Garaudy the Heretic and his Banned Book

THE HOFFMAN WIRE
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Michael A. Hoffman II, Editor

June 9, 2005

GARAUDY THE HERETIC AND HIS BANNED BOOK

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OSCE summit ends with new pledge to fight anti-Semitism

By The Associated Press

CORDOBA, Spain - Western governments pledged Thursday to fight anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance but acknowledged some of them have failed to deliver on past commitments and that upbeat speeches must now be matched with hands-on measures against hate crimes.

The two-day conference of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe ended on an unexpected and somewhat angry note as the body's top official for an anti-Semitism task force expressed shock upon learning that a landmark building in host city Cordoba houses a government-subsidized foundation created by Roger Garaudy, a French author convicted of questioning the Holocaust death toll.

"I am angry that this can happen here and nobody is really working against that," Gert Weisskirchen told The Associated Press. "I am ready to write a letter to the minister of the interior asking him what he personally is now doing against it. That is the first step. Then we will see."

In a final statement issued after two days of speeches and workshops, delegates from all 55 member states of the OSCE stressed the importance of interfaith dialogue and insisted that strife in the Middle East cannot be used as justification for violence against Jews.

The statement said educating people about the Holocaust and anti-Semitism is needed to prevent intolerance, but it did not suggest any specific measures on how to do this.

And it alluded to the fact that the OSCE has not come up with an official definition of what anti-Semitism is. "This is a work in progress," said the US ambassador to the Vienna-based body, Stephan Minikes.

Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said the conference had agreed on a policy of "zero tolerance of intolerance" and the meeting went a step beyond one held last year in Berlin because there was a greater commitment by countries to actually do something about religious and racial intolerance and not just talk about it.

Delegates heard that only 29 had abided by a pledge last year to provide the OSCE with detailed statistics on hate crimes.

The head of the U.S. delegation, New York Governor George Pataki, said: "We have all given our speeches in the best prose we can muster, but there is more to combating anti-Semitism and intolerance than mere speeches. We now need to implement our commitments."

As the conference ended, town hall quickly called a press conference to explain the existence of the Garaudy foundation, about 200 meters from the palace where the conference was held.

The edifice is an exquisite 12th-century Moorish tower in the old quarter of Cordoba, which in medieval times was known as a flourishing and peaceful home to Muslims, Jews and Christians.

The tower, which features a museum dedicated to that period, is owned by the town council, Deputy Mayor Andres Ocana said. Town hall first ceded the spot to the foundation in 1987 and renewed the arrangement 10 years later.

The foundation was created by Garaudy, who in 1998 was convicted in France over a book he wrote that questioned whether 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust.

Ocana said the Roger Garaudy Foundation receives a small subsidy from town hall and he defended the foundation's goals - encouraging harmony among religions - as legitimate and longstanding.

He said Garaudy is very ill and now has essentially nothing to do with the foundation. Ocana said the fact that his name remains on it is "a bit anachronistic," but officials had never considered forcing it to change its name after Garaudy was convicted in 1998 in France.

The vice president of the board that now runs the foundation, Balbino Povedano, said the foundation is about an idea - encouraging religious harmony - not its founder and that he himself would raise the issue of the 5-member board changing the organization's name.

Garaudy, a philosopher and convert to Islam who used to travel often to Cordoba, received a six-month suspended prison sentence and fines amounting to $21,400 for disputing facts about the Holocaust in his book, "The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics." Garaudy also received a three-month suspended sentence and an additional US$8,000 worth of fines for inciting racial hatred.

In his book, Garaudy questioned the number of Jews killed by the Nazis in World War II, saying it was much lower than the 6 million agreed upon by historians, and denounced what he called "Shoah business" - exploiting the Holocaust for money and political gains.

A stand in the lobby of the museum features a number of books by Garaudy but not the one he was convicted for or any that seemed to be about revisionism.

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