The World at One is usually one of the less contentious of BBC Radio 4's news programmes. It does offer the standard BBC world view of most matters but as far as I'm aware has rarely featured on blog sites as a source of some of the most outrageous examples of media bias presented as impartial reporting.
It did so on its web page and at the beginning and end of the five minute respectful interview it offered her, handing her an extended opportunity to put over her polemics at length. She was also referred to as in the course of the interview as "Lady Renouf, a supporter of the Bishop who is assembling a legal team in case he is extradited to Germany". Nowhere in the interview or the related World at One web page was any hint given of her extremist racist activism. It is as if Nick Griffin, leader of the racist British National Party had been introduced as "a politician". Not that the BBC would be at all likely to offer Griffin five minutes gently managed airtime to put his views on a self-acknowledged Holocaust denier across.
Michele Renouf is not just any old anti-semite and Holocaust denier. She is a leading activist who tirelessly organizes and propagates the cause of such front line convicted Holocaust denial historical fraudsters as Ernst Zundel, Robert Faurisson and David Irving. She raises money to bankroll convicted British racists to try their luck at seeking asylum from British justice in California. She runs a web site and produces DVDs in their various causes. The web site is also extensively devoted to representing "the Zionist lobby and its allies" as a sinister controlling group, and to representing
mainstream Jewish and non-Jewish political commentators and leaders as engaged in related conspiracies to suppress and twist the truth about their sinister machinations.
All this is presented by her as being campaigning in favour of human rights and free speech. It's the same grotesque inversion adopted by President Ahmadinejad and his regime, who defended his Tehran conference to "investigate whether the Holocaust happened" in the name of
open-minded enquiry. So it's hardly surprising that Renouf herself was one of the people
who took part in that conference.
The point about why debate with Holocaust deniers is inappropriate is not because there is any attempt to suppress genuine historical enquiry, let alone conceal truths about what the Nazi regime did to Jews and its other enemies. Nor is it,as is often represented, out of a wish to avoid giving offence, whether to the surviving victims of the Holocaust or to the dead and their families.
It is inappropriate because all Holocaust denial is invariably based on deliberate historical fraud. It cannot be otherwise, because the evidence that the Holocaust took place as an act of deliberate Nazi policy is so vast, so readily validated by innumerable incontrovertible evidence sources.
The reason Zundel, Faurrisson, David Irving and other Holocaust deniers like them have been convicted is because their supposed evidence has been based on fraudulent and falsified documentation, well established in trial after trial in courts across the world. Any "debates" the Holocaust deniers seek to invoke are invariably founded on the same recycling of fraudulent evidence and falsified historical data, as has been most devastatingly documented in the work of
Professor Richard Evans, and in the
judgement against David Irving given by Mr Justice Gray in April 2000.
You can hear the interview presenter Sean Ley of the World at One gave her by accessing the Wednesday edition
here. It'll be available until 2:00pm GMT on Wednesday 4th March. It starts at around 23 minutes into the 31 minute clip. Ley begins by detailing the reasons for Williamson's notoriety, through the interviews he's given in which he called the Holocaust "lies, lies, lies", his repeated assertions that no gas chambers were used by the Nazis to exterminate Jews, and that at the most some hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered by the Nazis in other ways.
Lady Renouf is a supporter of the Bishop who is assembling a legal team in case he is extradited to Germany. She told me he should not be called a Holocaust denier.
It's an absurd propaganda term and in any case no-one denies anything....If there's any denial going on, it's debate denial that goes on, and that should be objected to by all of us because the concept that we cannot debate and that there is no respect for debate flies in the face of our own civilization.
Isn't it that the debate he chooses to conduct in denying the existence of the gas chambers that killed so many Jews is one that causes profound offence to many people, Jewish or otherwise?
Well, I don't think offence should be part of an investigation into history. I think that is emotional blackmail that has nothing to do with an investigation.If for example your child was murdered and you didn't want to hear about it, you cannot debate whether there should be any investigation or court cases about that. You may not want to read about it, but you cannot say that there may be no investigation because your sensibilities will be hurt. That is an absurd situation.
Let me ask you about the Bishop's position now. His excommunication was lifted by the Vatican but the Vatican has now demanded that he should retract the views he expressed in that television interview and the Catholic Church in England and Wales has said he cannot be in full Communion with the Church until he does so. Is he prepared to do so?
There is something extraordinary going on. The idea of the Holocaust as some sort of thing that [if] one speaks about it and commits some sort of blasphemy in whole or part is the UN resolution. You may not query the Holocaust legend in whole or part. There is no such situation in normal historical debate and rational argument in any other field, and it should be normal for a review of history without exception and I think when the Bishop was asked by the Swedish TV,it was actually to stitch him up because it was later used to try and undermine the idea of this reconciliation with the pre-Vatican II society. And so I think it's actually aimed at preventing the priests who query the Vatican II from their being allowed back into the body of the Vatican.
This grotesque view of Holocaust denial as the attempt to restore suppressed normal historical debate to an area from which it is said to have been excluded went unchallenged by Sean Ley. He did not pick up on her definition of the Holocaust as "legend", despite the fact that she claims to be speaking for open enquiry and rational argument and that she proclaims herself on her web site to be an "actress and model" with no academic background in historical research.
Part of the reason for this is that Ley himself confined the issue of historical denial to the giving of offence and did not concern himself with the evidence of Holocaust denial being based on fraud, suppression of mountains of evidence or both, demonstrated in trials and judgements against all the leading Holocaust deniers.
The only riposte to Renouf's proclamation of the Holocaust as "legend" came from a subsequent telephone interview with Lord Janner, presumably on the grounds of his being Chairman of the Holocaust Trust, who also proceeded to discuss Holocaust denial primarily in terms of its offensiveness to survivors and to assert that he knew the Holocaust had happened because members of his own family had been murdered. Lord Janner has a long and mostly distinguished history on representing various Jewish community concerns, but he is not now at the centre of dealing with Holocaust denial propagandists. His answer here was utterly inadequate.
Why did the World at One team choose to give such a front line Holocaust denier as Michele Renouf a platform? Why did they choose to conceal her background and activism in this field and in promoting anti-semitism?
Who on the World at One team decided that the issue of Williamson's Holocaust denial was to be handled as one of actual or potential offence? Why did they not call one of the impeccably reputed historians who would have been able to show that her claims that the Holocaust is "legend" and that Williamson seeks "debate" are pernicious nonsense?
Quite apart from the outrageousness of giving a platform for Holocaust denial, this particular news treatment is most concerning because it suggests that truth of the Holocaust is coming to be relativised in public debate by being seen as one related to "offence", for the reason that it is seen as needing to be treated as an analogue of Muslim offence over portrayals of Mohammed and of Islam in general. It is another instance of something in British political discourse relating to Jews, and particularly to anti-semitism and Israel needing by definition to be "balanced" by being analogised explicitly or inexplicitly to Muslim concerns. Indeed, one of the reports in the Daily Telegraph to which I've linked refers to "Bishop" Williamson and his fellow Holocaust sceptics, an apparently innocuous terminological shift which reduces the reality of the most documented events in history to a matter of political opinion, analogous with membership of the European Community.
It's interesting that "Bishop" Williamson himself has now issued an apology for "offending" people by his stance on the Holocaust. But as has been widely recognised, not least by the Vatican, this does not deal with his actual denial that Jews were gassed by the Nazi, or that more than two or three hundred thousand were actually murdered.
The image above appeared in this week's edition of "The Jewish Chronicle". It shows a Mardi Gras carnival float in Germany last week. It's a particularly vivid representation of how today's Germany may understand much more acutely that "Bishop" Williamson may represent not just some bizarre sideshow of the backwoods of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, but shaking hands with the devil of anti-semitism.
Will the World at One team recognise they've gone beyond shaking hands with the devil when, without acknowledgement, they put the voice of Holocaust denial in front of the microphone to send its message to the worldwide BBC audience?
