Jews unmoved by Bishop’s apology

Richard Williamson, the English Roman Catholic bishop who has caused an international storm after saying in an interview on Swedish television that no Jews died in gas chambers during the Second World War, has attempted to throw an asbestos blanket over the whole incendiary affair by issuing an apology for his controversial views.

In a statement on the website of the Rome Catholic news agency Zenit, he said his opinions on the Holocaust were not those of an historian and that they had been "formed 20 years ago on the basis of evidence then available, and rarely expressed in public since". Williamson added: "To all souls that took honest scandal from what I said, before God I apologise."

As well as the gas chamber claim, he had also challenged the widely accepted figure of six million victims, saying he believed that no more than 300,000 Jews had perished at the hands of the Nazis.

To this, Williamson, who is currently in the UK after being booted out of Argentina by the interior minister, said: "I can truthfully say I regret having made such remarks, and that if I had known beforehand the full harm and hurt to which they would give rise, especially to the Church, but also to survivors and relatives of victims of injustice under the Third Reich, I would not have made them," Williamson said.

So how well has it gone down? Not very, it seems. Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, told the Times that it was "not the kind of apology that would end this matter" because it failed to address the central issue. "The one thing he doesn't say, and the main thing, is that the Holocaust occurred, that it is not a fabrication, that it is not a lie", he said. "You want to make an apology, you have to affirm the Holocaust."

Renzo Gattegna, the president of Italy's Jewish Communities, also described Williamson's apology as "absolutely ambiguous."

This ambiguous approach might be down to the right-wing historian David Irving - a man who served a prison sentence in Austria for "glorifying and identifying with the German Nazi Party" - and who, as reported here, is giving the bishop advice on how to handle the media.

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