Jürgen Graf Welcomed in Iran
Source: Mark Weber, Institute for Historical Review, E-mail: weber@ihr.org Web site: http://ihr.org
P.O. Box 2739, Newport Beach, CA 92659, USA, Tel. 949 – 631 1490 Fax: 949 – 631 0981
Jürgen Graf Welcomed in Iran
Swiss Revisionist Forced into Exile for “Thought Crime”
A prominent Swiss revisionist author who fled his homeland rather than serve a 15-month prison sentence for “Holocaust denial” has been welcomed in Iran.
Rather than begin serving the politically-motivated prison term that was to commence in October, Jürgen Graf is staying in Tehran at the invitation of a group of Iranian scholars and university professors who are sympathetic to Holocaust revisionism. (Contrary to some reports, he has not been given political asylum in Iran, nor has he requested it.)
He has written an 80-page overview of the history and impact of Holocaust revisionism that is being translated into Persian and Arabic for distribution to scholars, journalists and religious and political leaders. Graf will also be giving lectures at Iranian universities. He is learning Persian (Farsi) in an intensive study course. [Graf is fluent in 18 languages - OS]
Graf arrived in Tehran on November 17, 2000, concluding a journey that had taken him to Poland, Russia, Ukraine and Turkey. He is impressed with the hospitality and helpfulness of his hosts, as well as with the orderliness, cleanliness and sense of security in the Iranian capital.
At the conclusion of his trial in July 1998, a court in the Swiss town of Baden sentenced Graf to 15 months imprisonment and imposed a heavy fine because of his writings. (See “Swiss Court Punishes Two Revisionists,” July-August 1998 Journal.)
Graf does not intend to return to Switzerland until normal rights of free speech and free intellectual inquiry are restored. However, he has not yet decided where he will settle and make a new home.
Jürgen Graf, born in 1951, is an educator, researcher and author of several books, including “Holocaust on the Test Stand,” which has appeared in more than half a dozen languages. In March 1993, following publication of the 112-page German edition, he was summarily dismissed from his post as a secondary school teacher of Latin and French. (See “Swiss Teacher Suspended for Holocaust Book,” Sept.-Oct. 1993 Journal.)
In December 1994 the French-language edition, L’Holocauste au scanner, was banned in France by order of the country’s Interior Ministry. Some 200,000 copies of an expanded edition of this work have been published and distributed in Russia under the title “The Myth of the Holocaust.” (See “A Major Revisionist Breakthrough in Russia,” July-August 1997
Journal.)
In recent years Graf has examined the sites of numerous wartime German camps, and has carried out historical research at archives in Poland, Russia, and other countries. (See, for example, “Important Documents Found in Moscow Archives,” Nov.-Dec. 1995 Journal.) During the coming months he intends to bring out, in collaboration with Carlo Mattogno and Richard Krege, a book about Treblinka, the wartime German camp in Poland where, it is widely alleged, more than 750,000 Jews were killed between July 1942 and April 1943.
Since 1997 Graf has been a member of this Journal’s Editorial Advisory Committee. His addresses at the Twelfth and 13th IHR Conferences appeared in the Nov.-Dec. 1995 and July-August 2000 Journal issues.
In several countries, including Germany, France, Israel, Austria and Switzerland, it is a crime publicly to dispute standard “Holocaust” claims that six million Jews were systematically killed during World War II, most of them in gas chambers. Numerous writers and publishers have been fined or imprisoned for “Holocaust denial.” These one-sided “thought crime” laws are the result of a well-organized campaign by the World Jewish Congress and other powerful Jewish organizations.
Growing Support
Awareness of the importance of the Holocaust story as a key propaganda tool of Israeli-Zionist interests is growing throughout the world, especially in Muslim countries. This was manifest, for example, during the 1998 trial in Paris of the prominent French scholar Roger Garaudy, who was fined $40,000 for his book The Founding Myths of Modern Israel, which presents compelling evidence refuting the orthodox Holocaust story and other historical legends. (An attractive American edition is published by the IHR.)
Religious and political leaders, scholars and journalists in Egypt, Lebanon, Iran and other countries expressed support for Garaudy and Holocaust revisionism. (See T. O’Keefe, “Origin and Enduring Impact of the ‘Garaudy Affair’,” July-August 1999 Journal, pp. 31-35.) A professor at Cairo University, Dr. Amina Rashid, for example, declared: “Zionist propaganda, well entrenched in France, is exploiting the guilt complex among the French for the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis… The Zionist lobby keeps concentrating on the ‘Six Million victims’ in spite of the corrections to this figure.” In Iran, 600 journalists and 160 members of parliament signed petitions backing Garaudy, and during a visit to the country, he was received by the nation’s chief of state, Ayatollah Khamenei, who congratulated the French scholar.
Iran’s official radio voice to the world, IRIB, has in recent years expressed support for Holocaust revisionism by broadcasting sympathetic interviews with leading revisionist scholars and activists. Several interviews with IHR Director Mark Weber have been aired on the English-language service, and similar interviews have been broadcast with Ernst Zundel in German and with Ahmed Rami in Arabic. IRIB short-wave radio reaches millions in the Middle East, Europe and Asia.
An editorial, “Myth of the Holocaust,” in the English-language Iranian paper Kayhan International, Dec. 6, 1999, commented sympathetically on Holocaust revisionism, and criticized German government persecution of Dr. Fredrick Töben and others who dispute Holocaust claims. The paper called Töben an “Australian historian of German origin who is known for his authoritative research on the myth of the Holocaust … He was jailed and he was fined for having exposed the fabrications of the gas chambers where, Zionist propaganda says, six million Jews perished…” The paper referred to the “preposterous figure of six million,” and praised revisionist scholars for their “courageous research and highlighting of facts of the Second World War.”
On May 1, 2000, the Iranian embassy in Vienna granted refuge to an Austrian engineer, Wolfgang Fröhlich, who had been hounded for expressing dissident views on history. At Graf’s 1998 trial, Fröhlich had testified that, for technical reasons, mass gassings with Zyklon could not have been carried out in the German wartime camps as alleged. In his request for asylum, he reported that he had been offered $5 million to repudiate his expert testimony in the Graf trial, and instead state that mass killings with Zyklon could somehow have happened as claimed.
Since the Iranian revolution of 1978-79, which overthrew the repressive and pro-Zionist regime of Shah Pahlavi, the Islamic republic has steadfastly opposed Zionist oppression and aggression. United States policy toward Iran has accordingly been hostile, and includes a ban on trade and investment. This belligerent policy, which reflects America’s subservience to Zionist interests, is hypocritical. By any objective standard, Iran is today a much more “democratic” state than many with which the US has cordial relations, including Israel, China, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. US efforts to isolate the nation of some 65 million people have failed. Reflecting its good relations with the rest of the world (apart from the US and Israel), Iran’s popular President, Mohammed Khatami, has in recent years made successful state visits to Italy, France, Germany and Britain.
The warm welcome being given to Jürgen Graf in Iran is not only a dramatic expression of support for intellectual freedom and human rights, it further refutes the often-made claim that Holocaust revisionism has no significant public or scholarly support.
News from the IHR, December 26, 2000
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON REVISIONISM AND ZIONISM SET FOR BEIRUT
Prominent scholars, researchers and activists will participate in a landmark international conference on “Revisionism and Zionism” in Beirut, Lebanon, March 31-April 3, 2001. The meeting reflects, and will further strengthen, growing cooperation between revisionists in the Westand in Muslim countries.
The event is being organized by the Swiss revisionist organization Verité et Justice, in cooperation with the Institute for Historical Review. Conference addresses will be given in Arabic, French and English. Measures have been taken to insure complete security for the event.
Verité et Justice director Jürgen Graf, who was sentenced by a Swiss court in July 1998 to 15 months imprisonment for “Holocaust denial,” has fled his homeland to live in political exile rather than serve the politically-motivated sentence. The 49-year-old educator is currently visiting Tehran, Iran, as a guest of scholars.
Guests are welcome to attend the Beirut conference, but they must cover their own travel and hotel expenses. United States citizens traveling to Lebanon require a valid US passport and a visa issued by the Lebanese embassy or a Lebanese consulate.
Updated information about the Beirut conference is posted on the special “Beirut conference” section of the IHR web site as it becomes available.
– December 24, 2000
Source: ZGram – Where Truth is Destiny, December 26, 2000, Copyright (c) 2000 – Ingrid A. Rimland
This one is worthy of your revisionist archives. It was written by George Brewer of CODOH, <www.codoh.com> and is titled
“The Odyssey Of A Revisionist: Juergen Graf
Finds Asylum in Iran.”
<start>
Over the past several years, the Swiss Juergen Graf has emerged as one of the most powerful voices in the revisionist community. Yet, in accordance with legislation specifically designed to shut down revisionist voices in the Alpine republic, Graf was found guilty of a Swiss “racial hatred” statute in 1998. His appeals exhausted, Graf was recently to begin serving his sentence, until he began to hear that some revisionists incarcerated in German speaking countries were not emerging from confinement alive. As a result, he has been forced to flee his native country, pursuing a now familiar odyssey for those who seek historical truth.
Background:
Graf, who is in his mid 40′s, originally followed the career path of a secondary school teacher. One is tempted to think that he was following in the footsteps of another secondary school teacher, Oswald Spengler, whose Decline of the West remains one of the apexes of 20th Century cultural criticism. But something happened.
In the early 1990′s, Graf became concerned about the decline in Swiss culture, uncontrolled immigration into Switzerland and throughout the rest of Europe, and the remorseless use of the Holocaust icon to pursue these and other social engineering projects. So he turned his impressive intellect (Graf uses 18 languages in his research) to the fate of the Jewish people in World War Two.
The result was a number of studies in the early ’90′s that quickly made a reputation for the Swiss scholar. These include The Holocaust Swindle and The Holocaust Under the Scanner, as well as a scientific monograph on witness testimonies, and even a novel on the difficulties revisionists encounter. Nearly all of these books were written prior to the Swiss law that went into effect in 1995, which, by labeling revisionist writings as “race hatred” effectively criminalized any open historical discussion of key issues of WWII.
Within a year and a half, pressure was brought to bear on the Swiss judiciary to enforce the new law. Thus, in April 1996, Graf, as well as his elderly publisher, were charged with violating Switzerland’s “hate crimes” statute; that is, for the crime of disseminating Graf’s books. Of course, in a technical sense the application of the law was wrong in the first place, since it violated the basic principle that no crime can be assessed by law retroactively, but that didn’t stop the Nuremberg court and it wasn’t going to stop the Swiss courts, either. After two years, Graf and his co-defendant were put on trial.
The Inquisition of Juergen Graf:
The trial began at 8 o’clock on the morning of July 17, 1998 and finished the same day. First, Graf sought to have Dr. Robert Faurisson, the pre-eminent revisionist author, appear on his behalf However, the court lost no time in dismissing Faurisson’s petition to appear before the tribunal. Instead, Wolfgang Froehlich, an Austrian engineer, was the sole witness allowed for Graf.
Froehlich is a certified engineer in Austria and has extensive experience in fumigations, including those using cyanide gas. The prosecutor, Aufdenblatten, violated a basic rule of cross examination — never ask a question whose answer you cannot predict — when he asked Froehlich his opinion as to whether he felt that gassings were possible with Zyklon B.
Froehlich’s testimony, spoken with authority, denied even the possibility of homicidal gassing with the German pesticide, and was greeted with loud applause by the spectators in the courtroom. The prosecutor was reduced, in his impotent rage, to threats, which fairly well exposed the absence of the rule of law in this courtroom. Aufdenblatten said: “I hereby request the court to bring an indictment against this witness for racial discrimination or I will do it myself.”
In other words, simple scientifically valid and qualified testimony now constitutes a hate crime in the People’s Republic of Switzerland!
Graf’s co-defendant, the elderly publisher Foerster, then took the stand for two hours, although the defendant could barely cope with the rigors of testimony. (Foerster died a few weeks later, before the Swiss State could put him behind bars.) Then Graf took the stand and offered a broad and detailed defense of his writings and the trends of modem revisionism. After closing speeches from the prosecutor and defense attorneys, Graf had the last word, quoting a Swiss revisionist compatriot: “As in earlier historical times, it is a sign of weakness to attempt to enforce a dogma by force. The exponents of the Jewish extermination thesis may -win trials based on censorship today; but they will lose the last trial before the court of future generations.”
In the end, such eloquence helped neither Graf nor Foerster. They were found guilty of “race hatred,” Graf receiving a prison sentence of 15 months, Foerster 12 months, and both were heavily fined.
Aftermath:
Although the trial decision was handed down in great haste, clearly Graf had some breathing room due to the appeals process. He put the time to good use. Already in 1995 he had worked with Carlo Mattogno in doing path-breaking research in the Auschwitz archives located in Moscow, and there were several other such trips throughout Eastern Europe. In the last two years Graf had co-authored two important new documentary studies with the Italian savant: Maidanek (1998) and Stutthof (1999) (both, Castle Hill Publishers, UK). In addition, Graf has kept up a busy speaking schedule, including an appearance at the conference of the IHR (institute for Historical Review), held in may 2000. Not only did Graf’s participation contribute to the strong overall success of that conference – the first IHR conference in six years – but his talk on that occasion quickly stimulated widespread discussion. Graf’s paper, which has since been published in the Journal of Historical Review, deals with the problem of accounting for the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews allegedly deported to Auschwitz in the spring and summer of 1944. Truly, Graf has managed to keep himself involved in almost every significant trend in modem revisionism, even under the threat of prison.
Lost, Stolen or Strayed:
However, it was inevitable that at some point the Swiss government would insist that Graf start to serve his sentence. Over the past two years Graf had gradually resigned himself to being a prisoner on behalf of intellectual freedom. But in recent months he had been made aware of a frightening prospect: according to several reports, a number of prisoners of conscience in jails in German-speaking Europe have died mysteriously in recent times, including three in Austria alone.
A prisoner of conscience is one thing, a martyr is something else. Unable to recant, Graf sought refuge. After stop-overs in Russia and Turkey, Graf has been welcomed into exile in Iran.
Of course it is hard to predict what will be the next stop in the odyssey of Juergen Graf. He has escaped prison and a possible de facto “death sentence. But at the same time, revisionism has suffered a serious blow.
‘However much freedom is accorded him in Iran, it seems fairly certain that Graf’s involvement in revisionism will not be able to maintain its previously high levels so long as he is forced to live in exile. Forced exile, of course, is just one of the stratagems of the enemies of historical revisionism, and in this particular case Graf s misfortune mirrors the fate of the exiled German scientist Germar Rudolf. There have been other schemes, too, ranging from career and personal destruction (Fred Leuchter, David Irving), attempted censorship (Ernst Zundel, Fred Toeben), and imprisonment (Guenther Deckert, Udo Walendy, and again Fred Toeben), all with a view to stifling intellectual curiosity. These efforts may, in the short term, muffle the voice of revisionism. But they will never silence it.
When Ulysses was fated to make his 20-year odyssey after the fall of Troy, his wife and son could only try to maintain the integrity of the kingdom. Penelope, raveling and unraveling the tapestry that would confer the kingship of Ithaca, and Telemachus, by refusing the blandishment of the suitors, both kept faith with the exiled Ulysses. Today, for every revisionist silenced by prison, exile, personal destruction, or even fire and car bombs, there are thousands of silent Penelopes and Telernachuses keeping the faith, however much they have been intimidated into silence. Yet, when the enemies of revisionism create an epic structure of suffering for revisionists, suffering which revisionists have never sought, these enemies also guarantee an epic outcome.
In that outcome, truth always prevails, the heroes will return, and like Ulysses, they will be known by the scars they bear.
[George Brewer is editor of CODOH's E-zine The Revisionist.]
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Ernst Zundel knows Jürgen Graf and knew his publisher, Förster, quite well for many years. I asked him what he thought of this Brewer essay. Here is his reply:
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Jürgen Graf is a multilingual genius. He’ll find his way in any country and speak the native tongue of an “exile” country in short order almost as easily as his own. He is lucky that way – and we are lucky to have him advocate the Cause of Truth in the Arab world. We couldn’t wish for more.
However, the cold reality in the Here and Now is that most Revisionists, not as gifted as Graf, suffer in silence, forgotten by all, vilified or, worse, ignored by the one instrument in the world that could bring them relief and some semblance of justice – the mainstream media.
Thanks to the Internet, Revisionists – at least for the moment! – have a means by which to make their persecution known. That is why our enemies are hell-bent on shutting down revisionist access to the Internet – by hook and by crook, if need be!
While this epic struggle for man’s mind rages on in the new medium, every time a Revisionist gets hounded into exile, he “infects” his new surroundings with the potent bacillus of Truth. Jürgen Graf has left a trail of “converts” and “new apostles” in every place his journey of persecution has taken him – as have Robert Faurisson, Germar Rudolf, Fred Leuchter, David Irving, and others.
Graf’s presence in the Muslim world will mean an accelerated, exponentially expanding understanding of what was the truth in World War II – and what are the lies created since that are so hurtful to so many people in the Middle East. His suffering, and the suffering of others, will hasten the day of mental and spiritual liberation from the lies of the last century.
We see the effects already. The liar lives in constant fear of the truth, of being found out. As long as we still have the Internet, the tables are turned in our favor by this new means of communication.
In the end, freedom, truth and justice will beckon for all, thanks to warriors for truth like Jürgen Graf – and others who are driven into exile by the enemy’s censorship cudgel.
<end>
Thought for the Day:
“There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.” (Abraham Lincoln)
Dr. Ingrid Rimland is a well-known novelist, keynote speaker, and owner of the Zundelsite. For further information, please visit
www.zundelsite org or www.lebensraum.org
