I have said, and I repeat, at the risk of appearing sacrilegious, that the gas chambers are a detail of the history of the Second World War... If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what's called a detail.

As for me, even though I have been accused of anti-Semitism countless times, no one has ever heard me make anti-Semitic statements or engage in anti-Semitic behavior.

You must either suffer in this life or give up the hope of seeing God in Heaven. Sufferings and persecutions are of the greatest avail to us, because we can find therein a very efficient means to make atonement for our sins, since we are bound to suffer for them either in this world or in the next.

Millions also perished in the Chinese camps, and there have been terrible genocides in Cambodia and Vietnam.

When Joan D' Arc was asked by her judges why as a Christian she did not love the British, she answered that she did love them, but she loved British in their country. In the same way, we do not hate the Turks, we love them, but in their country.

When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines.

In recent years - before the intifada - there were three or four incidents of anti-Semitism a year, and that's out of 18 million crimes and violations of the law.