From: "Norman Finkelstein" <normangf at hotmail.com> Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 16:27:55 -0500
>From: joelle marelli
>To:
>Subject: (from Eric Hazan)
>Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 13:54:29 +0100
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>From joelle.marelli at wanadoo.fr Mon, 19 Nov 2001 05:04:29 -0800
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>Here is the text of the appeal, which Eric Hazan asked me to send you :
>
>A few individuals calling themselves "Avocats sans frontières" (this very
>name is contested by the well known and officially recognized homonymous
>association) put Norman Finkelstein and La Fabrique (the French editor of
>Finkelstein's book L'industrie de l'Holocauste, réflexions sur
>l'exploitation de la souffrance des juifs) on trial for "racial defamation",
>"incitation to racial hatreds" and "taking over the revisionist theses of
>Roger Garaudy". It is clear to everyone who read the book that it does not
>contain anything that justifies such an allegation. Finkelstein explicitly
>says he defends the memory of the holocaust committed by the Nazis with the
>greatest energy.
>
>In England, in the US and in Germany, where the book has already been
>published, it has given rise to animated discussions, in which
>internationally recognized specialists of both contemporary history and
>history of Nazism and Jewish genocide intervened, to defend and also to
>criticize Finkelstein's theses. Disagreements were sometimes acute, but they
>have always remained within the frame of intellectual debate. La Fabrique
>decided to publish The Holocaust Industry in France in order to contribute
>to, spread and enrich this debate. To criticize the theses defended in this
>book is fully legitimate, but defaming its author and systematically
>distorting his theses is not acceptable. Replacing critique by anathema,
>censure and intimidation excludes any possibility of intellectual debate and
>generates a profoundly nefarious climate of ideological terrorism. This
>would constitute a grave antecedent and might lead to a degradation of the
>intellectual climate in this country.
>
>The signatories call for freedom of historical analysis, are firmly opposed
>to fraudulent manipulations of the memory of nazi crimes and are convinced
>that debates on collective memory and on public use of history are
>productive. They hence express their solidarity towards La Fabrique, which
>today is affected in its dignity and its rights.