, 1945 by American, English, French and Russian leaders) leave no doubt on their "exemplary legal value."

"Article 19: The tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules relating to the admission of evidence."

"Article 21: Documents and reports of allied governments shall be admitted as authentic evidence."

Thanks to the application of these "principles," or rather the absence of principles and deliberate violation of legal ethics, the Soviet prosecutor Rudenko, for example, forced the admission of the report that blamed the German army for the massacre at Katyn of 11,000 Polish officers, while it was proved that the perpetrators were the Soviet leaders.

Similarly, when the Soviets liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, they presented a report, accepted on their word, of 4 million dead. Since then, this number continues to be controversial, as we have seen.

I have shown in my book that the rules that govern courts were not applied at Nuremberg. Neither texts nor testimonies concerning "the final solution" were verified, and the crime weapons (exhaust from trucks, or "gas chambers") were never authenticated.

Making this taboo sacred evidently required a ban on all research, the suppression of all scholarship and the demonization of whoever dares to raise questions.

This is similar to the trial of Captain Dreyfus, where it was deemed blasphemous to question the ruling of an antisemitic military tribunal backed by a Church that demonized Jews by calling them a "deicidal people."

The symmetry is striking. Today, the lobby has taken over the military and religious headquarters, not only to lynch people (like Abbe Pierre and myself) who dare to break the new idols of one-track thought and the "politically correct," but to put under investigation entire peoples, the new "deicidal peoples," against the only "chosen people."

A "Litany of Hate"

Today, there is a resumption of themes launched by Theodor Kaufman in 1942: "Germans, whoever they are, do not deserve to live." He showed the means by which the German race will be totally eliminated in 60 years. He mistook a whole people for its criminal leaders ("Germany must perish"). His racist frenzy paralleled that of Hitler.

In 1942, Clifton Fadiman requested the weekly "New Yorker" to incite blazing hatred against all Germans and not only their Nazi leaders, when he said: "The actual Nazi aggression is not the work of a group of gangsters, but rather the final expression of the deepest instincts of the German people."

In 1996, a product of American Zionist education (like Ygal Amir, Rabin's assassin, or Baruch Goldstein, killer of Hebron), a certain Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, inspired by the same "litanies of hate," describes Germans as a "Nation of Killers" in his book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners."

A similar process in operation by Bernard-Henri Levy in his book, "L'ideologie Francaise" (French Ideology). At the price of the worst historical distortions, he tries desperately to make all the French people under the Vichy regime the creators of a "French fascism." Vichy would be the product of all French culture. "French culture is a witness to our seniority in abjectness" (p. 61), and it makes France "the homeland of National-Socialism" (p. 125).

A Tribal Reading of the Bible

The Zionist feeling of superiority very much resembles the glorification of Aryan racial purity, which serves as a justification for any bloody domination policy.

In his book, "Le Talmud," (Ed. Payot, 1983), Rabbi A. Cohen is quite diligent in finding universalist elements in the Talmudic tradition. Early in the introduction (p. 19), he apologizes in advance for discriminatory passages: "A Jew needed a religion that not only distinguished him from pagans, but constantly reminded him that he is a member of the Jewish race."

He says that he found in Esdras what he calls "the fire frontier," "distinguishing and separating the Jew from all other people." This, he says, is the seed of the Talmud (p. 19).

We will not tackle here a discussion in theology, but we will only mention the political interpretation and the feeling of superiority that follows from a fundamentalist and literalist reading.

"One is more of a man when one is more Jewish" writes Rabbi Eisenberg, who runs the Sunday Jewish program on Channel 2 (Source: Rabbi Eisenberg "une Histoire des juifs" (CAL, 1970).

This theme is taken up by Elie Wiesel, citing the Talmud in his book, "Celebration Talmudique" (Ed. du Seuil, 1990): "A Jew is closer to humanity than anybody else."

This tribal reading of sacred texts, be it by Israeli extremists, "Islamists" or Christian fundamentalists is a permanent source of conflicts. To track them down is our task, whose aim is unity among men and not division.

Israel has no future in the harmonious fraternity of peoples, unless it is "dezionized," that is, becomes faithful to the admirable Jewish faith of the Prophets, whose goal was not nationalist and colonialist military conquest, but illumination of the divine message on the whole earth.

I have no word to change in my book, which is in line with my human struggle during the past half century, changing my fraternal ties whenever my challenge was not accepted. But I never changed my aim: the defense of man, every man. For GOD dwells in everyone.

A Prophetic Reading: Abbe Pierre

This brotherly love for all mankind is precisely what unites me with Abbe Pierre all through this century despite the different paths that we have followed in order to try to accomplish our divine task for humanity. This brotherliness does not require any blinding of one to the other. When we had divergent views, from the Miners' Strike of 1948 until the Maestricht Treaty, we confronted our differences candidly, but always enriching ourselves with our mutual criticisms, as a brother should help his brother along the path of truth.

That is why the treacherous attacks waged against Abbe Pierre because he refused to disown me are a disgrace to those who do not know that dialogue can be filled with controversy and that love means to be in harmony with a truth that is human, hence relative and humble, but filled with divine faith.

How pitiful are those who spoke of "blind friendship" or insulted the Father by accusing him of being senile, or "manipulated" by his entourage, or "antisemitic."

At the beginning of this "Affair," when I met the Abbe, I said to him: "You know, Pierre, how much I admire your work for the excluded, especially the homeless. Millions of Palestinians have been driven out of their homes by Zionist terror and millions of Lebanese had to flee on the road during Israeli aggressions. Don't you think that their defense is an extension of your work for the homeless of France?"

The untiring prophet went to Gaza and asked forgiveness in the name of the West from Palestinians for the despoliation of their lands and homes (he was criticized by the "Jewish Tribune" and the Kouchners). He added that no Arab was responsible for the crimes of Hitler (a "Christian apostate," said Abbe Pierre). Responding to the infamous and untruthful lawsuit against me, he said that violence annuls the Promise. In denouncing the "suicidal policy" of Israeli leaders, he was speaking the language of the Jewish Prophets, from Amos to Micah, shouting: "Listen, leaders of the House of Israel, you are building Zion with the blood of Jerusalem and with crime. Because of you, Zion will be plowed like a field; it will become a pile of rubble." (Micah, III, 1-12.)

Abbe Pierre refused to call a conquered land a "Promised Land," whether conquered by the legendary sacred exterminations of Joshua in Jericho or Hebron, or the very real massacres of Begin and the Irgun in Deir Yassin in 1948, in Kafr Kassim in 1956, or in Lebanon, from Sharon in 1982 to Perez in 1996.

The pack of apostates of the grand universalist faith of the Prophets was set against Abbe Pierre: Jacques Attali, Schwarzenberg, Kouchner, and the "high priests," Sitruk and Kahn, who summoned him to appear, like Jesus, before the Sanhedrin, before the new Inquisition tribunal, charged by the thought police, "LICRA." He refused to recant and was expelled. This was his honor and the shame of the Pharisees.

It is not at all a matter of a religious quarrel, as the sophist, Jean Daniel, wrote in an editorial in "Le Nouvel Observateur" on "Religions Against Peace." On the contrary, Abbe Pierre and myself are against the use of religions for political ends. Jews, Christians and Muslims recognize the same "Father of believers," who was neither Jewish, nor Christian, nor Muslim but anterior to all of them, an "Aramean wanderer," who announced a Covenant of GOD with "all the families of the earth." And since we are all filled with the same GOD, Abbe Pierre, myself and all people who struggle for human unity resist the temptation to attempt to appropriate the divine promise, which is in all of us, thereby making it a tool of bloody nationalism and colonialism.

It is not true, as Jean Daniel claims, that it is religions that are against peace but rather the nationalist heresies, a striking example of which is Israeli leadership. It sanctifies a policy of despoliation, aggression and violation of international laws, according to the goal assigned by its spiritual leader, the atheist Herzl, who wrote in his book, "The Jewish State": "We will be an advanced bastion of Western civilization against the barbarism of the Orient."

Abrogate the Totalitarian Gayssot Law

Today, there is no other resource for the thought police than to press charges against us in the name of the Gayssot Law. This law has not only disgraced the "communist" party and the "socialist" party, but all the political parties that fought it when they were in the opposition. They do not dare abrogate it now that they are in power, for fear of the lobby. During the debate of May 2, 1990, at the National Assembly (Official Record of May 3, 1990) when the "Gayssot Law" was passed, its stated objective was "to repress what is called "revisionism" (O.R., p. 912). "Revisionism must be sanctioned because it is a vehicle for antisemitism" (O.R., p. 956).

The hidden premise of the text is that there is no "crime against humanity" unless the crime is against Jews.

The meeting took place under heavy surveillance. A deputy remarks (O.R., p. 905): "We witnessed tonight an extraordinary stage production. During our debate, we rarely saw so many journalists and television cameras. They wanted to show that those who will vote 'against,' refuse to fight racism." (Then current Justice Minister) Toubon said, "It is not a law against racism, it is a manipulation" (O.R., p. 929) and he added, "The law they are going to enact is a media coup" (O.R., p. 936).

In Whose Interest?

Already in an article of July 5, 1983 in "Liberation," Luc Rozenzweig wrote, "'LICRA' enjoys an incredible privilege: the law of July 1, 1972 against racial discrimination, delegates to it the power to automatically decide who is antisemitic and who is not. It alone judges the appropriateness of proceedings, and within the framework of the law, reduces judges to the role of notary public in the register of infamy."

The "Gayssot Law" increases this power further. As Toubon said, "This proposition [Article 7, R.G.] was made by 'LICRA' during the work of the consultative commission on human rights" (O.R., p. 948).

Today, it is precisely Kahn, the grand master of "LICRA," who is the president of this commission!

Mssrs. Chirac, Juppe, Seguin, the current ministers of Justice and of Domestic Affairs (Toubon and Debre) and 265 deputies voted against the "Gayssot Law." One wonders what (or who) prevents them today from abrogating this law that they had so clearly denounced?

Francois Terre, the great French jurist, Philosophy of Law Professor at the Assas Faculty of the Institut, wrote: "The spirit of this law is totalitarian. It instituted negationism as a criminal offense. It is up to jurists to safeguard the fundamental freedoms undermined by the Gayssot Law: freedom of opinion and of expression. It is not in the courts that history finds its judges. Then, how can the implementation of the Gayssot Law be prevented when, prior to its promulgation, it could have been stopped by the Constitutional Council (the President of the Republic, the President of the National Assembly and of the Senate, 60 deputies, 60 senators) but which did not have the courage to do so?" The author proposes to submit it to the European Court in Strasbourg, to put an end to "the appalling character of a law that restores 'delit d'opinion' (i.e., defines questioning of official truth as a criminal offense)." ("Le Figaro" of May 16, 1996.)

It is sad to have to appeal to a foreign authority to remind France of what is a state of law.

In the same issue of the paper, a reader wrote about "the dangerous schizophrenia of a country where Salman Rushdie is a hero while Roger Garaudy is banned and Abbe Pierre is exposed to public contempt."

When Deputy Vodoz, President of "LICRA" in Switzerland, demands that a lawsuit be filed against me (in Switzerland!), Georges Andre Chevallaz, former President of the Helvetic Confederation, wrote: "As a historian, I am amazed by this spirit of McCarthyism and witch hunt every time the Holocaust is concerned" (Journal de Geneve, of May 2, 1996).

In France, during the debate on June 21, 1991 of the Gayssot Law in the General Assembly, Deputy Toubon, then Justice Minister, proposed to reject it: "It is a very grave political and legal error. It is an artificial law that imposes historical truth instead of allowing truth to be determined by history. I am sure this law will never be applied" (O.R. of June 22, 1991, p. 3571).

Today, another deputy wrote about "the official truth that fossilizes history." Recalling that the law was enacted during the Affair of Carpentras Cemetery, He described the conditions at the time of the vote, in an article entitled, "A Harmful Law": "The parliamentarians were subjected to a kind of implicit blackmail: any deputy who did not vote for this law would have been suspected of negationism. At the time, influential groups created an unhealthy climate." He added, "It is a law that imposes an official truth. It is worthy of totalitarian regimes, not of a democracy" ("Le Figaro," of May 3, 1996).

If one remembers, as Max Clos wrote in his "Bloc Notes de la semaine," that "The Gayssot Law of July 13, 1990 makes a crime of 'negationism,' the questioning of Nazi crimes against Jews," one can guess which were the "influential groups" that exercised "implicit blackmail" on the parliamentarians and why today, they do not have the courage to abrogate it, as Professor Terre said. We now know who controls and remote controls Presidents of the Republic (current or former), the Assemblies, the Media, the Parties and the Churches, and how difficult it is, through slander or silence, to help millions of well-meaning French people to liberate themselves from this "brainwashing" that hides the role played by this lie in the world domination strategy of the United States and its mercenary guardian of Middle East oil, through a project of disintegration of all the countries in the region (where the Kivounim plan is only an outline).

But the Truth Bursts Against Darkness

Efforts to silence us will be in vain. For this, they must kill us. The surge of hate against our misquoted writings, a real call to murder, shows that some are thinking about it, as though only prison will gag DREYFUS. But this will be a new proof that they cannot find any argument against us. -- Roger Garaudy

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