French Holocaust-denier Again Suspended from Job

A French Holocaustdenier whose attempt to return to his teaching job was blocked by protesting students has again been suspended by the school where he taught.

Bernard Notin was suspended indefinitely from teaching at Lyon III University in southeastern France, which had agreed to take him back on his job as an economics lecturer after three years of suspension.

Last week some 50 demonstrators, led by the French Union of Jewish Students, physically prevented the Holocaust-denier from entering the classroom.

Notin, who wrote an article in an academic journal denying the existence of gas chambers during the Holocaust, said after the decision to suspend him indefinitely that he never meant to deny the existence of gas chambers in the Nazi death camps.

But in an interview on French television a few days before he was blocked from entering the classroom, Notin said he stood by every single word he had written on the subject.

In his about-face a few hours after his latest suspension was made public, he told Agence France Presse, “I do not doubt at all the reality of the Jewish genocide and of the gas chambers.”

But, he said, “I do condemn the extensive media attention to the genocide, leading to its becoming banal, and I criticize the indecent and permanent showing of the horrible though sometimes dubious methods.”

He asked “those who may have been hurt by my writings to forgive me.”

But in order to prevent any further clashes, Notin’s superiors canceled his lecture.

Notin provoked a scandal in 1989 when it was discovered that he had published, in a journal of the French National Center for Scientific Research, a text denying the gas chambers’ existence.

As punishment, he was suspended from teaching for three years but was to resume his lectures last month.

Notin was unavailable for comment.