"The Greatest Lie of Modern
Times”. This is how French scholar Robert Faurisson defined the
Holocaust in an article published this week by the Italian daily Rinascita, a leftist national newspaper financed by Italy’s government.
Faurisson’s essay sparked an
uproar after Rome's Jewish community denounced the state-funded
newspaper for denial of the gas chambers.
“The general belief on the part of the Western world is that ‘the
Holocaust’ has long been the sword and shield of Zionism”, writes
Faurisson. “But today Revisionism is putting this belief in peril”, he
concluded.
Faurisson first appeared on the
scene in the 1970s and he is now known as “the dean of deniers”. Arab
and Iranian “experts” on the Holocaust frequently cite Mr. Faurisson’s
theories. He is quoted in the 1982 doctoral dissertation written by
Mahmoud Abbas, the PA’s President.
When Iran's Ahmadinejad described
the Holocaust as “a myth”, Mr. Faurisson sent him a letter
“expressing full support for his remarks”. The letter was heralded in
the Iranian press.
Faurisson’s latest essay raises the awareness of rampant anti-Semitism in Italy, where a jarring
44% of citizens are “prejudiced or hostile towards Jews”, according to
a research study released by the Italian Parliament just last autumn.
In November 2008 in Rome, a Holocaust-denying high school teacher was
suspended. Several days ago, on the eve of the Remembrance Day events,
an Italian judge condemned a journalist who denounced as anti-Semitic a
cartoon, entitled “Fiamma Frankenstein”, depicting Italian MP Fiamma
Nirenstein, who is Jewish, with a hooked nose, the symbol of fascist
Italy and the Star of David.
Instead of being considered an illiterate, the cartoonist was
celebrated as a champion of freedom of expression and the journalist
condemned to pay.
Italy’s media has a long tradition of anti-Jewish prejudice. Sergio
Romano, Italy’s ex ambassador and editorial contributor to the most
important Italian newspaper Il Corriere Della Sera, claimed that the memory of the Shoah has become an insurance
policy and is used by Israel as a diplomatic weapon, while Israel
itself is “a war-mongering, imperialist, arrogant nation” and “an
unscrupulous liar”.
Barbara Spinelli, the leading journalist for La Repubblica newspaper,
wrote that “Israel constitutes a scandal…for the way in which Moses’
religion inhabits our placet”. She also attacks the “double and
contradictory loyalty” of the Jews.
Holocaust denial and anti-Jewish contempt have gone mainstream in Italy's dolce vita.
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