Faurisson Affair - Petition Signed By Chomsky

Petition Signed By Chomsky

In the fall of 1979, American scholar Noam Chomsky contributed his name to a petition—signed by roughly 600 people, including Serge Thion, Arthur Butz, John Tuson Bennett and Mark Weber—concerning the affair:

Dr. Robert Faurisson has served as a respected professor of twentieth-century French literature and document criticism for over four years at the University of Lyon-2 in France. Since 1974 he has been conducting extensive historical research into the "Holocaust" question.
Since he began making his findings public, Professor Faurisson has been subject to a vicious campaign of harassment, intimidation, slander and physical violence in a crude attempt to silence him. Fearful officials have even tried to stop him from further research by denying him access to public libraries and archives.
We strongly protest these efforts to deprive Professor Faurisson of his freedom of speech and expression, and we condemn the shameful campaign to silence him.
We strongly support Professor Faurisson's just right of academic freedom and we demand that university and government officials do everything possible to ensure his safety and the free exercise of his legal rights.

A number of French intellectuals criticized Chomsky's signing of the petition, describing the extent of Faurisson's Holocaust denial and his ties to neo-Nazi groups. In particular, Pierre Vidal-Naquet criticized the wording of the petition as "scandalous", saying that it implied Faurisson was a serious researcher and not a propagandist:

What is scandalous about the petition is that it never raises the question of whether what Faurisson is saying is true or false, that it even presents his conclusions or "findings" as the result of a historical investigation, one, that is, in quest of the truth. To be sure, it may be argued that every man has a right to lies and falsehood, and that individual freedom entails that right, which is accorded, in the French liberal tradition, to the accused for his defence. But the right that the forger demands should not be conceded to him in the name of truth.

Vidal-Naquet said that Faurisson was not barred from access to public libraries or archives, and the only archive to ban him was the private Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation) in Paris, which Vidal-Naquet sees as entirely consistent with its declared mission, "the fact that the staff of the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, challenged in its fundamental activity, that of the memory of the crime, should --after years of forbearance-- refuse to serve Faurisson seems perfectly normal to me".