Robert Faurisson
|
|
Faurisson.jpg
Robert Faurisson (born January 25, 1929) is a French professor of literature who generated controversy over various articles he published in the Journal of Historical Review and elsewhere, as well as various letters he has sent in to French newspapers (especially Le Monde) over the years which denied the existence of homicidal gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps and questioned whether there was actually a systematic killing of European Jews using gas during World War II.
He was born in Shepperton, Surrey, England to a French father and Scottish mother.
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 Frenchman Paul Rassinier & Maurice Bardčche, he began to question the Holocaust. Over the years Faurisson claims to have studied the Holocaust extensively, and in the late 1970s he says that he came to the conclusion that it was a hoax. Since then he has written numerous letters to newspapers, published many books, and written many articles for revisionist journals questioning the occurrence of the Holocaust.
Faurisson counts among his acquaintances and friends the US revisionist Ernst Zündel, Swedish revisionist Ditlieb Felderer and Moroccan expatriate revisionist Ahmed Rami [1] (http://www.phdn.org/negation/faurisson/). Many have called Faurisson (and his aforementioned acquantances) anti-Semites, but Faurisson denies that he is anti-Semitic.
Christopher Hitchens has described Faurisson's goal as "the rehabilitation, in pseudoscholarly form, of the Third Reich" [2] (http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/other/85-hitchens.html). But Faurisson claims that he is only in pursuit of the truth, and he claims he has no political goals of any kind. He is a self-declared atheist and is apolitical.
In the early to mid 1980s, the American intellectual Noam Chomsky drew a lot of criticism for defending Faurisson's right to publish his findings on the grounds of freedom of speech. See Faurisson Affair.
External links
- A presentation of Robert Faurisson (http://www.amnistia.net/news/enquetes/negauniv/faurisson/faurisson.htm) (in French, from an anti-Faurisson perspective)
- French Holocaust Denier on Ban of Al-Manar: 'The Big Lie of the Alleged Holocaust ... is the Shield of Jewish Tyranny... Destroy it' (http://www.intelligence.org.il/eng/memri/feb_e_05.htm), Professor Robert Faurisson, in an interview to Iran's Mehr News Agency (MNA) about France's decision to ban Al-Manar TV.de:Robert Faurisson