ZGram - 10/19/2004 - "The Sizzling Gollnisch Affair in France"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

October 19, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Short but (for those blasted "Holocaust Deniers) definitely inspirational!

[START]

Professor Bruno Gollnisch in Lyon (France)       

October 14, 2004

1) France mulls ways to sanction Holocaust doubter

By Reuters

PARIS - France is checking whether it can take legal
action against a leading far-right politician who has
questioned whether the Nazis used gas chambers in the
Holocaust, Justice Minister Dominique Perben said on
Thursday.

The University of Lyon has urged education officials
to suspend Bruno Gollnisch, a professor of Japanese
there, for questioning how the gas chambers were used
in the wartime slaughter of the Jews and querying the
death toll.

The president of the European Parliament, Josep
Borrell, also called for legal action against
Gollnisch, a European deputy who is also the number
two man in the National Front party of extreme-right
leader Jean-Marie Le Pen.

"Mr Gollnisch's comments are absolutely unacceptable,"
Perben told France Info radio in announcing the probe.

"In an affair like this, I think the response should
not only be penal ... but it should be political and
possibly also professional."

France anti-racism laws have made denying the
Holocaust a crime, punishable by fines and even
prison.

Gollnisch, who is known as the intellectual of the
controversial party, said on Monday he recognized that
the gas chambers had existed but thought historians
still had to decide whether they were actually used to
kill Jews.

He called for an open debate about whether the total
number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was actually 6
million as stated.

He also questioned the objectivity of leading
historian Henry Rousso, who is investigating charges
that certain Lyon lecturers were denying the
Holocaust, by calling him "a Jewish personality".

The CRIF umbrella group of French Jewish organizations
publicly condemned Gollnisch's comments at a news
conference about Rousso's report on Holocaust denial
at Lyon University.

European Parliament head Borrell said: "I would like
to say clearly to public opinion in Europe and to all
those who suffered from Nazi ethnic cleansing that the
European Parliament will not tolerate this kind of
statement."

At his Monday news conference, Gollnisch also said
that serious historians no longer accepted that all
the judgements of the post-war Nuremberg Trials of
leading Nazis were fair.

"I don't know if I will lose my chair as professor of
Japanese or even be put in prison for saying that, but
I stand by it," he added.

Gollnisch, who studied law and political science at
Kyoto University in Japan, holds a chair for Japanese
language and civilization at the Lyon university named
after Jean Moulin - the hero of the French Resistance
murdered by the Nazis in 1943.


2) Outrage as Le Pen aide casts doubt on existence of
Holocaust
Susan Bell in Paris

FOR two years, the National Front in France has tried
to present itself as a moderate, socially acceptable,
right-wing party - a strategy guided by Jean-Marie Le Pen
Pen's youngest daughter, Marine.

But Mr Le Pen's deputy, Bruno Gollnisch, has blown a
hole through that public relations effort by casting
doubt on the existence of the Holocaust, provoking
outrage.

"There is not a serious historian alive today who
adheres completely to the conclusions of the Nuremberg
trials," Mr Gollnisch, a Euro MP and Mr Le Pen's
designated successor, said at a press conference in
Lyons on Monday [October 11, 2004].

"I do not call into question the existence of the
concentration camps, but as to the number of dead,
historians can still have something to argue about. As
to the existence of the gas chambers, that is up to
the historians to determine," he added.

A leading anti-racist organisation, LICRA, said it had
asked the president of the European Parliament to
sanction the National Front deputy.

And demands were made for Mr Gollnisch to be suspended
from his professorship at a university in Lyons.

His comments also infuriated senior members of the
National Front, who have been striving to present a
socially acceptable image of the anti-immigrant party.
"At his next appearance, he should just put on
a hood and a Ku Klux Klan outfit and he will have got
the total look," one exasperated executive said.

Until this latest controversy, Marine Le Pen had been
trying hard to transform the party's image and tone
down her father's frequently offensive rhetoric in a
bid to attract more women and young people.

Her movement, Generations Le Pen, offered a softer,
more palatable version of the National Front. Members
of Ms Le Pen's camp were reported to be furious with
Mr Gollnisch over his comments.

"It's unbelievable," one aide to Ms Le Pen said. "It
really does not follow the line of credibleness and
the culture of government which we have fixed for
ourselves."

"He let himself go," said another disgruntled senior
figure in the party. "This is hardly going to make us
more popular, or him either, while he looks like the
next leader the party will be putting up for
president."

This is not the first time Mr Gollnisch has made such
statements. In 1996, he sung the praises of French
soldiers who served under the Nazis on the eastern
front during the Second World War.

This is a sensitive issue for the brilliant but
colourless Mr Gollnisch. After long being promised the
party leadership upon the retirement of the ageing Mr
Le Pen, he is faced with a formidable rival in the
form of the boss's daughter.

Dubbed "the clone" by party insiders, the
square-jawed, green-eyed blonde with the gravelly
voice is the spitting image of her pugnacious father
and is increasingly powerful within the National
Front.

Many believe she is positioning herself to take on her
father's mantle upon his retirement, rumoured to be in
2006. That led observers to say yesterday they
believed Mr Gollnisch's comments were far from being a
slip but instead were a carefully calculated
rallying call to the ultra right-wing core of the
party, which feels betrayed by Ms Le Pen's
softly-softly approach.

Although the party's golden girl is clearly a chip off
the old block, offering few variations on her father's
anti-immigration, law-and-order message, the
twice-married mother of three has riled many party
militants by supporting abortion.

Mr Gollnisch, a professor of languages and Japanese
civilisation, made his comments as he was reacting to
the published findings of an investigation into
alleged extreme right-wing activities at the
University of Lyons III, where he teaches.

A report by the investigating commission, headed by
the Jewish historian Henry Rousso, found "it was
incontestable that the founders of Lyons III have more
than just tolerated the _expression of extreme-
right ideas".

Yesterday, the president of Lyons III, Guy Lavorel,
said he had asked the education minister, Franois
Fillon, to suspend Mr Gollnisch from his post
following his comments.

Mr Le Pen is no stranger to controversial statements
about the Holocaust. Some 17 years ago, he shocked
France, and the rest of the world, by describing the
Nazi gas chambers used to murder an estimated 3.5
million Jews as a "mere detail of history" while
speaking in Munich in the company of a former Nazi SS
officer.

"In a book which contains 1,000 lines, the
concentration camps take up about ten to 15 lines.
That is what is called a detail," Mr Le Pen said.

Speaking on the French radio station Europe 1 in 1987,
Mr Le Pen declared: "I am not saying that the gas
chambers did not exist. I did not have the possibility
to see them personally. I haven't especially studied
the question. But I believe it is a detail in the
history of the Second World War."

That comment led to him being stripped of his seat in
the European Parliament. 

[END]