WAR OF PERCEPTION

Canadian hate speech law unconstitutional: rights tribunal

The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal on Wednesday ruled that Section 13, Canada's much maligned human rights hate speech law, violates the Charter right to free expression because it carries the threat of punitive fines.

The shocking decision by Tribunal member Athanasios Hadjis leaves several hate speech cases in limbo, and appears to strip the Canadian Human Rights Commission of its controversial legal mandate to pursue hate on the Internet, which it has strenuously defended against complaints of censorship.

It also marks the first major failure of Section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act, an anti-hate law that was conceived in the 1960s to target racist telephone hotlines, then expanded in 2001 to the include the entire Internet, and for the last decade used almost exclusively by one complainant, activist Ottawa lawyer Richard Warman.

Mr. Warman's first big loss is a victory for the respondent Marc Lemire, webmaster of freeedomsite.org and a prominent figure in the Canadian far right.

Typically for the messy state of Canada's perennial hate speech debate, public reaction to the ruling yesterday was polarized, running the spectrum from glowing praise for the "bold" Mr. Hadjis, to criticism that his "outrageous" conclusion is "vulnerable on judicial review."

All sides seem to agree, however, that the stage is set for pitched battle in federal court, where CHRT rulings can be appealed. Another less likely outcome is for Parliament itself to repeal or amend Section 13, a law that even supporters say needs updating in the age of the Internet.

Neither the CHRC nor Mr. Warman would comment.

"No matter what happens, this decision is going to federal court," Mr. Lemire said. "This is the beginning of the end for Section 13 now. This law is 32 years old. Not a single person has ever won until today. But did I really win? I have given up six years of my life. The process is the punishment."

Mr. Warman, a former investigator for the CHRC, brought a complaint against Mr. Lemire in 2003, after monitoring his website for almost a year. He alleged that postings on the discussion forum, mostly written by others, contravened Section 13 in that they were "likely to expose" identifiable groups to "hatred or contempt." Mr. Warman later urged the CHRC investigators to expand their investigation to other websites he believed Mr. Lemire was involved with, but to "hold off on informing" Mr. Lemire "until the police take a good look at it." No criminal charges were ever filed.

In all but one case, Mr. Hadjis decided that these postings either did not contravene Section 13(1), or that Mr. Lemire cannot be held responsible for what others posted on his website.

Mr. Hadjis found Mr. Lemire violated the law in one case, by posting an article called "AIDS Secrets", written by an American neo-Nazi, which Mr. Hadjis found was "rife with hyperbole and moral condemnation. Homosexuals, and Blacks to a lesser extent, are denigrated as purveyors of a "killer" that is on the loose, agonizingly destroying the lives of American children and adults alike."

Even with this finding, however, Mr. Hadjis declined to make any order against Mr. Lemire. As a statutory tribunal, Mr. Hadjis does not have the legal authority to officially declare a law unconstitutional. But if he finds it would be unconstitutional to enforce it, he can do as he has done, which is to "simply refuse to apply these provisions."

Part of his motivation was that virtually all the offending material was removed either before or shortly after Mr. Lemire received word of the complaint against him.

"Mr. Lemire had not only "amended" his conduct by removing the impugned material, but sought conciliation and mediation as soon as he learned of the complaint against him," Mr. Hadjis wrote. "The problem had thus already been eliminated, yet the complaint continued to be processed."

Section 13(1) remains valid Canadian law, despite this ruling. Its constitutionality was last upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada in a 1990 split decision, before the Internet age.

That decision, about neo-Nazi John Ross Taylor, upheld the law as a justifiable limit on free expression largely because of its remedial, non-punitive purpose. But Mr. Hadjis found that that, today, the law "has become more penal in nature," and this renders it an unjustifiable limit on freedom of expression.

Ever since a 1998 amendment to allow the Tribunal to levy fines up to $10,000 -- payable to the government -- the pursuit of Section 13(1) cases "can no longer be considered exclusively remedial, preventative and conciliatory in nature," he wrote.

He cited Mr. Warman's request for a $7500 penalty against Mr. Lemire. Mr. Warman has won over a dozen other Section 13(1) cases, many leading to similar fines, payments to himself, and legal restrictions on Internet activity.

This criticism about a punitive law masquerading as a remedial one echoes that of Richard Moon, a law professor hired by the CHRC last year to provide an expert analysis of their online hate speech mandate. In essence, his advice was that it could not be done fairly, and so should not be done at all.

Prof. Moon said Wednesday's decision is "obviously a significant moment in the history of Section 13, but it seems like it is in some important sense inconclusive."

He said the ruling has no weight as legal precedent, and could theoretically be ignored by future tribunals, but in practice it is impossible to ignore, and it hints at a fundamental problem with the law.

"As soon as the Supreme Court confirmed that the scope of Section 13 was narrow, and confined to extremely hateful messages, then it was highly unlikely that we were going to have a kind of regular human rights process that involves conciliation between the parties," he said. "That was always something that we could have foreseen."

"We still believe Section 13 is constitutional. There seems to be some major difference of opinion within the Tribunal itself," said Bernie Farber, CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, referring to previous constitutional challenges of Section 13 that went the other way.

Marvin Kurz, legal counsel to B'nai Brith, which was an intervenor in this case along with the CJC and others, echoed Mr. Farber's question about why Mr. Hadjis did not simply "read out" the penalty section -- that is, ignore it, but allow the actual hate speech section to stand.

"Not only did he not do it, but he failed to explain why he did not consider the alternative," Mr. Kurz said. "It's like if the police act wrongly in a criminal case, you don't throw out the criminal law. That's what he's done here, and that doesn't make sense to me."

Ezra Levant, a blogger who has led the campaign against human rights hate speech law, said the ruling "shows that the CHRC has been acting illegally for many years," and it forces the Conservative government to make a "new kind of decision" about whether to appeal.

"If they launch an appeal, they are casting their lot with the censors," he said.

Pearl Eliadis, a human rights lawyer and a defender of Section 13, played down the importance of the ruling, and said Mr. Hadjis "just got it wrong. With respect, it's constitutionally not within the normal way that these provisions are dealt with." She said he should have simply ignored the offending penalty section and upheld the law.

Bruce Ryder, a constitutional law professor at York University, said Mr. Hadjis was correct to find that the penalty provision "exacerbated the chilling effect" on freedom of expression. But he said Mr. Hadjis' reasoning "broke down at the end," and he should have simply rejected the penalty provision.

He also wondered how Mr. Lemire was acquitted over the posting of an article that explicitly denied the Holocaust, which he called "outrageous and inconsistent with jurisprudence," and makes the entire ruling "vulnerable on judicial review."

Mark Steyn, a conservative author who was the target of a prominent hate speech complaint over his writing in Maclean's, said Mr. Hadjis' realized "that there is no future for Section 13 because of the damage done to it by the dress-up Nazis of the CHRC and and the sordid racket of Richard Warman."

"It makes explicit that section 13 has no friends," he said.

Joseph Brean / National Post

Hamas condemns Holocaust lessons

Gaza's ruling Islamist movement Hamas has resisted suggestions that Palestinian children should be taught about the Holocaust in UN-run schools.

The head of its education committee in Gaza, Abdul Rahman el-Jamal, told the BBC that the Holocaust was a "big lie".

He said that to teach it would be to "grant a big favour" to Israel, which has been fighting Hamas for years.

The UN, which runs most Gazan schools, recently asked local groups whether the Holocaust should be taught.

It uses local textbooks and, in Gaza, that means using material from neighbouring Egypt, the BBC's Tim Franks reports.

But over the past seven years the UN has added its own coursework about human rights.

Mr Jamal told the BBC that the UN should, instead, teach about the Naqba, the term Palestinians use to describe the establishment of the state of Israel and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees.

A spokesman for the UN said that no final decision on this year's curriculum had yet been made. Some 200,000 children are taught in schools run through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

During the Holocaust, Nazi Germany murdered some six million Jews.

However, the event's significance is often disputed in parts of the Middle East where Israel is seen as the enemy and the Holocaust is seen as a tool used by Israel to justify its actions.

BBC News 

It is right to expose Wiesenthal

‘Simon Wiesenthal’s reputation is built on sand. He was a liar and a bad one at that. From the end of the war to the end of his life, he would lie repeatedly about his supposed hunt for Eichmann as well as his other Nazi-hunting exploits.

“Wiesenthal would also concoct outrageous stories about his war years and make false claims about his academic career.”

With these words, the historian Guy Walters begins his examination of the career of the world’s most famous Nazi hunter. It forms one of the main themes of his new book, Hunting Evil, a history of the Nazi war criminals who escaped and the effort to bring them to justice. And it is impossible to read it without feeling deeply uncomfortable.

There are two reasons for this, and only one of them is to do with Wiesenthal. The first reason for discomfort is simply that Walters lays bare, in what is a fine, very readable but nonetheless important, book about how the victors simply let criminals, thousands upon thousands of terrible murderers, walk away after the war.

A couple of years ago, at the end of a drama documentary on the Wannsee conference, the sentences handed out to the conspirators were rolled on the screen just before the credits. I remember watching aghast as I read that one after another of these monsters appeared to have gone back to Bavaria or wherever and lived a quiet life as a greengrocer. Walters explains how this happened.

To start with, the Allies simply had what they regarded as more important things to do. They didn’t want to spend any time or money catching Nazis. Walters prints a tragi-comic correspondence between a set of war crimes investigators and their superiors in which headquarters declined a request for an English-German dictionary, saying that it was out of print and wouldn’t be available for a year.

The victors were also fighting each other. Nazis were recruited to help fight the Soviets, and thus protected from justice. The Allies were fearful, too, that legal proceedings would expose their own soldiers to liability.

They failed to comprehend the scale of the Nazi crime until the units were disbanded and it was too late. Into the vacuum stepped privateers. And Wiesenthal was the most famous. He did a wonderful thing. He kept the issue in the public eye, kept the memories alive, kept the pressure on.

This made him a secular saint. Until now, criticising Wiesenthal has been the occupation only of cranks and antisemites. Walters is most definitely neither of those. But has he erred by providing them with ammunition? Should Jews welcome his book, or shun it? Very firmly the former, in my view.

Walters’s documentary evidence on Wiesenthal’s inconsistencies and lies is impeccable. He shows how the Nazi hunter’s accounts of his wartime experiences are contradictory and implausible. He demonstrates that he had no role, contrary to his own assertion, in the capture of Adolf Eichmann. He pitilessly dissects Wiesenthal’s overblown claims about the numbers he brought to justice, suggesting it was not much more than a handful.

When you read Hunting Evil, you know its author is telling the truth. And, above all — above everything — the truth matters. The truth however painful, the truth however embarrassing, the truth wherever it takes you. Jews can never be hurt by the truth about the Holocaust and must never fear it, never run away from it.

Ben Barkow, the director of the Wiener Library, the institution that my grandfather established to document the truth, has lent his voice to that of Walters, agreeing that a revaluation of Wiesenthal’s contribution was in order. Barkow argues that a nuanced view is possible. That accepting that Wiesenthal was a showman and a braggart and, yes, even a liar, can live alongside acknowledging the contribution he made.

Surely he is right. But even if he is not, Walters has done a service to history and therefore to Jews.

By Daniel Finkelstein / The JC.Com

The Face Of Jewish Vengence: 'Inglourious Basterds'

By Trevor Lynch / Occidental Quarterly

Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds [sic, sic] has been hyped as World War II action movie-cum-sadistic gorefest. In reality, it is a self-indulgent snorefest. I thought I would need a gin and tonic before I went in, but it turns out what I needed was a cup of coffee. Yes, there is some gore and sadism, but frankly I found myself hoping for more of it. Anything, really, to relieve the sheer boredom.

This is Quentin Tarantino’s worst movie, and that is saying a lot, given how bad Kill Bill, vol. I is. Pulp Fiction was Tarantino’s Citizen Kane, and it has been The Magnificent Ambersons ever since. If you find this review entertaining, let me assure you that it is far more entertaining than the movie itself. Nothing here should be interpreted as encouragement for you to waste your time and money on this preposterous and dull film.

Inglourious Basterds is about a team of American terrorists, consisting of seven Jews led by a gentile, Aldo “the Apache” Raine (played by Brad Pitt), who hails from Tennessee and claims to be part American Indian. The character is clearly based on Tarantino himself, since he too has an Italian name, hails from Tennessee, and claims to be part Cherokee. The mission of the Basterds is to terrify the Nazis by killing them in the most sadistic manner possible and mutilating their corpses. The dead are scalped. The survivors have swastikas carved in their foreheads.

Holocaust narratives are filled with tales of thousands of Jews herded to their doom by relative handfuls of Germans and their collaborators. Although this sheep-like behavior seems rather unlike the hyper-aggressive and unruly Jews of my acquaintance, most people accept it at face value and then wonder: What was wrong with these people? Why didn’t they fight back?

Tarantino has asked the same question: “When you watch all the different Nazi movies, all the TV movies, it’s sad, but isn’t it also frustrating? Did everybody walk into the boxcar? Didn’t somebody do something?”

Inglourious Basterds is his answer. During WW II, the Jews needed the leadership of someone like Aldo the Apache, a mostly white man with a bit of red savage mixed in, just like the people who have churned out six million holocaust flicks need to take direction from Quentin Tarantino. With Tarantino in charge, the war would have had a very different end, and Inglourious Basterds shows us how.

Should Jews be insulted by this premise? Of course they should. But the movie itself is far more insulting still. Indeed, this is probably the most anti-Semitic movie ever released by Hollywood. Tarantino’s Jewish characters are one-dimensional, inhuman monsters.

The Jewish Basterds are all as ugly as Der Sturmer cartoons. They have virtually no lines in the entire movie. All they do is skulk around, waiting for Aldo the Apache’s commands to murder and torture Germans.

The most prominent of the Basterds is played by Eli Roth, just another degenerate Jewish director of repulsive horror films. Roth plays the “Bear Jew,” who beats Germans to death with a baseball bat. He is the funniest thing in the entire movie, with his pouting, prissy mouth, drag queen makeup, and shiny brilliantined coiffure. Roth’s large, hairy body (anyone can take steroids) looks menacing until one hears his high, hysteria-edged voice. There was laughter in the audience every time this castrated gorilla opened his mouth on screen.

Too shallow to realize that he was playing a monstrous buffoon, Roth really got into the role, praising Inglourious Basterds as “kosher porn” (is there any other kind?). He really gets off on fantasies of killing Nazis: “It’s almost a deep sexual satisfaction of wanting to beat Nazis to death, an orgasmic feeling. My character gets to beat Nazis to death. That’s something I could watch all day. My parents are very strong about Holocaust education.” They sound like lovely people, and I am sure they are really proud of what a successful boy Eli turned out to be.

Other Jews were equally smitten: Tarantino’s producer, Lawrence Bender, told Tarantino, “As your producing partner, I thank you, and as a member of the Jewish tribe, I thank you, motherfucker, because this movie is a fucking Jewish wet dream.” Harvey and Bob Weinstein, the film’s executive producers, also reportedly enjoyed the film’s theme of Jewish revenge.

Tarantino also reported received uniformly positive reactions from his Jewish friends: “The Jewish males that I’ve known since I’ve been writing the film and telling them about it, they’ve just been, ‘Man, I can’t fucking wait for this fucking movie!’” he told me. “And they tell their dads, and they’re like, ‘I want to see that movie!’”

If all these Jews have no objection to their tribe being portrayed as one-dimensional vengeful sadists, who am I to complain? Perhaps the shoe fits.

The most prominent Jewish character in the movie is the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Shoshanna (played by Mélanie Laurent), the daughter of a Jewish dairy farmer (that got the first laugh of the movie). Her family is massacred in 1941 by the SS, and somehow she turns up a few years later with an assumed French identity running a movie theater in Paris with her Negro lover. When her theater is chosen to premiere a new German movie in the presence of Hitler, Goebbels, Goring, Borman, and other leading Nazis, she plans to bolt the doors and burn the place down as an act of revenge.

Shoshana is a character of reptilian inhumanity. A young German, Frederick Zoeller (played by Daniel Brühl) is obviously smitten with her. A film enthusiast, he tries to strike up a conversation about movies. The contrast could not be clearer. He is warm, sincere, and polite. He sees her as a fellow human being and a fellow film-enthusiast.

She sees him only as a racial enemy. She takes no interest in him until she discovers that he is both a film star and a war hero, which she thinks she can use to her advantage. (He does not reveal these things to her initially, for he does not merely wish to impress her, but to befriend her.)

Her only flash of human emotion comes at the end of a scene in which she meets the SS man, Standartenführer Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), who murdered her family, but it just heightens the impression that she is a cold-blooded master of deception and intrigue.

Shoshanna’s inhumanity is heightened by comparison to Uma Thurman’s revenge-driven character “The Bride” in the Kill Bill movies. The difference is not just a matter of who played the role (although Tarantino decided that as well) but of how the actresses were directed.

Hans Landa claims that he is effective at hunting Jews because he knows how they think. The meaning of this is made clear at the end of the film, when he turns out to be a traitor.

The Allies do not come off much better than the Jews. Aldo the Apache is the only American. He is a loud-mouthed, sadistic, duplicitous jackass with a hillbilly accent. Brad Pitt plays him for laughs, and he is genuinely funny.

There are three Britons: the handsome German Michael Fassbender as film-critic Lt. Archie Hicox, Mike Myers as General Ed Fenech, and the wreck of Rod Taylor as Winston Churchill. The first two come off as effete wankers, and Churchill might as well be Jabba the Hutt.

　

All of this is in strong contrast to the portrayal of the Germans, even the German traitors. First of all, they are mostly quite good-looking and sexy. (As P. J. O’Rourke said: “Nobody has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually revished by someone dressed as a liberal.”) Second, they are dignified, charming, and polite with strangers; warm, playful, and fun-loving among friends. Even though the Germans are supposed to be the bad guys, they are the only people in the film with whom most white people can readily identify themselves. This means that white audiences can only feel revulsion at the sadistic Jews who murder them.

Hitler, of course, is portrayed as a monster. He first appears wearing a cape, which is appropriate, since he is played as nothing more than a comic book villain. (Martin Wuttke is surely the ugliest Hitler ever.)

Goebbels, although he is portrayed as somewhat arrogant (like a film director, perhaps), comes off overall as warm, sincere, playful, and even a bit lovable(!). Tarantino has obviously immersed himself in German films of the era, and it is clear that he has some admiration for what Goebbels accomplished. (In a scene set in England, it is stated as plain fact that Jews run Hollywood, and Goebbels is given credit for giving them a run for their money.)

The true star of the film is Christoph Waltz, whose portrayal of Hans Landa is absolutely riveting. He is such a magnificent character that Tarantino had to turn him into a traitor in the end, otherwise he would be the true hero of the film as well.

The other star is Daniel Brühl who plays Frederick Zoeller, the young war hero who becomes smitten with Shoshanna. His character is the most likable and most tragic of the film.

Now let’s examine the climax of the movie. I have no qualms about giving it away, since I don’t want any of you to see it anyway. Shoshanna hosts the premiere. Hitler and all the top Nazis come to the theater. She splices her face into the fourth reel of the film. Once the fourth reel is playing, her Negro lover bars the doors to the theater. Suddenly, Shoshanna’s face appears on the screen: “This is the face of Jewish vengeance!” she screams, while the Negro sets the building on fire. The kindling he uses are movies printed on highly flammable nitrite film. (Jews use movies — and Negroes — to create mass death and destruction in this country too.)

Meanwhile, two of the Jewish Basterds (including the preposterous Eli Roth), who have infiltrated the theater without knowing of Shoshanna’s plot, run amok with machine guns, killing Hitler and Goebbels and other Nazis. The theater then explodes. Everybody dies, Jews and Germans alike. Götterdämmerung.

The climax of Inglourious Basterds is obviously based on the Oscar night massacre in neo-Nazi Harold Covington’s novel The Brigade. If you don’t believe me, read the novel for yourself.

The symbolism and the message could not be clearer: Jews use movies and movie theaters as tools to destroy their enemies. And since the white people in the audience can most readily identify with the Germans, the message gets through: the Jewish movie business is a tool of hatred and vengeance directed against all white people.

Why would Quentin Tarantino make a movie about World War II in which Germans are portrayed as attractive human beings, Americans are portrayed as sadistic buffoons, Englishmen are portrayed as effete wankers, and Jews are portrayed as cold-blooded, inhuman mass murderers?

Why would Quentin Tarantino borrow plot elements from neo-Nazi Harold Covington’s The Brigade to craft a climax for his movie? Why would he use that climax to expose the true anti-white agenda of Hollywood?

Is Quentin Tarantino a Nazi-sympathizer?

Of course not. Nothing could be further from the truth. Quentin Tarantino is simply a nihilist with an unfailing instinct for finding and desecrating anything sacred. In Pulp Fiction — his one great movie, and his most sincere — Tarantino showed a profound grasp of the spiritual meaning of the duel to the death over honor, symbolized by the Samurai sword. In Kill Bill, vol. I, he made a giant joke of it.

In Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino has taken the one truly sacred myth in modern Jew-dominated America — especially in modern Hollywood — namely WW II and the holocaust, and he has desecrated it by inverting all of its core value judgments and reversing its stereotypes. In the process, he has exposed the true anti-white agenda of Hollywood. Why? Just because he can.

The fact that Quentin Tarantino could desecrate the holocaust, expose Hollywood’s agenda, and sell it back to Hollywood’s Jews is a testament to his twisted genius and their shallowness and moral imbecility.

I wish Inglourious Basterds were a better movie, since I think that many white people would benefit from seeing it. Yes, the explicit message is that it is good for Jews and their hillbilly dupes to sadistically murder Germans (and any other enemies of the Jews, for that matter). But the largely white audience with which I saw the film did not seem terribly comfortable with this message.

Yes, they found Brad Pitt funny. He really was funny. But the sadism directed at Germans did not amuse. In the last scene of the film, where Aldo the Apache graphically carves a swastika in the forehead of Hans Landa and pronounces it “my masterpiece” — pathetically enough, this is probably Tarantino’s view of the film — there was no laughter.

For the subliminal message was coming through loud and clear: we are all Germans now, and every time we turn our eyes to a movie screen we are seeing the face of Jewish vengeance.

In France: Growing Recognition of the Shoah Religion

Famous French sociologist Alain Besançon discovers “the religion of the Shoah”

by Robert Faurisson

When in the late 1970s, I struck the first heavy blow against them, the historians of “the Holocaust” (which today is often called the “Shoah”), exhibited their disarray. Whereas I had placed myself on scientific ground to demonstrate, in a way that admitted of no rebuttal, that their alleged homicidal gas chambers were technically inconceivable, they were reduced --abandoning reason for faith -- to replying with a pitiful formula: 

“It must not be asked how, technically, such a mass murder was possible; it was technically possible, since it happened.”  (“La politique hitlérienne d’extermination: une déclaration d’historiens,” Le Monde, 21 Febuary 1979, p. 23. For further details on that controversy of 1978-1979, see my book Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire, [La Vieille Taupe, 1980, p. 69-101]).

Consequently, as early as May 3, 1980, in a letter to Jean Daniel [i.e. Jean-Daniel Bensaïd, founder and executive editor of the weekly Nouvel Observateur] I spoke of “the new religion” and “the upholders of the Holocaust religion,” and concluded: “No sudden change will arise when it becomes apparent that ‘the Holocaust’ is a historical lie. Besides, religions disappear only very slowly, to make way for other religions. As it happens, I myself prefer to go on from faith towards reason” (ibid., p. 261-263). 

I had perceived that, for want of any ability to resort to technical, scientific or historical argument, the other side was bound to seek a way out in religious-style mystification, along with reviving the modern equivalent witchcraft trials. The result is that these days, in 2009, the existence of a “Shoah religion” has become an obvious fact. 

Recently, an article in Le Monde by Gérard Courtois dealt with “the Shoah” being “built into a ‘State religion" by French President Nicolas Sarkozy” (April 4, 2009, p. 26). 

In a study on “Benedict XVI and the fundamentalists” (“Benoît XVI et les intégristes”, Commentaire n° 125, Spring 2009, p. 5-11), from the pen of the famed Roman Catholic sociologist Alain Besançon, the following remarks are to be found: 

"On the scale of sacred things, there is nothing today that can challenge the Shoah for first place" (p. 9 A). "At the top of scale, we have the Shoah. It may be assigned, going by external criteria, a near-religious rank" (p. 10 A). "Having become universal [this religion] maintains the Jewish people’s standing as chosen, with the choosing done by the diabolical will of Hitler and not by the benevolent decision of God. It offers them up to the sympathy, in the strongest sense, of the Christian world. Ensuing from all this are changes in the scale of dignity, in the list of objects that can be touched only with trembling hands, in the hierarchy of values and in the prestige of those who defend them. Thus, ranking first, undeniably, is the Shoah" (p. 10 B).

"One is tempted to state that the religion of the Shoah and the humanitarian religion, in their various combinations, form the civil religion of the Western democracies [...] The heroes of the Shoah religion, followed by those of the humanitarian religion [Abbé Pierre, sister Emmanuelle...] find themselves at the top of the scale" (p. 11 B).

In the last two pages of his study (pp. 10-11) Besançon uses the expression “religion of the Shoah” seven times.

Born in 1932, having belonged to the Communist Party from 1951 to 1956, Alain Besançon is a member of the prestigious Institut de France and director of studies both at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales and the Institut d’histoire sociale. Raymond Aron, who founded the journal Commentaire in 1978, was — he tells us — his “teacher.” On December 13, 2004, Besançon paid a vibrant tribute to the memory of the late Chief Rabbi Jacob Kaplan, at an exceptional gathering of the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques. Besançon is the author of a number of books and studies in which, in particular, he deals first with the “woe of the century,” caused — according to him — by Communism and Nazism, and then with “the uniqueness of the Shoah.” Condemning the "fantasies" of "Holocaust denial" ("négationnist"), he attacks “those who deny the Shoah and reject the overwhelming mass of positive evidence of its reality” (p. 6 A and 7 B).

But he does not bother to cite, by way of example, a single one of those alleged fantasies, or provide a single bit of "overwhelming" evidence. Not for an instant does he explain how and why, in such a short span of time, the Jewish version of Second World War history has become a religion and, more precisely, the religion of the whole of the Western world. He does not tell us how it is that in the 21st century the sensitive elements of that triumphant and domineering religion “can be touched only with trembling hands.”

Why did a sociologist of the calibre of Alain Besançon remain mute for so long concerning the existence of this extraordinary social phenomenon whose birth, in the late 1970s, he had been unable to discern at the time? And why does he persist, now in 2009, in holding back from explaining its prodigious growth in these past 30 years?

Jean-Marie Le Pen remarks, correctly, that today we have arrived at the point where the Second World War itself has, in a way, become merely a detail of “the Shoah.” Why and how did such an aberration come about? How is it possible that the zany, hair-raising stories of Father Patrick Desbois of “the Shoah by bullets” and “the Shoah by suffocation [under cushions]” become, in 2009, with the unction of Nicolas Sarkozy, Simone Veil and the Catholic bishops of France, material for catechism in our middle and secondary schools, both public and private? 

Any being endowed with reason can only blush on reading the phantasmagoria spouted by this devil of a prankster Rev. Father Desbois in his book The Holocaust by bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 million Jews (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; 233 pages.). Martin Gray and his ghost writer, Max Gallo, authors of For Those I Loved,have been outdone.

On August 7, 2008, I composed an essay on the phenomenon of Shoah fraud and gullibility entitled “The secular religion of the Holocaust, a tainted product of consumer society." In it I suggested a rational explanation for the mounting success enjoyed, especially since 1980, by the new “Holocaust” or “Shoah” religion. 

Now that, in his turn, he is finally discovering this religion, will Alain Besançon decide to explain its "mystery" to us rationally? If he did so, he would discover that the revisionists, far from engaging in “fantasies,” have accumulated “an overwhelming mass of positive evidence” to support their findings. But in order to become aware of this he would at least have to start by reading their work. Having awoken in 1956 from the effects of the Communist opium, might Besançon also one day rise from the torpor into which the “Shoah religion” has sunk our thinking faculties -- this religion he is discovering now, nearly 30 years after the revisionists first exposed it?

“The religion of the Shoah” tolerates other religions, particularly the Roman Catholic religion, only insofar as they accept subordination to it. Benedict XVI knows this, as he prostrates and humiliates himself before it. Especially lie-ridden, the “Shoah religion” calls for hatred and crusades. In this respect, repeating the image used by Jean Jaurès regarding capitalism, it can be said of the new religion that it “bears war within it just as thick clouds bear a storm.”

[Editor's note: Dr. Faurisson (PhD. The Sorbonne) is a former Professor of Literature at the University of Lyon. He has been repeatedly physically assaulted, and prosecuted and fined in French courts. In Toronto in 1985 he was the chief consultant to the legal defense team during the show trial of publisher Ernst Zündel, against Norman Finkelstein's hero, the late "Holocaust" historian Prof. Raul Hilberg, who testified on behalf of the government prosecutor's attempt to imprison Zündel for fifteen months. Thanks to Faurisson, Hilberg was reduced to near incoherence, testifying at one point, "I'm at a loss" (cf. Hoffman, The Great Holocaust Trial[Torrance, Calif., 1985]).