Downfall of Holocaust-denying bishop

"The reason men are silenced is not because they speak falsely, but because they speak the truth. This is because if men speak falsehoods, their own words can be used against them; while if they speak truly, there is nothing which can be used against them -- except force." - Birdy

When Bishop Richard Williamson gave an interview to Swedish television four weeks ago it could never have crossed his mind that his words would provoke a worldwide furore.

After all, he was based in Argentina, speaking in Bavaria and the clip would be broadcast in Sweden.

But the 64-year-old bishop, who converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism as a young man, reckoned without the power of the global media which can send words and images around the world in seconds.

In the interview Bishop Williamson strayed onto hugely controversial territory: he said that no Jews were gassed during the Second World War and that only 300,000 – not six million – died in the Holocaust.

His comments unleashed a torrent of anger and incredulity that spanned the globe.

His religious group, the Society of St Pius X, kicked him out of the seminary, the Argentine government gave him 10 days to leave the country and the Pope demanded he retract his remarks.

Last week, the bishop fled to Britain and was hustled through Heathrow airport by bodyguards.

Backed by an exotic cast of supporters, among them a former beauty queen who was once married to a Russian Count, he took refuge in the unlikely setting of a detached house in the south west London suburb of Wimbledon, the UK headquarters of the St Pius X society.

From there he issued an apology but one so half-hearted, so gauche, that it succeeded only in making things even worse. On Friday the Vatican rejected the apology as inadequate.

Abraham Foxman, national director of the US Anti-Defamation League and a Holocaust survivor, said: "This is another sham statement that doesn't recant any of his earlier remarks about the Holocaust.

"Bishop Williamson must unequivocally acknowledge the full extent of the Holocaust and recognise the fact of the existence of the gas chambers."

On Saturday, the clergyman at the centre of a worldwide debate over the Holocaust was still hidden way in his suburban bolthole, fearing he might be the target of an extradition request from Germany where, unlike in the UK, "Holocaust denial" is a criminal offence.

Jacques Barrot, the EU Justice Commissioner, said Father Williamson could face legal action in many European nations where Holocaust denial is illegal.

His lawyer, Kevin Lowry-Mullins, of Dass solicitors, said the bishop would fight any extradition request "all the way to the House of Lords and beyond".

"He is determined to resist any attempt to extradite him to be tried for something that is not an offence in this country," the lawyer said.

A priest who answered the door responded to all questions with a determined "no comment". Friends said Father Williamson wanted to "lie low" and wait for the storm to blow over.

When the bishop flew into Heathrow wearing a dog collar last week he was greeted by the glamorous socialite and former model and beauty queen Michele Renouf.

The meeting of the Beauty and the Bishop raised eyebrows but Lady Renouf, as she has called herself since her short-lived marriage to Sir Frank Renouf, a wealthy banker and entrepreneur, sees in the bishop a kindred spirit.

For the one-time actress also believes that the accepted view of the scale of the Holocaust must be challenged.

For the past 10 years the Australian-born 62-year-old, who lives in Kensington, west London, has attended and spoken at Holocaust "revisionist" conferences and written papers on the subject.

The bishop's cast of supporters also includes David Irving, the 70-year-old British historian described by a court as an "active Holocaust denier," an anti-Semite and a racist, and Fredrick Toben, 64, a German-born "revisionist" who has been in jail in Germany for Holocaust denial.

Mr Irving, who lives in Windsor, Berkshire, was also arrested during a visit to Austria and convicted of "glorifying and identifying with the German Nazi party". He served a prison sentence from February to December 2006.

In 2006, Lady Renouf organised financial support for Mr Irving's family, looked after his website and went to Vienna to support him during his trial.

She and Mr Toben attended the Iranian-sponsored Holocaust Denial Conference in December 2006 and were appointed to the "International Fact Finding Committee on the Holocaust".

Lady Renouf said she went to the airport to offer Bishop Williamson the services of the lawyers who had fought successfully against an attempt by the German authorities to extradite Mr Toben to Germany.

The Society of St Pius X is an ultra-Conservative Catholic organisation with 500 priests and 600,000 members worldwide, including thousands all over Britain.

It was formed in 1970 by the French Archbishop Lefebvre after he rejected the modernising reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

In 1988 Bishop Williamson and three other priests were excommunicated after being consecrated illicitly as bishops by Archbishop Lefebvre.

In 2003 the bishop was appointed rector of the society's seminary in La Reja, Argentina, which has one of the world's largest Jewish populations.

Days after the interview with Swedish television the Pope announced that the 1988 excommunication would be lifted.

The bishops' friends are cagey about who funded his flight from Argentina, the bodyguards and the lawyers, and about who will provide financial support in the UK.

But the money is believed to be provided by a combination of the society's UK branch, Lady Renouf and donations from other well-wishers and sympathisers all over the world.

Lady Renouf is an experienced fund-raiser. In the Nineties she was on the advisory board of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre where much of her work involved raising funds for the reconstruction.

Like the bishop, his sympathisers say they are not "Holocaust deniers" or anti-semites but want the conventional view of what happened to the Jews in the Second World War to be subjected to rigorous scrutiny.

Lady Renouf said her conversion to the "revisionist" cause began after a female Jewish guest at a fund-raising dinner she organised in 1997 for the Globe objected to suckling pig being one of the main courses on the menu.

"The woman accused me of being a tyrant for giving people a choice of what to eat," she said. "She told me that Jews cannot expect to sit next to people who may opt to eat pork. She was the real tyrant."

Her interest in the Holocaust sharpened when she went to observe a High Court libel case brought by Mr Irving against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt in 2000 after she accused him of Holocaust denial.

Mr Irving lost the case but Ms Renouf, who attended the trial every day for two months, said she was impressed with his "sound and serious" arguments while the other side offered "insults and subjective arguments".

"Our concern is not Holocaust denial, but debate denial," Ms Renouf said. "People should have the freedom to question the accepted view of what happened. That questioning is part of our culture."

The Toben case was "an important victory for free speech", she said, and the British Government had "wasted £100,000 of taxpayers' money" supporting the extradition request under a European arrest warrant.

"The Government pledged that the warrants would only be used for crime and never for an opinion," she said. "But they broke that pledge."

It was Mr Irving who put Ms Renouf in touch with Bishop Williamson. Mr Irving said he had not spoken directly to the bishop, who he first met at a party at his home in Windsor, Berkshire, in October last year, but was in indirect contact with him by email. Photographs of the bishop at the party had been removed from the historian's website at the bishop's request, Mr Irving said.

The historian said he thought the bishop "looks similar to me. He is a bit younger but he has a cleft chin, a solemn face, blue eyes and is very fair.

"He is an intelligent man, an independent thinker who has done the math on the Holocaust, but was naive and did not realise the danger of talking to the press."

Last week Mr Irving sent Mr Williamson a long email, via an intermediary, advising him on what he should and should not say to the media.

In the email, which has been passed to The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Irving advises "His Excellency" to accept that there were "organised mass killings from the spring of 1942 to October 1943 at Himmler's three sites on the Bug River - Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec."

But he says there is "much dispute over numbers and methods of killing" and adds: "As for numbers, he might add that the Polish (Krakow) trial of the main Auschwitz officials, which concluded in December 1947, found that "altogether nearly 300,000 people from the most different nations died in the Auschwitz concentration camp".

Even the official figure had been adjusted from 4m to 1.5m, he said.

Lady Renouf was born Michele Mainwaring, the daughter of a lorry driver in New South Wales.

But after moving to London when she was 18 she married Daniel Griaznoff, a psychiatrist descended from the Russian aristocrats who fled the Russian Empire during the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

She adopted the title Countess Griaznoff but the couple divorced in 1990 and the following year, aged 44, she married 72-year-old Sir Frank Renouf a wealthy banker and entrepreneur, and became Lady Renouf.

They lived in Neville Chamberlain's former home in Eaton Square, Belgravia but, according to media reports, the marriage collapsed after only a few months when Sir Frank discovered that Lady Renouf was not a real Russian countess. The formal divorce came five years later.

Bishop Williamson's life could hardly have been more different. Born the second of three sons he went to Winchester and Cambridge and was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1971.

After a brief spell at the London Oratory he entered the international seminary of St Pius X at Ecône Switzerland and was ordained a priest in 1976.

Mr Toben runs the Adelaide Institute, a Holocaust "revisionist think tank" in Australia. He spent seven weeks in London's Wandsworth jail last year while his lawyers fought – successfully – against an attempt by the German authorities to extradite him from the UK for Holocaust denial when he was transiting in Britain on his way from the United States to Dubai. He also served seven months in jail in Mannheim, Germany for Holocaust denial in 1999.

"There have been many distortions about the Holocaust," he said. "We should be allowed to examine it the way we would any other subject," he said.

Bishop Williamson may need more advice from his fellow Holocaust sceptics. In his apology, published on the Pope Pius X society's website on Thursday, he said he had given "an opinion formed 20 years ago on the basis of evidence then available and rarely expressed in public since". One critic described it as "a confirmation of his views rather than an apology".

Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder of the Nazi hunting Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, said the bishop's apology "would not end this matter.

The one thing he doesn't say is that the Holocaust occurred, it isn't a fabrication, that it is not a lie. If you want to make an apology, you have to affirm the Holocaust."

The Home Office declined to comment on whether it would support a request from Germany, or any other country, for the bishop to be extradited to face trial for Holocaust denial.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/4885781/The-downfall-of-a-Bishop.html


Bishop Williamson apologizes for telling the truth