*** Report about Dr. Robert Faurisson's trial in France ***

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

Report of Dr. Robert Faurisson's trial in France on July 11, 2006



In the XVIIth Chamber of the Paris Correctional Court, the CRIF and 
Yahweh against 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 [Š], 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 assistant public prosecutor, Anne de Fontette,
calls for Yahweh's protection

    Anne de Fontette, the assistant 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 beŠ 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.

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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