PARIS (November
4, 1998, 1998 Reuters News Service)
A French writer,
sentenced for
questioning
traditional
accounts
of the Holocaust has published a new
book about
Jews, Israel and World War II persecution even as a court
reviews his appeal against the earlier
sentence.
The new work by Roger
Garaudy, 85, entitled "The Trial of Israeli Zionism," was
distributed to journalists on Tuesday.
His first book,
"The
Founding Myths of Israeli
Politics"
sparked a storm of protest in the West but made him a hero
in some Middle Eastern states.
It also led a Paris
court last February to fine him $20,000 under a French law
that prohibits the questioning of World War II crimes
against humanity.
The appeals court,
which met on Wednesday and was to give its verdict within a
month, heard Garaudy's lawyers ask for the overturning of
the lower court sentence.
A public prosecutor
requested earlier this week that the penalty be stiffened
and Garaudy sentenced to a prison term of unspecified length
as well as a lesser fine.
The legal case
triggered a wave of sympathy for Garaudy in parts of the
Arab world and in Iran, where he met and received support
from supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in
April.
A university
professor, Garaudy was born a Protestant and converted to
Catholicism before becoming a leader of France's Communist
party following World War II.
He was forced out of
the party during one of its periodic "witch hunts" and
converted to Islam in the 1970s.
Garaudy's latest book,
whose cover is an Islamic green, was published by an unknown
firm which printed no address.
The Jewish lawyer
Michel Zaoui, vice president of CRIF, an umbrella group for
French Jewry, said concentration camp survivors were reading
the new book to see if they would seek legal action against
that work as well.
(Reuters News Service)