Biographisches Lexikon des Revisionismus

Biographical Encyclopedia of Revisionism

 

 
Michèle Renouf - Lady Renouf 

Australian-born British socialite, supporting charity work, * 1946

In childhood R. became a photographic model, professional ballet dancer, television commercials actress and beauty queen, winning various titles including Miss Newcastle & Hunter Valley 1968.

Since the earliest days of these careers she has been involved (both as performer and organiser) in extensive charity work, including fundraising for disabled children as Radio 2HD's Miss Beach Girl 1969; many musical soirees and charity balls at her Hampstead home in the 1970s and 1980s in collaboration with Count Nikolai Tolstoy for Russian emigre and medical charities and during the 1990s and 2000s chaired a committee organising a major theatrical fundraising event for the reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and served for many years on the committee of the War and Peace Ball in aid of ChildLine.

Having graduated in Fine Art at the National Art School, she became a lecturer in Fine Art and Media Studies at Queensland University of Technology. In 1970, she took residence in London. To consummate her ballet and choreography studies and teacher training she undertook a licentiateship at the Royal Academy of Dancing, then in Knightsbridge, under Keith Lester and Clement Crisp, ballet critic of the Financial Times for almost half a century. At the Academy she achieved Lester's notoriously demanding "Karsavina" virtuoso standard.

Her first marriage at London's Humanist Centre, followed by a second ceremony nine months later at the Russian Orthodox Church in exile in Kensington, was to Daniel Griaznoff, a consultant psychiatrist, whose ancestor was right hand man to the medieval Tsar Ivan the Terrible and whose courtly title, like other Russian equivalents, derives from the adoption by Russian court circles of the French style of aristocratic courtesy title. Though not used in her professional life, the title Countess Griaznoff proved helpful for her continuing charity work after taking residence in London.

During the 1970s and 1980s Countess Griaznoff's charity related endeavours regularly appeared in society publications such as Tatler and the Court Circular, including numerous events under Royal patronage. During this period she was recruited to the Ladies Committee of the European-Atlantic Group. Negative publicity did not arise until her second marriage.

She and Griaznoff were divorced in 1990, and in 1991 she married Sir Francis Renouf, an international financier who had worked alongside Hermann Abs of the Deutsche Bank to restore Germany's postwar banking system. The bride was given away by her distant cousin Capt. Maurice Cavenagh-Mainwaring and the marriage was witnessed for her by the Duke of St Albans and for him by Lord Kindersley. Their matrimonial home in Eaton Square, Belgravia, was the former home of Neville Chamberlain, British Prime Minister 1937-40.

Sir Francis, a New Zealand billionaire with a Rolls Royce in thirteen cities, was already the focus of an antipodean media circus after losing a substantial part of his fortune in the 1987 stockmarket crash and undergoing a dramatic divorce from his second wife in Sydney. The new Lady Renouf found herself targeted by the media. They tracked down her long estranged father, by then terminally ill and previously assumed to have died, to bolster claims that Lady Renouf had in some sense misrepresented her past. The elder son of a family of Australian hoteliers but having no interest in the family business, Arthur Mainwaring had served as an aerial reconnaissance photographer during the Korean War, later taking up this field professionally, and was working as an aerial and sports photographer for the Port Macquarie News until just before his death. He was also a professional musician and prize winning golfer, but was crudely caricatured to suit the tabloids' "rags to riches" agenda.

The renewed media scandalmongering soon derailed the Renouf marriage which ended in divorce five years later, despite persistent efforts by Sir Francis to effect a reconciliation. He suffered a heart attack and stroke soon after the divorce was finalised and died in 1998.

During 1991-92, R. gained a diploma in Landscape Design and went on to design an Elizabethan Knot and Maze Garden for the reconstruction of William Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. During her honeymoon in New Zealand, R. had been invited to add stitches to a giant New Zealand wool tapestry curtain which was its national contribution to the Globe Theatre reconstruction project. This led to her joining the Globe's advisory board on her return to London and raising substantial funds for the restoration. R. and her handpicked coterie sponsored the building of the Globe's Wardrobe of Robes Room, in private celebration of her late mother's career in the design and construction of ballet costumes. As a highlight of her career in landscape design R. designed a hillside-sized maze garden for family friend Prince Fahd bin Salman in the form of a horse's head, as a tribute to the Saudi Prince's 1991 Derby winning horse Generous.

From 1999 to 2001, R. read for a post-graduate degree in Psychology of Religion at the University of London. Partly as a consequence she has been working during 2007-8 on Pious Piracy, a new DVD about New Testament source criticism which features interviews with Prof. Dr. Christian Lindtner (author of Gematria and the Gospels), Kenneth Humphreys ("Jesus never Existed"), and Dr Zacharias Thundy ("Buddha and Christ"').

R. has never been a member of a political party, save when she joined the Cities of London and Westminster Conservative Association so as to serve on the inaugural committee of the Middle East Cultural Group, in which she proposed they aim to provide a voice in political circles for the Palestinian and Arab nations and communities of the Middle East, redressing a perceived imbalance in London's political circles. 

In 2001 she archived on film a series of interviews with British veterans of the 1945-48 conflict in Palestine. Surprised by the absence of mainstream media interest in their eyewitness testimony, she made the documentary film Palestine Scrapbook which was screened at the House of Commons in 2001 and House of Lords in 2002. A sequel Israel in Flagrante, featuring the anti-Zionist orthodox rabbis of the Neturei Karta, was shown at the Cairo Conference in 2004. Thus after a lifetime's international career as a photographic model and actress in television commercials, R. has found herself by default on the other side of the camera.

R. has become increasingly known in recent years for her support of prominent Revisionists. Her interest in World War II and the 'Holocaust' began in 2000, when she read a quotation from David Irving in a newspaper article regarding Irving's libel case against rival historian Deborah Lipstadt. She attended the two month long hearing and became impressed with Irving's case, saying "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... On the other side of the courtroom I saw 21-25 people with laptops connected it seems to the Israeli government."

In the same year, she wrote a letter to the Evening Standard newspaper in London complaining of biased BBC coverage of the Irving-Lipstadt trial, signing it "Lady Renouf, Reform Club, 104 Pall Mall." This led to an unsuccessful attempt to expel her. Irving had already been banned by the club in 2001 after attending a function as R.'s guest, though he was never alleged to have broken any club rule. She was eventually expelled from the club in 2003 for continuing to raise the issue of Irving's so far unique banning with fellow members. 

Between 2004 and 2006 R. spoke at numerous meetings and conferences in Europe, the U.S. and Canada, and attended the trials of Ernst Zundel, Germar Rudolf and Robert Faurisson. In attempting to recruit Jewish speaker Barry Chamish to the much disrupted but eventually salvaged 2004 Sacramento Conference, she pointed out that Jews such as John Sack and Peter Kirstein had addressed David Irving's revisionist conferences, and wrote:

To be sure the conference (and I) will make you and your debate, if reasoned, welcome; for my part, I do not hold you personally responsible for the disastrously sociopathic formulation of the Hebrew Scriptures! ... so I look forward to meeting you - a person, not to be confused with an ideology. ...You'll find such conferences are not celebratory hate fests that doubtless you are used to. I can assure you rational Jewish speakers at other Revisionist conferences (such as David Irving's) come as I've seen without cavalry ... and come away (to return the next year) having received a convivial welcome.

In 2006, R. organised financial support for David Irving's family, maintained his website and travelled to Vienna to support Irving during his trial for denying the "Holocaust", saying "I am here to see a freed Irving and a freed Austria from this totalitarian law." Arriving at the court, she called for "so-called Holocaust victims" to be exhumed to see whether they died from typhoid or gas. R. has also shown her support for the rights of other prominent Revisionists, including most recently Dr Fredrick Töben.

She attended the 'International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust' in Iran in December 2006. In her address to the Teheran Conference, which was open to all participants without preconditions, she described Judaism as possessing a "dangerously misanthropic tendency" and "fundamentally anti-Gentile narcissism."

Of the 'Holocaust', R. has said, "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)."

During 2007-8 she appeared in televised debates with Rev. Dr. Stephen Sizer, Dr Norman Finkelstein, Dr George Lambrakis and Likud strategist Dmitry Shimelfarb, as well as broadcasts with Dr Christian Lindtner, Dr Yaqub Zaki, Peter Rushton, Dr Nicholas Kollerstrom, Moeen Yaseen, Riad Al-Taher, Dr Mohammad Saeed Bahmanpour and Press TV's Behind the Headlines.

Although she says that she is not anti-Semitic, she has described Judaism as a "repugnant and hate-filled religion." The European Jewish Congress quoted R. as telling the Teheran Conference: "anti-Semitism is caused by the anti-gentile nature of Judaism".

R. has used her first hand observation of Canadian and European court processes in producing the DVD Jailing Opinions. She is currently working on its sequel Jailing the Lawyers, in which she relies upon the inseparable nature of the Classical Greek Four Virtues, arguing that the criminalisation of 'Holocaust denial' has separated the traditionally inseparable Virtues of justice and wisdom (or scientific attitude).

R. and Dr Töben were elected to the 'International Fact Finding Committee on the Holocaust' at the conclusion of the Teheran Conference in December 2006. Assessing the conference American writer Michael Collins Piper said that:

One speaker in particular broke the basic mold of the conference. That was Lady Michèle Renouf of Britain.... Lady Renouf asserted that the often hateful (and indeed racist) attitudes toward non-Jews expressed in the Jewish religious reflections in the collective works known as the Talmud were the root of much opposition to Jewish people in the nations of the West.

In June 2008 the Jewish Chronicle published an article about London revisionist academic Dr Nicholas Kollerstrom, and allowed rights of reply to Dr Kollerstrom and R.. A Canadian based Zionist website launched a campaign of protest against the Jewish Chronicle for publishing R.'s letter, and one of the site's regular correspondents posted a terror threat to send the deadly poison ricin to R. through the post.

In October-November 2008 she organised a top extradition solicitor to defend Australian academic Dr Toben after he was arrested at London's Heathrow Airport under a European Arrest Warrant, and then convinced the Adelaide-based former schoolteacher to allow his lawyers to base their case on the vagueness of the arrest warrant issued by Germany, rather than mounting a futile ideological defence about the merits of his views. R. had observed the singularly successful strategy of veteran Viennese lawyer Dr. Herbert Schaller during 2006, interviewing him in 2008 for a forthcoming DVD sequel Jailing The Lawyers. Dr. Schaller's legal
strategy was the indirect inspiration for R.'s approach to Dr. Töben.  

R. said she funded her activities "with some difficulty" by using her savings and selling her art collection and family heirlooms because "the Jews I come across in my work are Zionists, so my work has dropped off". Lady Renouf was thrown out of the progressive Reform Club in 2003 after taking controversial historian David
Irving there as a guest. She now faces expulsion from a London discussion
group, the European Atlantic Group. Her critics "always say I am charming
but sinister", she said, "because if you meet me you don't find the hate
they talk about". Denying she was anti-Semitic, she said: "I oppose the
Jewish religion, not the people."

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Letzte Änderung / Last update: 30.03.200) 

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