A French Far-Left Political Scientist and a Notorious Convicted Holocaust Denier “Debate” Antisemitism

On Friday, August 28, Mike Borowski hosted Thomas Guénolé on the French conspiracy channel Géopolitique Profonde (GPTV) for an almost three-hour, supposedly “manly” discussion with Alain Soral. The subject: the “antisemitic theses” of the antisemitic polemicist.

Both men resorted to arguments from authority, each drawing on his own stock of references. Whenever Soral made one of his many outrageous claims, Guénolé objected that he had provided no evidence. Soral’s response was that his evidence could be found in writings Guénolé had never read and, above all, in “reality” and “the march of History.” It was a dialogue of the deaf. The media savvy political scientist tried to compensate with a veneer of erudition for what he lacked in depth on the subject. The polemicist, meanwhile, simply reprised the role of a lifetime: that of a faithful ideological heir to Édouard Drumont.

The two debaters’ premises were so far apart that no genuine discussion was possible, as could easily have been predicted. Very quickly, all that remained was the spectacle—and the slightly pornographic quality inherent in this kind of transgressive exercise, where viewers are guaranteed to hear things said publicly that would normally get someone into trouble with their employer, colleagues or the courts. As for the promises of a “courteous,” “serious” exchange “without ad hominem attacks,” they were not always kept.

By the end, it was difficult to say which of the two men had “won.” On social media, supporters of each side claimed victory. What is certain is that a viewer who knew nothing about the subject could easily have been intimidated by Soral’s certainties, while anyone who knew even a little about it hardly needed Guénolé to realise that his opponent harboured a pathological fixation on Jews.

A “useful contribution” but for whom?

Guénolé, at any rate, appears pleased with the episode. He began posting a clip from it on his X account and said at the end of the debate that he was “genuinely happy” to have made a “useful contribution.” But was it useful to him, or to Soral? That is the question.

The political scientist gave the self-styled dissident an opportunity to promote two Holocaust-denial texts that were debunked years ago and are well known to specialists—the Leuchter and Rudolf reports—as well as conspiracy literature published by Soral’s own publishing house, Kontre Kulture.

The Leuchter Report, produced in 1988 by American execution-equipment technician Fred Leuchter, and the later Rudolf Report by German chemist Germar Rudolf are two well-known staples of Holocaust-denial literature, both purporting to cast doubt on the use of homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Guénolé rightly pointed out that his opponent was talking nonsense about estimates of the number of Holocaust victims, while Soral apparently pretended not to understand. Anyone seeking an illustration of his spectacular intellectual dishonesty on the subject can consult the page devoted to him long ago by PHDN, the French reference site on Holocaust denial—which, indeed, may well have been among the sources Guénolé used to prepare for the debate.

Unfortunately, Guénolé failed to explain properly why Holocaust denial – which Borowski casually reduced to a mere matter of “accounting” – is itself a form of hate speech. He could simply have pointed out that Holocaust denial necessarily implies that Jews who survived the extermination are frauds and liars.

It remains unclear why a debate lasting more than two hours was needed to establish that Alain Soral’s past and present statements are antisemitic. That is roughly equivalent to establishing that someone who professes that the Earth is flat is a flat-earther.

The entire setup rested on a deception: treating antisemitism as something other than an irrational and deadly passion. It was a deception Soral naturally knew how to exploit. The Holocaust-denying ideologue who denies even the reality of Holocaust denial itself, rejects the very term “antisemitism.” Like all falsifiers, he works hard to disguise an impulse as a line of reasoning.

A stupid and murderous creed

The fable he wants us to believe is that his ideas about what he calls “the Jewish problem” are the product of cold, rigorous analysis. He describes himself instead as a “Judeophobe” and claims the right to be afraid of Judaism, which he portrays as a racist, supremacist project aimed at dominating and dispossessing non-Jews.

According to Soral, the negative feelings Jews supposedly inspire arise solely from this, while the violence and slander directed against them throughout history amount to nothing more than “self-defence.” The argument is hardly new: for centuries, pogroms, expulsions and discrimination against Jews have been justified in precisely this way.

Agreeing to “debate” this proposition was already to grant Soral what he wanted: to have his hatred treated as a “thesis”.

A genuine thesis must be capable of being refuted. Soral, however, who sees the hand of the Jews behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy, 9/11, the murders committed by the Franco-Algerian terrorist Mohammed Merah, the Notre Dame fire and Covid, to name only a few—has found a way to immunise his obsessions against refutation.

Merah, an Islamist terrorist, murdered seven people in Toulouse and Montauban in 2012, including three Jewish children and a teacher at a Jewish school, and French soldiers.

Every serious, documented fact that contradicts Soral’s belief in the existence of a small group of Jews who hold power – “power over the Jewish community and power, full stop,” as he takes care to specify –is automatically dismissed because it was supposedly produced under the control of that very “power.”

“All your references,” he tells Guénolé, “are produced by people who have been validated by the establishment.”

QED. Here we find the great sleight of hand of conspiracism: if the conspiracy cannot be proved, that does not mean the conspiracy does not exist. It means “they” are very good at hiding it.

Soral did not invent anti-Jewish conspiracism. He merely repeats a stupid and murderous creed that he mistakes for thought. Nothing will ever persuade him otherwise, because his uninhibited antisemitism is ultimately the only thing that makes him interesting to his audience and keeps people talking about him.

Soral cannot even claim ignorance of where the ideas he advocates have led in the past. But he cannot acknowledge that either. Doing so would leave him looking like either a fool or a scoundrel. Which is why one can safely predict that he will never stop denying the reality of the Holocaust.

Take one of Soral’s favourite arguments, one he has been using for 25 years and trotted out once again among his friends at GPTV: antisemitism is the Jews’ fault.

“There is no effect without a cause,” he insists. “There is antisemitism because there are Jews! And wherever there are Jews, there is always antisemitism.”

The answer should have been that antisemitism does not require actual Jews at all, and that this is one of the distinctive features of this form of hatred.

Strange as it may seem, virulent anti-Jewish sentiment can be found in countries with virtually no Jewish population. Communist Poland offers a well-known historical example: the “anti-Zionist” campaign of 1968 was unleashed against a Jewish community already reduced to only a few tens of thousands of people following the Holocaust. The phenomenon was so striking that journalist Paul Lendvai coined the expression “Anti-Semitism without Jews” in a book published in 1971.

Japan offers another example. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has repeatedly enjoyed bestseller status there, while Holocaust denial has also flourished despite the country having an almost nonexistent Jewish community.

As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: “If the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.”

Did three hours of Soral and Guénolé debating on a conspiracy channel leave viewers with a better understanding of what antisemitism is? That is doubtful.

One thing is certain: the clickbait worked. With more than 400,000 views in under 24 hours, and to date almost 700,000 on YouTube, GPTV received an unexpected publicity boost. It even made some money from it, since the debate revealed that viewers could pay the channel to have their questions put to the guests live.

Fighting antisemitism by helping fill the coffers of a conspiracy channel: now there’s an idea.