Tehran - A senior Iranian cleric called yesterday for a book by a convicted French author questioning the Holocaust to be widely distributed in Muslim countries. "I recommend that this book be translated and distributed in all Islamic countries, including Iran," Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati said in a Friday prayer sermon broadcast on Tehran radio.
He was referring to the book The Founding Myths of Israeli Politics by the French Muslim author Roger Garaudy, which disputes the numbers of Jews killed in the Holocaust and questions the existence of gas chambers in Nazi death camps. Garaudy (84) was recently fined by a Paris court, under a 1991 law, over the claims in the book.