This beauty's a right one

Sydney Morning Herald 24 February 2006
 
It's hard to know what is more remarkable about Lady Michele Renouf - her personal life or her political views. The former Australian beauty queen, advertising model and London socialite made headlines this week by protesting on behalf of her close friend David Irving.

The British historian was jailed for three years in Austria this week for denying the Holocaust took place.

Lady Renouf, wearing a Union Jack label pin, was on hand to see Irving sent to prison, telling reporters: "I am here to free David Irving and free Austria from this totalitarian law."

Renouf, 59, praised Irving for "standing up to the Zionists" before a member of the Austrian press shouted at her: "Do you think your British flag entitles you to bring your Nazi propaganda into this court?"

The story of how a girl formerly known as Michele Mainwaring went from Miss Newcastle 1968 to outspoken champion of the extreme right, via a very brief marriage to Sir Frank Renouf, seems almost too far-fetched.

Her 1991 marriage to the late New Zealand financier Frank 'The Bank' Renouf ended quickly when he discovered some of her claims about her past were untrue. She had claimed her father was dead, but it turned out he was alive and well, a former truck driver from The Entrance in New South Wales. He also found her use of the name Countess Griaznoff was perhaps not warranted, even if she claimed the mother of her ex-husband was from Russian nobility.

After the collapse of the marriage it took just a few months for Lady Renouf - she has always retained the rather grandiose title - to make a mark on the fringes of London society.

She made headlines in 2003 when expelled from the Reform Club of Pall Mall - a progressive society with ex-members ranging from Winston Churchill to Henry James - for using the club name in a letter to a newspaper championing Irving.
Lady Renouf claims she had no interest in the issues of World War II and the Holocaust until a piece in a newspaper about Irving's 2002 libel trial caught her eye.
 

Irving had sued an American academic for claiming he was a 'Hitler partisan' who twisted history to cast the German dictator in a better light.

Irving lost the case

Lady Renouf attended the hearing and soon became inseparable from the historian, who she clearly admired. "I found on Irving's side of the courtroom a solitary person representing himself, backed up by enormous forensic research and tremendously capable debate based on substance and fact," Lady Renouf told a right-wing American radio show this week. "On the other side of the courtroom I saw 21-25 people with laptops connected it seems to the Israeli government. "All they were offering was smears and insults to Irving personally."

If her interest in the Holocaust did not exist prior to the 2002 trial, she has made up for it ever since, and is now a regular speaker at international conventions of the far right.

Last year, she attended a New Orleans conference where she shared the rostrum with form Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, the British National Party, Germany's neo-Nazi NDP and France's National Front.

Lady Renouf is eager for her views to be publicised and admitted that Irving's seemingly brazen return to Austria - where he was long wanted for Holocaust denial - was designed to bring on a trial and thereby gain publicity.

The publicity was not just welcome for Irving politically, but also monetarily, as he made sure a copy of his magnum opus Hitler's War was included in every trial photo of him as he was led around in shackles.

"The reason he is there is to draw attention to this outrageous (Holocaust-denial) law," Lady Renouf said. "That is the purpose of this case - to allow people to understand and know about this almost sacred law. We need these things to be out in the open and expressed openly and that is the purpose of this case. It's not good news for David personally but for all of us (it is) because we must have the freedoms. These are things we have received from our Hellenic-based culture and we must fight for them if necessary. It mocks our war dead who believed they fought and died in the Second World War for our right to freedom of speech and open historical inquiry and expression. That is the basis of our culture, and it's being eroded by this totalitarian law. It's preventing us from treating history as history rather than a religion that has tenets that can't be challenged."

Such views are not unreasonable, and have indeed been voiced as much by libertarian voices of left as they have been by the right in the wake of the Irving trial. But scratch the surface of Lady Renouf's arguments and another agenda becomes apparent.

"Holocaust-denier suggests you don't think anything bad happened to the Jews during World War II and there's no-one I know who suggests any such thing," Lady Renouf said. Those bodies we see in the big trenches, the war-time skeletons, are said to have been people to have been gassed - millions of them. The obvious thing to do would be to exhume and forensically examine how they were killed. Did they die of typhus epidemic which was rife in those internment camps during the war, or did they die from poisonous gas, the Zyklon B? We have all been trained by the extremely successful Hollywood narrative of World War II and that we all feel we are being disrespectful if we raise some issues about (victims' bodies being turned into) soap and lampshades which have now been proven to be totally propaganda. We are now taught we can't criticise any Jew or criticise their activity be it bad or good because we risk putting them in a gas oven. This sort of nonsense has to stop and we must be able to speak in a rational way about historical events."

It's a short step from there to Lady Renouf describing French National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, ex-Klan leader Duke and Irving as "heroic people".

Also winning Lady Renouf's admiration is Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, perhaps on the philosophy that 'my enemy's enemy is my friend'.

"What is happening now with generating hatred toward Islamists is deliberately done to cause the west to be pressured to find the Islamists as the culprits rather than the victims, to generate fear in the west and support Bush and his Christian Zionists to attack Iran," Lady Renouf said. "The two prophets Christ and Mohammed came to warn us against this particular style of deceit, they both spoke of it."

Irving has signalled his intention to appeal against his conviction in Austria, probably via the European Court of Human Rights, so we are unlikely to have heard the last of Lady Renouf yet.
 
AAP

____________ 

In a message dated 25/02/2006 02:05:37 GMT Standard Time,

Lady Michelle Renouf writes:

 
Thank you so much for your kind compliments and for being the first to send me this article. 
 
I'll now study it to see if in any way it requires Corrections, or does what two earlier ones have tried to do.  That is, to tweak my comments so that - as The Times (Feb21) and Herald Sun (Feb 22) have inferred or falsely claimed - that I risked breaking Austria's law whilst in Vienna thus "being charged herself". 
 
You see, these two earlier reports claim mendaciously, twice, that I answered questions outside the Austrian courthouse.  The truth is, no-one asked me questions anywhere but inside the courtroom where I said nothing like those added tweaks made by the Herald Sun, of "so-called Holocaust victims...".
 
I do not doubt they were victims.  Or that the term as chosen by international Zionism for these victims is a Holocaust (a religious term meaning a sacrificial burnt offering in a Covenantal bargain to gain a literal Zionist state of Israel).  The Times said "a reporter pointed out that the bodies were now ash".  No-one said that to me there.  Had he or she, I would have replied, I am referring to the truckloads of bodies being dumped into deep pits which we have all seen time and again on newsreels with the caption or voiceover declaring them victims of systematically massed, homocidal gassing.
 
And of course I never, instead, "turned abruptly away".  On the contrary!
 
Kind regards

Michele

PS My old Corrections with regard to, indeed, the media's so-called personal background of me, as syndicated worldwide with impunity, have never to my knowledge been published or heeded, even though I also sent these Corrections to the Press Complaints Commission in 2003.  Unable to run to the colossal finance needed to sue mega-rich international newspapers for libel, I am obliged to adopt a philosophical view of this gross mischaracterization as a vehicle which enables crumbs of other far more important historical truths to reach the general public.  As indeed they do! 
 
The attached photo, below, taken last November 2005 captures the presentation to me by Canada's top human rights attorney Douglas Christie, of the 20th annual George Orwell Free Speech Award from the Canadian Free Speech League.
 
A second photo, above,  shows members of world media asking me questions inside the courtroom in Vienna, 20th February 2006, during the minutes allotted for the purpose prior to the commencement of the trial of British historian David Irving.

Holocaust outrage by beauty queen
 

Daryl Bradford Smith interviews Lady Michele Renouf

Michelle Renouf and Doug Christie