Iraq played host to a gaggle of French neo-Nazis and Holocaust revisionists from several countries, according to a July 24 interview published in the daily Liberation here.
Michel Faci, 35, who says he was secretary general of an extreme right-wing anti-Semitic group at the time, boasts that he and about 20 others were invited to Iraq by a government-sponsored organization called “Friendship, Peace and Solidarity with Iraq.”
He described the “thrill” of being able to walk around in a “genuine” SS uniform in the Al Aras tourist city about five miles from Baghdad.
According to Faci, the French neo-Nazis were received by the Iraqi information minister, Abdel Lateef Jassem, who was surprised that the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is outlawed in France.
The 19th-century anti-Semitic forgery that originated in Czarist Russia is a best-seller in Iraq, Faci claimed.
He said the Holocaust deniers on the plane to Iraq included an American, William Brown, who was personally received by Saddam Hussein, and Michel Sergent, a Frenchman whom the Iraqis employed as a lecturer at Baghdad University.
“In the streets of Baghdad, we saw in a newspaper stand the portrait of Uncle Adolf (Hitler) with a swastika. The Iraqis are fiercely anti-Zionist,” Faci was quoted as saying. “They agree Hitler was right to fight against the Jews in World War II. To them, Israel is really the incarnation of the devil.”
Faci said that after doing propaganda work on Iraqi television, he and his companions left on the last plane to Jordan in mid-January — following the first night of Allied bombing of Baghdad.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
