Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy; Despised by west revered by Muslims – By Latheef Farook

Despised by Jewish lobbies in United States and Europe well known French philosopher, left wing intellectual and prominent communist author Roger Garaudy died last week   near Paris at the age of 98. 

Born into a Catholic and atheist family Garaudy, a holocaust denier, converted  Protestant at the age of 14   before embracing Islam in 1982. As a Muslim he adopted the name "Ragaa" and became a prominent Islamic commentator and supporter of the Palestinian cause. 

Garaudy wrote more than 50 books, mainly on political philosophy and Marxism. Some of these books have been controversial due to hisanti-Zionist positions and denial of the Holocaust. He became a political outcast after publishing a book which claimed that Nazi war crimes were invented to justify the existence of Israel.

In 1996 Garaudy published his most controversial work, “The Founding Myths of Modern Israel”. In this book he  argued, among a number of other controversial claims, that Hitler had ordered the deportation and not the extermination of the Jews and that typhus, not gas chambers, was responsible for the deaths of Jews in Nazi concentration camps.

In his book, Garaudy enumerated many of the premises of the international Jewish claim to rights in Palestine and to the legitimacy of modern state of Israel as "myths," e.g., the "theological myths" of the Bible; the twentieth century "myth of Zionist anti-Fascism" (citing evidence that Zionists actually collaborated with Hitler's regime); the "myth of justice at Nuremberg," the "myth of the six million," and the "myth of the land without a people for a people without a land." These and other myths, as Garaudy's book argues, had been used by world Zionists to dispossess the Palestinians of their homeland. 

Garaudy's essay unabashedly kicked over three pillars of the traditional version of the Holocaust story: namely, the Hitler’s order to exterminate the Jews of Europe, the existence of the homicidal gas chambers, and the very "genocide" itself. 

After an outcry in the media, Garaudy was prosecuted under France’s tough laws against inciting racial hatred and denying crimes against humanity, and found guilty in 1998. On 27 February 1998 the French court fined him 240,000 French francs – about $40,000 and was sentenced to a suspended jail sentence of several years. 

Many of those who frothed against Founding Myths gave voice to their embarrassment — real or pretended — at the French law that makes it a crime to question the Holocaust. 

The decision of the court provoked a debate about freedom of speech in France and Europe and some claimed the verdict was a political one.  He appealed against the judgment at every possible level but lost each time, with the final verdict from the European Court of Human Rights declaring that he had received a fair trial. 

Since then he was boycotted by publishers and others under powerful Jewish lobby.

He lamented that” For more than half a century, I have had my books published by the biggest French publishing houses. Today, I am forced to publish  at my own expense  because since 1982 I have violated a taboo: the criticism of Israeli politics, which is henceforth protected by the infamous Gayssot-Law of July 13, 1990, which brings back in France the Second Empire's "delit d'opinion", which uses a repressive law to make up for the lack of arguments. 

However he repeated his claim that the Holocaust is a myth, stating that the genocide of Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War was "invented as a myth byChurchill, Eisenhower and De Gaulle" to justify the destruction and occupation of Germany.

His suggestions for a Muslim counter-strategy…

It is a fact that anybody spending some length of time in mainstream Western society notes, that the Jewish victimology around the supposed WW II "holocaust" in magical gas chambers, is hammered – day and night – into the Western non-Jewish media consumers. Not a day passes by without TV, radio, the cultural pages of the main news papers, carrying something on this subject – usually produced by Jews. Even the Western schoolchildren get visits from Jewish so-called "survivors of the holocaust", telling their fantastic tales of Germans making soap from Jewish body fat, their miraculous escapes from Nazi "death camps", etc. – in front of weeping audiences of young minds.

The end result is a brainwash that effectively erases all feelings of sympathy for the modern victims of the Jews. The IDF slaughter machine can thus openly massacre thousands of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians, but from the indoctrinated Westerners at most you will hear something like lame critique: "It is a sad thing what happens now, but it has to be understood in the context of the terrible deeds that was made by the Nazis against the Jews during the Second World War…"

Garuady publishes articles on the Jewish use of this myth and how it can be combated, so that Westerners can be liberated from this vicious propaganda and thus also not be used as simple tools in the Jews' war against Arabs, Muslims – against anybody standing in the way of their expanZionist plans.

In later interviews, Garaudy stated that the attacks of 11 September 2001 were organized by the United States government.  

Garaudy has been praised throughout the Islamic World:

In June 1999, Jordanian intellectuals named Garaudy "the most important international cultural personality of the 20th century."

Former Syrian vice-president Abdul-Halim Khaddam has called Garaudy "the greatest contemporary Western philosopher."

OLusted Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi stated that Garaudy is "Europe's greater philosopher since Plato and Aristotle.

Garaudy was a co-winner of the King Faisal International Prize for Services to Islam in 1986.

In February 2006, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah described Garaudy as "a great French philosopher." Nasrallah went on to praise Garaudy for exposing "alleged Jewish Holocaust in Germany" and stated that Garaudy "proved that this Holocaust is a myth." Nasrallah also criticized France for putting Garaudy on trial.   

His hero's welcome in the most populous Arab country,Egypt, included backing from an array of social and intellectual leaders. "Every Muslim should support Garaudy's thought and stand with all cultural, religious and diplomatic efforts," declared Egypt's highest religious authority, Grand Mufti Nasr Farid Wasel. "It is a duty to defend him and stand by his side."

In Iran, 600 journalists and 160 members of parliament signed petitions backing Garaudy, and during a visit to the country, he was received by the nation's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, who congratulated the French scholar.

Given this, it is not surprising that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and such American-based Jewish-Zionist support groups as the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Zionist Organization of America have designated such books as Garaudy's Founding Myths as the "number one threat to Israel."