The Garaudy-Abbe Pierre Affair

Philo Bregstein

In his book Les mythes fondateurs de la politique Israel the French writer Roger Garaudy seriously doubts the significance of the magnitude of the Shoah. Zionists, he argues, use the Second World War to justify their suppression of the Palestinian people. Garaudy, who evolved from Stalisnism, via Christianity to Islam, found solidarity from Abbe Piere, who is still very popular in France. According ly, the book became the subject of fierce discussions. In the following article editor and writer Philo Bregstein considers the reactions. He describes Les mythes fondateurs de la politique Israel as a follow-up to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The Garaudy-Abbe Pierre affair, which caused an uproar in France last spring, seems at first sight "much ado about nothing". Garaudy is, as historians such as P.A. Taguieff (Esprit, August- September, 1996), Florent Brayard (Le Monde, 31 May 1996) and P. Vidal-Naquet (Le Monde, 4 May 1996) have shown, nothing more than a chameleon-like charlatan (changing from Protestant to Stalinist and then to Catholic and finally converting to Islam) who, without any mention of sources, has sloppily copied and plagiarized negationist predecessors such as Rassinnier and Faurisson and various extreme right publications. Abb‚ Pierre, who morally supported his old friend Garaudy, fell from his pedestal as national relief worker for the "wretched of the earth": expelled from the Licra (Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l'antis‚mitisme) he seemed to have "the mental baggage of a 19th century village priest, steeped in antijudaism" (Lib‚ration, 29 April 1996). After a series of provocative pronouncements, which were often attributed to senility (even though he has been advocating these ideas for years). He withdrew these statements and asked for forgiveness from those whom he had hurt. With this act, it appeared that the case was closed. It was nevertheless remarkable that intellectuals who "are above any suspicion of antisemitism" have walked into the trap of Abb‚ Pierre's good intentions, such as Bernard Kouchner, the instigator of M‚decins sans frontiŠres and who is at present fighting for international humanitarian aid to help war victims. In 1993, together with Abb‚ Pierre, he published a book containing conversations: Dieu et les hommes. It has now been revealed by the two journalists who compiled the book, M.A. Burner and C. Romane, in Le secret de l'Abb‚ Pierre that in consultation with Kouchner they had not included a number of antijudaic and anti- Israel pronouncements by Abb‚ Pierre. And these appear to be identical to what he would express three years later. "Poor Bernard Kouchner...." says Tribune Juive. Just like many others, Kouchner had been taken in by Abb‚ Pierre's good intentions.

First some positive aspects of the case: unlike in the recent past, it appears that revisionism is "intellectually dead" in Western Europe today. (P. Vidal-Naquet, Le Monde, 4 May 1996). Rassinier and Faurisson, whose revisionism emanates from the left, as Alain Finkielkraut already showed in 1982 in L'Avenir d'une n‚gation, were often taken seriously at the time even by a paper such as Lib‚ration. Their demands for a scientific discussion on the existence or non-existence of the gas chambers not only found a response in marginal neo-Nazi circles but also in intellectual, especially left-wing, antizionist groups.

In contrast to this, the present negative reaction in the intellectual world is unanimous: the evidence for the Shoah has been definitely shown by a great number of historical studies. It is nowadays communis opinio that those who still take individuals such as Faurisson seriously are motivated by ideological, mainly antisemitic aims. Moreover, the antizionism of the left in the seventies and eighties has lost much of its support due to the disappearance of many left-wing ideologies. By the same token, revisionism has also lost this support.

Another positive aspect is the strong condemnation by the French Catholic church of Abb‚ Pierre's antijudaic statements by Mgr. Gaston Poulain and Father Jean Dujardin (in a press release dated 29 April 1996). This confirmed the fundamentally changed view, in a positive sense, of the Catholic church towards Judaism since Vatican II.

A negative aspect of the dispute is in the first place in this sort of case the unavoidable media attention by means of which a rather uninteresting, marginal figure such as Garaudy is suddenly seen as important and his statements are made accessible to the public at large, in part thanks to the popularity of Abb‚ Pierre who supported him. Even though Garaudy was attacked by all newspapers, the aim of the revisionists was to profit from this "publicity stunt" and that has been entirely successful. An example of this is the French weekly L'Ev‚nement du Jeudi, normally above suspicion, which devoted an issue to the case full of critical articles and interviews including with Simone Weil and A. Finkielkraut. There was a photo of Abb‚ Pierre on the front page in his monks habit with the announcement in large letters - VICTORY OF THE REVISIONISTS. For a whole week this front page could be seen on posters all over Paris promoting the sale of the magazine. One of the unforeseen consequences, which I personally noted, was the case of a Romanian bookseller near Sorbonne university who until that moment had been discreetly distributing extreme right publications (for example, none of them were displayed in the shop window). He was also a discreet distributor of "samizdat" books by Garaudy as he himself termed them. From one day to the next he filled his shop window from top to bottom with copies of L'Ev‚nement du Jeudi with the text VICTORY OF THE REVISIONISTS repeated many times. Shortly after, the shop was attacked by an "armed, masked commando" (according to the bookseller), the owner wounded and his books and inventory smeared with red paint. (the same thing happened to the extreme left-wing, revisionist bookshop La Vieille Taupe, which led to its closing). But events in this case took a different course - the bookseller filled his shop window with pamphlets and distributed them in the area denouncing this as "a new attack on freedom of speech". Even Jerome Lindon, director of the avant garde publisher Editions du Minuit, called this in Lib‚ration a "a victory for Roger Garaudy (...) which recalls painful memories for my generation with the difference that the fascists and the nazis at least had the courage to accept responsibility for their outrages". The "victory of the revisionists" was that they could show that they had been the innocent victims of the violent suppression of freedom of speech. An echo of the way in which Faurisson managed years ago to win over the linguist and left-wing American intellectual Noam Chomsky.

By using this controversy, a new strategy of the revisionists emerged attempting to sow doubt and confusion. It appeared quite simple at first sight: Abb‚ Pierre's anti-Israel statements were linked to an old antijudaism which he uses to explain the Old Testament: "It all began for me when, after years of studying theology, I experienced a terrible shock when I privately began to reread the Bible and discovered the Book of Joshua. I had already been greatly disturbed upon reading some time before about Moses carrying the tablets of the law which said 'Thou shalt not kill' and upon seeing the golden calf, ordered the massacre of 3 000 of his own people. With Joshua I discovered (even if recounted centuries after the event) how a real 'Shoah' was perpetrated against all existing life in the Promised Land (...) Doesn't violence in fact destroy all foundation of the Promise?" (letter to Roger Garaudy, 15 April 1996). After Abb‚ Pierre made a link with the present State of Israel that would act in the same way with the Palestinians. Besides, it is well known that a few former members of the Italian Red Brigades were members of his Emmaus organization who would have introduced pro-Palestinian propaganda. But it is more complicated than that: the historian P.A. Taguieff shows that Abb‚ Pierre had taken these views directly from the book written by his friend Garaudy, for whom this is left-wing, anti-zionist reasoning. But Garaudy in his turn had copied this from an article which appeared in an extreme right publication. Old anti- Judaic and left-wing anti-Israel statements seem to be interchangeable with the ones expressed by the extreme right.

Another aspect of the new strategy of the revisionists is that they, by means of Abb‚ Pierre, link their ideas to the apolitical humanitarian fight against poverty. It is not a coincidence that Abb‚ Pierre's popularity has increased strongly since the breakdown of communist ideology. Extreme left and right suddenly discover each other via Abb‚ Pierre. Even the 'Renouveau ‚tudiant', during a meeting of the 'Front National' on 1 May, used the slogan "Abb‚ Pierre is on our side!". Extreme right-wing bookshops sell Garaudy's books who himself originally comes from the left and today as a convert to Islam, should be an enemy of the 'Front National'. Without the revisionists rallying behind the 'Front National' and without the 'Front National' openly supporting revisionism, there is an obvious complicity of strategy: the 'Front National' is at the moment one of the most influential racist and fascist movements in Europe with mayors in three medium-sized French cities. As P. Vidal-Naquet puts it (Le Monde, 4 May 1996): "politically and socially, due to the theories of Le Pen and Abb‚ Pierre, revisionism is on the increase".

An example of the confusion that the revisionists, by using Abb‚ Pierre, have managed to create is the fact that his views are often quoted in the press, even after his retreat to an Italian monastery, where he repented (but where he in the meantime also met up with Garaudy): "The Catholic Church of France intervened to stop me from speaking under pressure from the press which is influenced by an international zionist lobby". (Le Monde, 2-3 June 1996). He repeated the same view in an interview with the Swiss daily Le Matin, on 17 June 1996: "The Zionist movement established in the United States with world-wide ramifications is based on a verse in Genesis where God is supposed to have said to Abraham 'I give you the earth from the Nile to the Euphrates' (...) The Zionist movement says: 'We don't care about Israel or the Palestinians. What we want is the empire promised to Abraham'. And this movement is scheming worldwide to achieve this".

P.A. Taguieff, author of the historical study, Les protocoles des sages de Sion - Faux et usages d'un faux (The Protcols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery and the uses made of this forgery), shows in his article in Esprit how the Abb‚ Pierre-Garaudy affair is an example of one of the major forms of modern antisemitism - the accusations of a 'Zionist world conspiracy'. Revisionists such as Garaudy are not seeking a scientific discussion on the Shoah. Their main aim is the ideological maligning of Israel that would exploit 'The myth of the Shoah' for political purposes, helped by the 'world Jewry'.

Due to this affair, a discussion on whether revisionism should be a punishable offence or not flared up once again in France. In 1990, legislation was passed, the Gayssot Law, which made revisionism a punishable offence. This came about in reaction to Le Pen's aggressive language and the grave stone desecrations at the Jewish cemetery in Carpentras in 1989. (Recently one of the perpetrators confessed, citing the inflammatory statements of Le Pen as the motive for his deed). It is remarkable that most of the intellectuals fighting revisionism still have their doubts concerning the law not only concerning its formulation, but as a matter of principle. Simone Weil, P.A. Taguieff, P. Vidal-Naquet, A. Finkielkraut are all sceptical. They point to Faurisson who at the time put himself forward as a victim of the inquisition trying to suppress his freedom of speech. Finkielkraut says: "When it comes to the Law of Gayssot, I am sceptical. If a law is judged by its effectiveness, the result is deplorable. The Law of Gayssot changes dangerous fanatics into the persecuted. Faurisson yesterday and Garaudy today put themselves forward as victims of the Inquisition, like new Galileans, and they attract the sympathy of a number of imbeciles for whom the law is always repressive and repression always barbaric".

A Dutch echo of this affair was found in the daily newspaper Trouw which with its Christian resistance past appears to be above all suspicion of being antisemitic. Whole pages were devoted to an article on the Garaudy affair (9 May 1996) followed by an interview with him (8 June 1996), both by the journalist B. van Geffen. The latter, who made Garaudy the subject of his doctoral thesis, presented Garaudy as a "victim" of suppression of freedom of speech ("a media lynch party") and published his views without any critical commentary. Naturally for Trouw as a Christian paper, Abb‚ Pierre embodies the charitable helper of the poor and Garaudy is seen as supporting the oppressed Palestinians. Van Geffen had even given the address of the Internet site where Garaudy's book could be found The Chief Editors of Trouw did, however, criticise this (14 May 1996), conceding that the site is "full of suspect reading material, calling the holocaust into question and throwing suspicion on the Jews". In spite of this, three weeks later, Trouw published the non-critical interview of van Geffen with Garaudy on a full page. This example of 'imbecility' (as Finkielkraut rightly calls it), especially with the approval of the responsible editorial staff of Trouw, shows how easy it is to fall into the trap of anti-Semites and revisionists with the best intentions at heart.

Last but not least, yet another example of the European export of antisemitism to the Arab world: The founding myths of Israeli policy by Garaudy appeared in August 1996 in Arabic. And the author was received with great honour for the presentation of his book in Beirut, Damascus and Cairo by high-ranking government representatives (Le Monde, 21 August 1996). Criticism of Garaudy and the trial against him in France was defined in the Arabic press as a "Zionist plot". Garaudy's book is compatible with various antizionist statements in the Arab world: the proposition "that the Shoah is nothing more than a Jewish fable" is announced on a regular basis in Arab publications, as by the influential Islam 'guru' and Director of the Islamic centre in Durban, South Africa, Ahmed Deedat (Lib‚ration, 29 May 1996). The aim of the Islamic revisionists applauded by Garaudy is to destroy the State of Israel on the grounds that it is "illegal" and to bring the Jews back to the position of dependent "dhimmi" as they lived in the Arab world for centuries.

The "Garaudy-Abb‚ Pierre case shows how in Western Europe the fallacy of a Jewish, Zionist world conspiracy arises again and again under new guises even if it is rejected by public opinion. It fits in comfortably with the parallel propaganda used in the Arab world. Both contain a new anti-Israel version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. However, the critical reactions of a number of Lebanese intellectuals gives us some cause for hope: "Garaudy uses easy, superficial and false arguments and pretexts". Abdel Wahab Badrakhane, editor of El Hayat writes: "It is nonsense to deny crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazis of which the Jews and others were victims with the sole aim of proving another crime against humanity of which the victims are Arabs at the hands of Israeli Jews". This statement must, in spite of the dubious parallel with crimes against humanity which the Israelis are said to have committed against the Arabs, be considered as an attempt to keep a distance from anti-Zionist revisionism in the Arab world.

Philo Bregstein is a writer and a filmmaker. He made documentaries about the Dutch historian Jacques Presser and the conductor Otto Klemperer. Bregstein also works as a journalist for the Dutch weekly De Groene Amsterdammer. He is the author of several publications on anti- Semitism. In the last volume of Poliakov, Histoire de l'Antisemitisme 1945-1993, Bregstein wrote the chapter on anti-Semitism in the Netherlands. His last book, which appeared only a few months ago, is called Het kromme kan toch niet recht zijn (publisher de Prom).