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Robert Faurisson (born January 25, 1929) is a French Holocaust revisionist who has generated controversy over various articles he has published in theJournal of Historical Review and elsewhere, as well as various letters he has sent to French newspapers (especially Le Monde) over the years which denied the allegations of the existence of homicidal gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps and question whether there was actually a systematic killing of European Jews using gas during World War II.
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Life
Faurisson was born in Shepperton, England, to a French father and a Scottish mother.
He studied at the Sorbonne, and then from 1974 to 1979 taught literature at the University of Lyon. During the 1970s he published academic books about Lautréamont (in 1971), Arthur Rimbaud (1972) and Gérard de Nerval (1977). Since his first appearance as a Holocaust revisionist in 1974 these books have been largely ignored by many literary scholars, which has occasionally been criticised as censorship even by some scholars who are not believed to sympathise with his views in any way.
Faurisson became familiar to a wider audience through the publication of three letters in French newspaper Le Monde between December 1978 and February 1979, in which he maintained that the gas chambers at the so-called death camps were never used, and denied the existence of the systematic murder of Jews. Due to the fierce controversy sparked by his publications, and in the face of threats against his person, he was removed from his academic position at the central French institution for further education. In 1990 (according to some reports 1991) he retired from the civil service. In 1989 his jaw was broken during one of a number of physical attacks that have been made against him.
Since 1974 Faurisson has published numerous brochures and articles, in recent times mostly in the French Annales d'histoire révisioniste and the American Journal of Historical Review, as well as on the internet.
Faurisson is currently understood to live in Vichy.
Views, work and criticism
Faurisson, like most Frenchmen of that era, has said that he had anti-German sentiments during and immediately following World War II, but after reading the works of fellow Frenchmen Paul Rassinier and Maurice Bardèche, he began to question the Holocaust. Over the years Faurisson claims to have studied the Holocaust extensively, and he says that in the late 1970's he came to the conclusion that it was a hoax. Since then he has written numerous letters to newspapers, published several books, and written many articles for revisionist journals questioning the occurrence of the Holocaust.
Faurisson counts among his acquaintances and friends the German-Canadian revisionist Ernst Zündel, Swedish revisionist Ditlieb Felderer and Moroccanexpatriate revisionist Ahmed Rami[1]. Many have described Faurisson as anti-Semitic, but he repudiates this description.
In 1991 Faurisson, in collaboration with Siegfried Verbeke, published the Dutch-language brochure Het "Dagboek" van Anne Frank. Een kritische benadering ("The 'Diary' of Anne Frank - A Critical Evaluation"), which claimed that the diary of Anne Frank is a forgery since the original handwritten manuscript cannot be that of a child; the brochure was banned in the Netherlands.
As core arguments, Faurisson claims that to be feasible the gas chambers would have needed perfect hermetic sealing, a special introduction and distribution system for the gas, an elaborate ventilation system to eliminate the gas from the chambers after the mass murders, a system to neutralize the exhausted gases, and, separately, an expertly constructed device to eliminate the gas which would adhere to the bodies, making further handling lethal. These arguments were argued against in the book Les Crématoires d'Auschwitz, written in 1993 by a former supporter of Faurisson, Jean-Claude Pressac, who had familiarised himself with the installations at Auschwitz while searching for evidence to support Faurisson's arguments. Faurisson has attacked the book in writing numerous times since its publication.
In the early to mid 1980s, the American intellectual Noam Chomsky drew a lot of criticism for defending Faurisson's right to publish his claims on the grounds of [[freedom of speech].
In 1991, Faurisson was removed from his university chair on the basis of his views under the Gayssot Act, a French statute passed in 1990 that prohibitedHolocaust revisionism. He challenged the statute as a violation of international law at the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Human Rights Committee. The Human Rights Committee upheld the Gayssot Act as necessary to counter possible anti-Semitism. Further trials followed, among them one in connection with a publication on the website of the "Association des anciens amateurs de récits de guerre et d'Holocauste" (AAARGH) in 1998, of which he was absolved due to lack of evidence of his authorship.
Faurisson was charged again in a trial on July 11, 2006. He was accused of denying the Holocaust in an interview with the Iranian television station "Sahar 1" in February 2005. On October 3, 2006 he was given a three-month probationary sentence and fined €7,500 for this offence. In December 2006 Faurisson gave a speech at the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust, which was sponsored by the government of Iran. He repeated his theories about gas chambers and said that in the past 32 years he had been waiting for someone to show him one of those chambers.
Notes
External links
- Holocaust Deniers and Skeptics Gather in Iran, The New York Times
- Quand le négationnisme s'invite à l'université, by Didier Daeninckx, amnistia.net, March 20, 2000 (French)
- French Holocaust Denier on Ban of Al-Manar: 'The Big Lie of the Alleged Holocaust ... is the Shield of Jewish Tyranny... Destroy it', Faurisson in an interview to Iran's Mehr News Agency (MNA) about France's decision to ban Al-Manar TV, intelligence.org.il / MEMRI
- nizkor.org, Nizkor Project's entries on Faurrison
- Holocaust History News, Holocaust History News
- Castle Hill Publishers, Castle Hill Publishers's entries on Faurrison
- Author Archive for Robert Faurrison, Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust's archive on Faurrison
Being happy–is it good for the Jews? "Before Professor Dershowitz accused me of being an anti-Semite (news to me), I was a happy person. Since then, I'm still a happy person". –Michael Santomauro
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