Roger Garaudy

Roger Garaudy died in Chennevières-sur-Marne, Val-de-Marne, on Wednesday 13 June 2012, aged 98.

In December 2006, Garaudy was unable to attend the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust in Tehran, Iran owing to ill health. He reportedly sent a videotaped message supporting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's view that Israel should cease to exist.

In 1996, Garaudy published, with his editor Pierre Guillaume, the work Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israelienne (literally, The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics), later translated into English as The Founding Myths of Modern Israel. In the book he wrote of "the myth of the six million" Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Because of this breach of French law concerning Holocaust denial, the courts banned any further publication and on 27 February 1998 fined Garaudy 120,000 French francs. He was sentenced to a suspended jail sentence of several years. Garaudy appealed this decision to the European Court of Human Rights, but his appeal was rejected as inadmissible. At his hearing, Garaudy stated that his book in no way condoned National Socialist methods, and that book was an attack on the mythologizing and use of "the holocaust" by Israeli government as policy. He argued that his book dealt with the Israeli government's use of "the holocaust" as a "justifying dogma" for its actions, mainly in Palestine and toward Palestinians.

In Iran, 160 members of the parliament and 600 journalists signed a petition in Garaudy's support. On 20 April 1998, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei met Garaudy. Khamenei was critical of the West which, he said, condemned "the racist behavior of the Nazis" while accepting the Zionists’ "Nazi-like behavior." Iranian president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, insisted in a sermon delivered on Iranian radio that Hitler "only killed 20,000 Jews and not six million" and that "Garaudy's crime derives from the doubt he cast on Zionist propaganda." Iranian President, Mohammad Khatami, described Garaudy in 1998 as "a thinker" and "a believer" who was brought to trial merely for publishing research which was "displeasing to the West."

In The Case of Israel: A Study of Political Zionism (1983), Garaudy portrays Zionism as an isolationist and segregationist ideology that is not only dependent on antisemitism to nourish, but also willfully encourages it to achieve its goals.

Around 1980, Garaudy read The Green Book by Muammar Gaddafi and became interested in Libya and Islam, meeting the country's leader on several occasions in the desert. He converted formally at the Islamic Centre in Geneva, an organisation controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood. Garaudy converted in 1982 after marrying a Palestinian woman, later writing that "The Christ of Paul is not the Jesus of the Bible," and also forming other critical scholarly conclusions regarding the Old and New Testaments. He became an Islamic commentator and supporter of the Palestinian cause.

According to Azzam Tamimi, Tunisian thinker Rached Ghannouchi was inspired by Garaudy in the early 1980s, after he read a translation of his book on women. He subsequently authored a treatise on women rights and on the status of women in the Islamic movement, partly influenced by Garaudy's work.

In 1974, Frederic Will described him as sympathetic towards Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Gabriel Marcel. He held that the Western culture was something of a coalition between the idealistic philosophy and the elite class, which is devoted to turning man away from the material world. The goal of socialism in his view was not simply economic or providing social justice, but also giving each individual their personal chances for creativity.

Garaudy was expelled from the Communist Party in 1970, because he had criticized the party's position on the student movement and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. His philosophical and political views were characterized as revisionist by Soviet commentators. He had, however, accepted the invasion of Hungary in 1956.

Garaudy lectured in the faculty of arts department of the University of Clermont-Ferrand from 1962–1965. Due to controversies between Garaudy and Michel Foucault, Garaudy left. He later taught in Poitiers from 1969–1972.

Garaudy's faith in communism was shaken in 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev made the Secret Speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Afterwards, he espoused an eclectic and humanist view on Marxism, strictly opposing the theoretical Marxism of Louis Althusser and advocating dialogue with other schools of thought.

He obtained a state doctorate in philosophy in 1953, with a dissertation discussing theory of knowledge and materialism, entitled La théorie matérialiste de la connaissance. In May 1954, Garaudy defended another doctoral thesis, The Problem of Freedom and Necessity in the Light of Marxism, at the Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences.

As of 1940s, Garaudy was critical of Jean-Paul Sartre's view of freedom, maintaining that it lacks any social, economic, political or historical context. He criticized Being and Nothingness for what he deemed not going beyond the domain of metaphysical pathology, and Sartre's novels for "depicting only degenerates and human wrecks" and describing his existentialism as "a sickness".

Garaudy joined the French Communist Party in 1933. By mid 1940s, Garaudy was considered a leading polemicist within the party. He rose through the ranks and in 1945 he became a member of the party's leadership and its Central Executive Committee, where he occupied positions for 28 years.

Roger Garaudy (French: [ʁɔʒe gaʁodi]; 17 July 1913 – 13 June 2012) was a French philosopher, French resistance fighter and a communist author. He converted to Islam in 1982. In 1998, he was convicted and fined for Holocaust denial under French law for claiming that the death of six million Jews was a "myth".