In the Paris
Court
CRIF and the Jewish god Yahweh
against the French Professor
Robert
Faurisson
(July 11, 2006)
They
came to grief for it. Quite a bad idea, picking a quarrel
with Professor Faurisson. That is what they have
learned to their cost,
“they” being, first, Madame le substitut du
procureur (“assistant public prosecutor”) of
the French Republic in Paris, Anne de Fontette, initiator of
the proceedings, then the three
civil plaintiffs – the LICRA (“International
league against racism and anti-Semitism”), the MRAP
(“Movement against racism and anti-Semitism and for
friendship among peoples”) and the LDH (“League of
human rights”) – and, finally, the new presiding
judge of the XVIIth chamber, Nicolas Bonnal.
Professor
Faurisson’s knowledge and determination
For four and a half hours on this very
hot July afternoon, in a sweltering XVIIth
Chamber of the Paris Correctional Court, slightly more than
a hundred revisionists, who had come
from France, Britain, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy, Iran and
still other countries to support the professor, attended a
legal bout that, from the start, was to swing in favour of
the defence. 77 years of age but endowed with a fierce
energy, Robert Faurisson is a retired university professor
who taught at the Sorbonne and in Lyon. Of
“British” style (he is both a British subject and
a French citizen), he appeared determined. His memory was to
have the LICRA barrister saying: “This one, with his
hate-fed memory, can’t be expected to end up with
Alzheimer’s”. It was in a sarcastic tone that the
presiding judge deemed fit to begin the opening questioning
of the professor but the latter warned him that he would not
let himself go on being spoken to in that way. And the tone
changed. Then, at three points in his reading of a document,
the judge stood corrected. His three errors,
as the professor was good enough to point out, resulted
from the fact that he’d relied on a faulty copy
(the text of the writ of summons) whereas he ought to have
referred to the original text of a basic document:
the report drawn up by a chief inspector-sergeant. When the
professor started setting forth his line of defence and
developing the revisionist argumentation, the judge seemed
to become aware of his mistake: he had a tough opponent to
contend with and the revisionist case proved to be decidedly
more solid than he appeared to have imagined. Many times he
was to be seen, overwhelmed by it all, hiding his face in
his hands. “A judge having his virginity taken from him
on the bench!”, concluded one revisionist present at
the hearing.
The law forbids us, in France, from going into the
academic’s arguments, which R. Faurisson always
backed up by references. It will be enough here to recall
his keenness to point out that it is not his ambition to
seek “the Truth”, but that he aims only at
exactitude. According to his explanations, he first carried
out, on site at Struthof, Auschwitz, Treblinka and in a good
number of other places, a technical detective’s
investigation; then, through the intermediary of laboratory
chemists, he conducted a forensic investigation. Like
an examining magistrate, he strove to find all the elements
he could both against and in favour of the accused. He
sifted closely through a considerable number of testimonies.
In the study of documents, he merely followed the most
classic historical method. He put into practice a discipline
in which he had in the past lectured at the university of
Lyon and which had received the official designation of
“Appraisal of texts and documents (literature, history,
media)”. A revisionist, he points out, far from being a
“denier” or a
“negationist”, is a researcher who, at the
end of his inquiries, can be led to affirm that such
or such “Truth” is questionable from a scientific
point of view. Also, the right to do historical research
should not normally come with either arbitrary bounds or a
pre-imposed conclusion. The researcher must not let himself
be gagged, just as the judge must not let his hands be tied
by a special purpose law like the Fabius-Gayssot Act of 13
July 1990, also known by its technical label
“article 24bis”. Besides, up to now, for one and
the same offence, which he has stubbornly repeated over a
quarter of a century, in the same forms and in identical
conditions, the professor has seen himself judged in all
possible manners. He has often been convicted but he has at
times been acquitted and it has even come to pass that,
after a certain trial, a court of appeal has paid solid
tribute to the quality of his work, to the point of stating:
“The value of the findings defended by Mr Faurisson
[on “the problem of the gas chambers”] is
thus a matter for the sole appreciation of experts,
historians and the public”. If, over these last few
years, his publications have no longer met with prosecution,
it is because the Law changes moods, because case law
reverses itself and because French judges are first of all
men and women, who, in general, mean to serve the law but
not to enslave themselves to it.
At
the root of the charges, a botched inquiry
Robert Faurisson is charged with having granted in 2005 a
telephone interview of revisionist tenor to the Iranian
radio and television station Sahar 1. The indictment asserts
that the programme carrying the interview, having been
transmitted by satellite, could at the time be received in
France, but there is nothing to prove that it was actually
received there. The prosecution produced a
“re-transcription of Mr Faurisson’s words on the
cassette submitted by the CSA [“Superior council
for audiovisual communications”]”. Mr
Faurisson readily admitted that the recorded words
corresponded to his thoughts but added that, given the
abundance of interviews he had granted to foreign stations
or agencies, especially since his stay in Iran in November
of 2000 at the Iranian government’s invitation, he was
unable to specify the date and place of the interview in
question. And he was quite surprised that the prosecution,
for its part, should be able to state, without having made
any inquiry on the relevant points, that his interview would
seem to have been broadcast on February 3, 2005 (the date,
in fact, of the transmission) and, in the prosecution’s
obscure wording, “in Paris […], in any
case on the national territory”. The authorities had so
badly botched their own investigation into the matter that
they couldn’t tell where the cassette had come from, a
cassette that, furthermore, might well have undergone
tampering since, with the beginning and end of the
professor’s discourse having been cut out, the tape
could not show in exactly what context the remarks had been
made. [As the CSA is apparently not equipped with the
formidable technical means requisite for recording, day and
night, all the broadcasts of the great many stations of the
Arabo-Moslem world, one must suppose that the listening was
the work, in reality, of an intelligence agency, for example
the famous MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), an
appendage of the Israeli military intelligence services
specialising in tracking down revisionism in
cyberspace.] With such proof wanting, it could not,
consequently, be known whether the professor had spoken from
France or from a foreign country. As for the missing
portions of his talk, perhaps they contained a passage
where, as he customarily does, the professor warned his
interviewer that such statements as he was about to make
must not be diffused in France. In short, there existed
no proof of criminal intent. Finally, Maître Eric
Delcroix, barrister for the accused, stressed that, in
spelling certain names letter by letter, Mr Faurisson
plainly believed that his words were going to be translated
into Persian, for an Iranian audience.
The
civil plaintiffs’ agitation and insults in
the face of the professor’s demonstration
Despite the civil plaintiffs’ attempts at obstruction
and their noisy objection requesting that the judge stop
what one of them termed a “slandering of the
martyrs”, the professor listed, to the general
amazement of those present, the sizeable concessions,
touching directly on the merits of the “Holocaust”
case, made to the revisionists in the course of a
half-century by the representatives of the official version.
He brought up the undoing of Raul Hilberg, in 1985, at the
first Zündel trial in Toronto, where the Number One
historian of the “Destruction of the European
Jews” (as his magnum opus is entitled)
had been forced to admit, under oath, that there was, after
all, no document proving the existence of a policy for the
physical extermination of the Jews. When summoned to explain
how, then, such a policy had been able to be conceived,
ordered and implemented by Germany, he stated, affirming
beforehand what was to appear later that year in the new
edition of his book, that
all of that “came about not so much [in line
with] a plan carried out, but an incredible meeting of
minds, a consensus mind reading by a far-flung
bureaucracy”! Robert Faurisson mentioned as well the
utter defeat of Jean-Claude Pressac on May 9, 1995, in the
very same XVIIth chamber. A few days after that
memorable session, Pressac had, on his own initiative,
signed a sort of act of surrender, which would be revealed
to us five years later by a young French academic,
Valérie Igounet, at the very end of her book
Histoire du négationnisme en France (Paris,
Seuil, 2000, p. 651-652). For the one who for years had been
the miraculous saviour of exterminationism or affirmationism
and the Klarsfeld couple’s protégé, the
dossier of the official history of the concentration camps
was henceforth “rotten” and no longer good for
anything but the “rubbish bins of history”. At
this, the burly, paunchy barrister for the LICRA,
Maître Charrière Bournazel, exploded with
anger. Together with his friends, he asked the judge to put
an end to the professor’s turn to speak. Fifteen years
previously, faced with the same demand, presiding judge
Claude Grellier, the first to hear cases brought under the
1990 law, had termed it “surreal”,
pointing out to the censors that, if Faurisson was appearing
before his court, it was indeed because of them. Judge
Bonnal having ruled that the defendant should continue to be
heard, the professor went on with his discourse. Robert
Faurisson piled up the evidence, with references,
indications of sources and all kinds of precisions. He
predicted that his opponents, for want of ability to
confront him with arguments and evidence, would seek refuge
in invective. And that is what happened. With regard to him
or his writings, all that was to be heard from the
plaintiffs were words such as “stinking”,
“nauseating”, “falsifier”,
“lie”, “crime”, “beyond bad
faith”, “mud”. In his concluding statement,
Maître Charrière Bournazel struck a solemn pose
and proclaimed himself a “holy garbage
collector”. The plaintiffs repeated the word
“anti-Semite” but with nothing specific to
indicate the defendant’s supposed anti-Semitism. Later,
Maître Delcroix was to observe that, in our day and
age, the accusation of anti-Semitism is hurled against
people just as the accusation of anti-Christianism was
launched against people in former times: “We know your
hidden motive, Galileo: you’re trying to discredit the
Holy Scripture!”
The
substitute public prosecutor,
Anne de Fontette, calls for Yahweh’s
protection
Anne de Fontette, the substitute public prosecutor, brought
the verbal assaults to a climax with one of her own. She was
putting both Faurisson and Iran on trial. To crown it
all, the rhetorical flourish of her summation was to
be… a Jewish prayer. Announcing that she was
about to give a reading of a text of which, as she let us
know, she would have been glad to be the author, she read
out an invocation to Yahweh (sic), protector of his
“chosen people” (sic), beseeching him to
protect the said people from “lying lips”
(sic) (thus, from the “lying lips” of
Faurisson). You have read correctly. Those words were
pronounced by an assistant to the procureur of
the French Republic and in the courtroom of a secular State.
The crucifix had long been removed from French courtrooms,
but, on this day, in Paris, it has been replaced by the
evocation of Yahweh, whose wrath might strike Robert
Faurisson, a call that may be interpreted as a call to
murder. Is it not specified in Psalm
120 that “sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of
juniper” shall punish the “lying lips”?
Today, the French people in their entirety have been
replaced by the sole “chosen people”. Judge Bonnal
did not breathe a word. Can one imagine his reaction if a
representative of the public prosecutor’s office had
read an invocation to either Allah or Jesus (who, according
to the Talmud, is condemned to stand in boiling hot
excrement till the end of time)? Madame le substitut
ended by declaring that, as Faurisson was a multiple repeat
offender, it would only be right to “move up a
notch” and give him a prison sentence, “perhaps
with remission”. She was unaware that on May 9, 1995
her predecessor, François Cordier, had sought a
sentence of three months without remission. As for the
various civil plaintiffs, they demanded, true to ritual
fashion, their pounds of flesh in the form of coin of the
realm.
Nicolas
Bonnal has been “trained” by the
CRIF and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre!
But why did judge Bonnal keep quiet in the face of the
misplaced evocation of the Judaic deity
and the call to violence or to
murder? Is it because he has compromised himself with two
entities that are close to the Israeli right: the CRIF
(“Representative council of French Jewish
institutions”) and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre? The
CRIF is headed by the banker Roger Cukierman, formerly a
senior director with the
Edmond de Rothschild bank. And, just recently, in a press
release of July 5, the CRIF announced that it was in charge
of a “training” programme for European
judges, among whom it expressly mentioned, first of all,
Nicolas Bonnal, who had taken a course given by Marc Knobel,
a research fellow at the Centre Simon-Wiesenthal de France!
In second place the CRIF proudly announced another trainee:
François Cordier! Was Robert Faurisson about to find
himself in a rabbinical court that would be trying him
more Judaico?
Maître
Eric Delcroix’s clap of thunder
A formidable voice then made itself heard in the courtroom:
that of Maître Eric Delcroix. Hang the microphone! We
were no longer hearing the speeches of our three likenesses
of Maître Bafouillet (“Barrister Babbler”),
as inept as that fictional French lawyer who was so afraid
lest he “make the judge’s white hairs turn
red”. With Eric Delcroix it’s a well-structured
presentation eloquently delivered in the great French
tradition. The professor’s barrister went to the bottom
of the case: he dissected “article 24 bis”
of the law regulating the freedom of the press, that
“atrocious article 24 bis” as Maître
Yves Baudelot, lawyer for Le Monde, has termed it.
After demonstrating its aberrant nature, Maître
Delcroix, going to the bottom of the bottom, showed the
legal ignominy of the trial of the defeated at Nuremberg in
1945-46, which was the basis chosen for article 24
bis. He also recalled how, as a young law
graduate, he had visited the Soviet Union to take part in
the defence of dissidents. These days it is against a new
tyranny that he continues his task of defending public
freedoms. For years he had fought to obtain the
non-enforcement of article 14 of the same law, which enabled
the Interior minister to ban certain publications printed
abroad. That non-enforcement ended up being obtained de
facto before it was then approved by the superior
administrative courts in Paris. Finally, the lawmakers have
recently repealed article 14 outright. Maître Delcroix
declared: “I’ve vowed to have the hide of article
24 bis just as I’ve had the hide of article
14.”
Last
to speak: Professor Faurisson
Despite all kinds of hindrances the professor had been able
to speak for an hour. Now he was to speak for another half
hour. In his address, he listed the civil parties’ main
errors and, especially, those of the substitut. He
pulled his punches somewhat, for the opponent was visibly
exhausted and flustered. One doesn’t hit a man when
he’s down. But there was a warning: any conviction or
new prosecution would reignite hostilities. In the past few
years, guided by experience, the examining magistrates and
prosecutors had refrained from causing R. Faurisson trouble.
Then, new and inexperienced jurists thought they would be
cleverer than their predecessors. That cost them dear on
this July 11th of 2006. It could cost them dearer
still in a future encounter on the judicial terrain.
Meanwhile, the decision is due to be handed down on October
3, 2006
NB:
Contrary to their custom, the Jewish tontons
macoutes did not come to the courthouse on the day of
this hearing, and so did not punch anyone. One of judge
Bonnal’s predecessors, Jean-Yves Monfort, used to show,
for his part, great indulgence towards the physical violence
of the groups known as Bétar, Tagar and Ligue de
défense juive. And early last year, on January 15,
2005 to be precise, speaking on radio
station France-Inter at 8.30 AM, he confided to presenter
Elisabeth Lévy that he was “alarmed” by the
number of revisionist followers: he was sad not to see the
“citizens come out onto the
streets” to express their
“indignation” and, in doing so, bring their
support to judges whom he described as being totally
isolated in their struggle against “negationism”.
Acknowledging that the remark, coming as it did from a
judge, might surprise people, he called for – his exact
word – “disorder”!
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