January 10, 2020
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi has gone out of his way to honor a European Holocaust denier.
As he and other officials of the Islamic Republic have done in the past, Khamenehi cited the 1998 trial and conviction in a French court of Roger Garaudy as proof that Westerners do not actually believe in freedom of expression.
He ignored the fact that laws in several countries ban Holocaust denial as an exception to freedom of expression, not as a normal standard.
He and other officials also ignore the fact that Holocaust denial is legal in the United States under its Constitution; they remain silent about US law and try to leave the impression among Iranians that all Western countries punish Holocaust denial.
Khamenehi tweeted December 16 on the 21st anniversary of the French court’s sentencing of Garaudy to a suspended prison term and a fine of about $18,000.
“In his book, Roger Garau-dy, the French philosopher, expressed doubts about the number of Holocaust victims,” Khamen-ehi said on his English-language Twitter feed. “The French govt not only banned his book, but also brought Garaudy to trial. These are the claimants of advocating Freedom of Speech.”
Khamenehi repeated the message on his French and Spanish-language Twitter accounts, but expanded on the issue, praising Garaudy for “tireless courage.”
“The fight he carried out against the Zionists is a spiritual and divine duty that falls to all those who profess respect for the truth,” the ayatollah wrote, apparently not seeing any disconnect with the Islamic Republic’s punishment of people who speak truths the regime would rather not hear uttered.
“Garaudy made precise and correct forecasts about the US regime which we approve of,” he added. “We believe that the US is in decline. A power based on interference in the affairs of other countries and the domination of nations is not sustainable.”
Garaudy, a communist who converted to Islam, claimed in his 1996 book, The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics, that the Holocaust was an exaggeration, and that the Nazis’ killings of Jews could not be described as genocide. He described the killing of six million Jews as a myth, and called into question the Nazis’ use of gas chambers for mass extermination.
The writer, then in his 80s, was convicted under French law in early 1998. He appealed the judgment, but it was upheld by an appeals court in Paris.
Garaudy was feted in the Arab and Muslim worlds, praised publicly by Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and Syrian and Palestinian officials.
The Iranian regime was particularly enthralled. More than 150 Majlis deputies signed a petition in support of Garaudy, and then-President Mohammad Khatami invited him for a visit.
Received with honors usually reserved for heads of state, Garaudy met with Khamenehi during that April 1998 visit. The Supreme Leader told him, “The Zionists and the Nazis have a lot in common.” According to Khamenehi’s website, the visiting Frenchman told him that the United States was “a colony of Israel.”
In 2002, Garaudy published an article in a Saudi newspaper calling the 9/11 terrorist attack a US government conspiracy.
Garaudy died in 2012, aged 98.
Almost four years ago, Khamenehi marked Holocaust Memorial Day by posting on an official website a video in which he said, “No one in European countries dares to speak about holocaust while it is not clear whether the core of this matter is a reality or not.”