Roger Garaudy

Roger Garaudy or Ragaa (born July 17, 1913, in Marseille) is a French author, philosopher and politician. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s he was an important figure in the French Communist Party, and he has written over 50 books, chiefly on Marxist themes. He was the center of a public scandal in 1996-1998, when he was put on trial on a number of charges relating to his book "Foundational Myths of the politics of Israel" ("Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israelienne"). He was convicted of aiding and abetting the denial of crimes against humanity in the chapters "The Myth of the Nuremberg Trials and The Myth of the Holocaust" in the first edition, two counts of contesting crimes against humanity in a number of passages in a successive edition, publishing racially defamatory statements defaming the Jewish community with his claims of a "myth of the six million", and publication of racially defamatory statements and incitement to racial hatred for his " [suggestion that] the Jews deceitfully fabricated evidence of the reality and extent of the genocide for financial gain".http://cmiskp.echr.coe.int/tkp197/viewhbkm.asp?sessionId=7679744&skin=hudoc-en&action=html&table=F69A27FD8FB86142BF01C1166DEA398649&key=25185] French courts consequently banned its publication and fined Garaudy 120,000 French Francs (about $20,000) and sentenced him to a suspended jail sentence of several years. [ [http://www.humanite.fr/1998-02-28_Societe_Roger-Garaudy-condamne-a-120-000-F-d-amende Roger Garaudy condamné à 120.000 F d'amende - l'Humanite ] ] Garaudy appealed this decision to the European Court of Human Rights, but the appeal was rejected as inadmissable.

Raised by Catholic and atheist parents, Garaudy became a Protestant, then a Communist. During World War II, he was imprisoned in Djelfa, Algeria, as a prisoner of war of Vichy France. In the postwar years he was elected to public office several times as a member of the French Communist Party, but was expelled from the Party in 1970 due to his criticism of the U.S.S.R.. He then became Catholic, before converting to Islam in 1982, taking his new name, Ragaa. Garaudy has lived in south of Spain, near Córdoba, for over 20 years.

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