BBC World News
April 1st 2006

'Irving? Let the guy go home'

By Brendan O'Neill

David Irving, the infamous British war historian, is today sitting in an Austrian jail, accused of denying the Nazi Holocaust. So why is an American Jewish academic who dramatically crushed Irving in the British courts saying he should be released? When you ask Professor Deborah Lipstadt for her thoughts on David Irving's forthcoming trial, the very last thing you expect her to say is: "Let the guy go home. He has spent enough time in prison."

Lipstadt, the American Jewish academic who exposes Holocaust deniers is not exactly David Irving's greatest fan.

Let him go and let him fade from everyone's radar screens
Deborah Lipstadt

But five years after she famously defended her own reputation in the High Court, and in doing so shredded Irving's, she is arguing that the Austrian authorities should probably let him go, saying the far-right will find a martyr if he goes to jail. David Irving, 67, who made his name as a World War II historian, became infamous for suggesting that the Holocaust didn't happen.

But in November last year he was arrested in Austria for two speeches he made in 1989, during which he allegedly claimed there had been no gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Gas chambers

It is a crime in Austria to minimise the atrocities of the Third Reich and the historian faces up to 10 years imprisonment if found guilty. Speaking after the arrest, Irving's lawyer said the historian no longer denies that gas chambers existed in Nazi death camps.

Yet Lipstadt, arguably the best-known warrior against Holocaust denial, believes that the best outcome would be for Irving to be let go.

"I would not want to see him spend more time in jail," she says.

"I am uncomfortable with imprisoning people for speech. Let him go and let him fade from everyone's radar screens."

If there were to be a film of Deborah Lipstadt and David Irving, they would be presented as nothing less than arch enemies, fighting to the last - as they indeed did in the High Court. Lipstadt has spent years exposing the arguments of Nazi sympathisers. She warns historians must "remain ever vigilant" against those who say the Holocaust was a hoax, "so that the precious tools of our trade and our society - truth and reason - can prevail".

The showdown came in January 2000 when she stood accused of libel for describing Irving in a book as "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial"; he accused her of "vandalising" his legitimacy as an historian.

The 32-day trial became a legal debate on the history of the Nazis - and the nature of truth itself.

Mr Justice Gray witheringly described Irving as anti-Semitic, racist and a Holocaust denier who had "deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence".

Irving had comprehensively lost not just his money, but his reputation.

Much to the annoyance of those who have fought against him, Irving is still invited to speak both in Europe and the USA. And Lipstadt raises questions about both free speech, and the publicity Irving stands to gain at his impending trial.

"Generally, I don't think Holocaust denial should be a crime," she says. "I am a free speech person, I am against censorship."

Irving's 1977 book Hitler's War contained the thesis that, until late 1943, Hitler knew nothing of the Holocaust

"I don't find these laws efficacious. I think they turn Holocaust denial into forbidden fruit, and make it more attractive to people who want to toy with the system or challenge the system. "We don't have laws against other kinds of spoken craziness. If you're a medical quack and you hurt someone, there's a law against that.

"But if you're a medical quack and you stand on the street corner preaching that you have an elixir that cures cancer and saves lives, no one throws you in jail."

Holocaust deniers spread conspiracy theories such as that Anne Frank's Diary was a hoax, and that the gas chambers were secretly built after the war.

But whether free speech should include the freedom to say such things has been the subject of furious debate on both sides of the Atlantic. Nine European countries have laws against Holocaust denial - and supporters argue that this is the one issue that crosses the line because it is offensive to both the dead and the survivors.

Democracy

In the UK, the free speech debate has focused on religious hatred: the government says it will outlaw incitement to hatred of believers. Opponents of the measure, including comic actor Rowan Atkinson, say it's an attack on free speech.

However, in the case of the Holocaust, Lipstadt says she recognises a case for laws in the lands that formed the heart of the Third Reich.

"Germany and Austria are not so far past the Third Reich. So I can understand that the swastika symbol, Mein Kampf, Holocaust denial, being a neo-Nazi and all the rest have a certain potency there that they would not have in the United States," she says.

"And Austria is a democracy. If the citizens of Austria were against these laws, they could change them. Austria and Germany are different, but I would not support those laws being instituted elsewhere."

Lipstadt says the reason she is generally opposed to outlawing Holocaust denial is not because she fails to recognise how deeply offensive it is but because such laws tend to turn cranks into martyrs.

"I am not interested in debating with Holocaust deniers," she says. "You wouldn't ask a scientist to debate with someone who thinks the Earth is flat. They are not historians, they are liars. Debating them would be nonsensical.

"But we also should not allow them to become martyrs. Nothing is served by having David Irving in a jail cell, except that he has become an international news issue.

"Let him go home and let him continue talking to six people in a basement.

"Let him fade into obscurity where he belongs."

Ha'aretz
26/02/2006

Denial is not a reason for arrest

By Gideon Levy

Words do not kill. So there is no statement for which it is permissible to send a person to prison. Freedom of speech is absolute, even when that which is spoken is as despicable and ridiculous as Holocaust denial. Those who start to doubt that principle will not know where to stop. Is denial of the Jewish Holocaust deserving of punishment while denial of the Armenian Holocaust, perpetrated by the Turks, is not? And why not? Because "only" a million and a half people were destroyed there?

And what about the world's racist indifference to the destruction of a million Tutsi in Rwanda or the mass murder of 4 million people in the Congo? After all, the world ignores those holocausts even if it does not deny their existence explicitly, and nobody thinks about punishing someone for that outrageous apathy and indifference. The Danish cartoons, which also hurt millions of people, are not deserving of punishment and neither is the denial of the criminal activities of Israel in the territories, even if they are incomparable, of course, to any holocaust. The Jews had a Holocaust, it was the most horrifying crime in the history of mankind, there is nothing similar to it in its evil, and those who dare deny this deserve to be made pariahs, excommunicated and boycotted, even expelled, but not and never jailed.

British historian David Irving delivered two insignificantly marginal lectures in Austria in 1989. In November he told an audience of 300 that gathered in a small auditorium in Luben that Hitler never ordered the destruction of the Jews; in a back room in a Viennese pub he claimed a few days later that "Auschwitz was a legend." This demonic curiosity should have been ignored. It's pathetic, shocking, crazed and particularly severe when such things are told to Austrians, but under no circumstances does that make them worthy of arrest.

At an international conference in Brussels a few weeks ago I heard some of the disciples of the various conspiracies about how the Mossad was responsible for the terror attacks on the Twin Towers. So what? Should those fruitcakes be locked up for what they said? Will Irving and his handful of followers stop believing in his doctrines because he's been thrown in jail? Did the Prisoners of Zion stop believing in Zionism because they were locked up? Or the followers of the Falun Gong movement in China? Locking up Irving won't bring an end to the ugly - but let's face it, marginal - wave of Holocaust denial, in an era when there is unprecedented commemoration of the Holocaust. In the U.S., where the principle of freedom of speech is sanctified and therefore there is no law against Holocaust denial, the issue of the Holocaust only grows in its interest to the public. There is practically no important city in America without a museum about the Holocaust.

The fact that Irving was sent to prison by Austria, perhaps one of the greatest of the deniers of the Holocaust, is one of the ironies of history. For years, Austria denied any responsibility for the destruction committed by its own son, Adolf Hitler, and the man who grew up in Austria, Adolf Eichmann. Austria, whose people welcomed Hitler with cheers, refused for years to pay compensation to its victims. Only in recent years has it retreated a bit from that position, after it felt it paid a heavy political price for its behavior after the war, when it became an international outcast in the wake of the election to the presidency of Kurt Waldheim, who had a Nazi past, and the success of the racist Jurg Haider.

Now Austria is sending Irving to a spectacular prison sentence, both because that's what the Austrian law calls for but also to minimize the damage done in the past and to please the world and Israel, which was behind the pressure to boycott it. But are the Austrians themselves convinced their court did justice, or do many of them regard the sentence as just another surrender to the Jews and Zionism?

And the question should also be asked why it is so important for Israel to chase after every Holocaust denier, when it is such a small cult, particularly when the world is honoring the memory of the Holocaust with ever more anniversaries, monuments, etc. Is our confidence in our righteousness so shaken? Israel's right to exist, as a birthright of the Holocaust, is stronger than all its deniers, including the president of Iran. Israel must not try to win petty profits from the memory of the Holocaust, and it should not use it over and over for emotional blackmail, as it has done for years. Israel has the right and duty to lead the world's campaign against racism and anti-Semitism, but it must take care to avoid any manipulation in the spirit of Golda Meir's terrible comments to Shulamit Aloni, "After the Holocaust, Jews are allowed to do anything."

Instead of fighting Holocaust deniers, we should focus on learning the proper lessons from them. One of the important lessons is that racism is racism whether it is directed against Jews and expressed in their systematic destruction or whether it is directed against Palestinians and expressed in their ruthless imprisonment in their own villages behind fences and walls. Ignoring this lesson is also a form of Holocaust denial, with far graver and ruthless consequences than another lecture by Irving.

Historians News Network

Why Historians Have a Responsibility to Condemn
the Jailing of David Irving

By Jesse Lemisch

Mr. Lemisch is Professor of History Emeritus, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.

An Austrian court has sentenced historian David Irving to three years in prison for Holocaust denial. This constitutes a moment of crisis for historians and in particular for the American Historical Association. How should historians react?

Irving's doctrines and his history are obnoxious. I suppose it's premature to reach a conclusion about yesterday's event this soon, but my first reaction is that it is simply horrifying to see a historian locked up for a bad, wrong, dishonest or evil interpretation or misuse of sources, and that this should be opposed. The AHA has painted itself into a corner on this kind of issue. As I noted in AHA Perspectives (September 2005) and on HNN, "Historian Sees Contradiction between AHA's Stand on Holocaust Denial and Its Stand on Armenian Genocide," the AHA President at the time, Jim Sheehan, wrote: "Needless to say, the Association does not have a position on the fate of the Armenians." I pointed out that in 1991 the AHA Council had put out a statement deploring Holocaust denial. The AHA condemns Holocaust denial while presenting itself as agnostic on the Armenian Genocide. All of this seems to me to add up to a privileged position for the Holocaust, and an inconsistency which is at bottom political -- another chapter in the AHA's long record of taking political stands while denying that it has politics. An organization that defines certain historical interpretations as unacceptable is on a slippery slope.

Of course the AHA is in no direct sense responsible for an Austrian court's jailing of Irving. But by privileging the Holocaust, the AHA has contributed to an atmosphere in which the "wrong" view of the Holocaust has been criminalized, which of course brings us pretty close to the jailhouse door. Historians have a special responsibility in this situation. We, and our organizations, will be complicit in a bad episode if we can't bring ourselves to speak up.

As a kind of a First Amendment absolutist, I have long been puzzled as to where I stand on restrictions on _expression in Europe after the Holocaust, but I have thought, well, they have a special history, it's understandable. But now, seeing such restrictions take concrete form in imprisonment of a (bad) historian, I feel professionally obliged to oppose this, to see what other historians think about it, and whether they are willing to take a stand.

It should be noted, without suggesting facile connections, that this takes place at a time of debate about the defense of obnoxious _expression in Europe. On this side of the water, if a historian presented slavery as less bad than we know it to have been, would we want that historian jailed? Of course not.

Jerusalem Post
March, 1st 2006

David Irving has a right to free speech, too

By Peter Singer

The timing of Austria's conviction and imprisonment of David Irving for denying the Holocaust could not have been worse. Coming after the deaths of at least 30 people in Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Libya, Nigeria and other Islamic countries during protests against cartoons ridiculing Muhammad, the Irving verdict makes a mockery of the claim that in democratic countries freedom of _expression is a basic right.

We cannot consistently hold that cartoonists have a right to mock religious figures but that it should be a criminal offense to deny the Holocaust. I believe that we should stand behind freedom of speech. And that means that David Irving should be freed.

Before you accuse me of failing to understand the sensitivities of victims of the Holocaust, or the nature of Austrian anti-Semitism, I should say that I am the son of Austrian Jews. My parents escaped Austria in time, but my grandparents did not.

All four of my grandparents were deported to ghettos in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Two of them were sent to Lodz, in Poland, and then probably murdered with carbon monoxide at the extermination camp at Chelmno. One fell ill and died in the overcrowded and underfed ghetto at Theresienstadt. My maternal grandmother was the only survivor.

So I have no sympathy for David Irving's absurd denial of the Holocaust - which he now claims was a mistake. I support efforts to prevent any return to Nazism in Austria or anywhere else. But how is the cause of truth served by prohibiting Holocaust denial? If there are still people crazy enough to deny that the Holocaust occurred, will they be persuaded by imprisoning people who express that view? On the contrary, they will be more likely to think that people are being imprisoned for expressing views that cannot be refuted by evidence and argument alone.

In his classic defense of freedom of speech in On Liberty , John Stuart Mill wrote that if a view is not "fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed," it will become "a dead dogma, not a living truth." The existence of the Holocaust should remain a living truth, and those who are skeptical about the enormity of the Nazi atrocities should be confronted with the evidence for it.

IN THE aftermath of World War II, when the Austrian republic was struggling to establish itself as a democracy, it was reasonable, as a temporary emergency measure, for Austrian democrats to suppress Nazi ideas and propaganda. But that danger is long past. Austria is a democracy and a member of the EU. Despite the occasional resurgence of anti-immigrant and even racist views - an occurrence that is, lamentably, not limited to countries with a fascist past - there is no longer a serious threat of any return to Nazism in Austria.

By contrast, freedom of speech is essential to democratic regimes, and it must include the freedom to say what everyone else believes to be false, and even what many people find offensive. We must be free to deny the existence of God, and to criticize the teachings of Jesus, Moses, Muhammad and Buddha, as reported in texts that millions of people regard as sacred. Without that freedom, human progress will always run up against a basic roadblock.

Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms states: "Everyone has the right to freedom of _expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers."

To be consistent with that clear statement - and without the vague qualifications of Article 11, which threaten to render it meaningless - Austria should repeal its law against Holocaust denial. Other European nations with similar laws - for example, Germany, France, Italy, and Poland - should do the same, while maintaining or strengthening their efforts to inform their citizens about the reality of the Holocaust and why the racist ideology that led to it should be rejected. LAWS AGAINST incitement to racial, religious or ethnic hatred, in circumstances where that incitement is intended to - or can reasonably be foreseen to - lead to violence or other criminal acts, are different, and are compatible with maintaining freedom to express any views at all. Only when David Irving has been freed will it be possible for Europeans to turn to the Islamic protesters and say: "We apply the principle of freedom of _expression evenhandedly, whether it offends Muslims, Christians, Jews or anyone else." The writer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, is the author of, among other books, Pushing Time Away: My Grandfather and the Tragedy of Jewish Vienna. This piece was provided through www.project-syndicate.org.

The Washington Post
February 26, 2006
Page B07

Less Freedom, Less Speech

By George F. Will

In some recess of David Irving's reptile brain, he knows that his indefensible imprisonment is helping his side. His side consists of all the enemies of open societies.

Irving, born in England in 1938, was a prodigy of perversity, asking for a copy of "Mein Kampf" as a school prize. He grew up to be a "moderate fascist" -- his description -- historian who has made a career of arguing, in many books and incessant speeches, that although many Jews died of disease and hardship during World War II, nothing like the Holocaust -- 6 million victims of industrialized murder -- occurred.

Holocaust deniers, from crackpots to the president of Iran, argue that the "so-called" gas chambers were only for showers or fumigation; that Zyklon B gas was too weak to produce mass deaths; that it was too strong to be used -- it would have killed those emptying the chambers; that Poles built the crematoria after the war as a macabre tourist attraction or by Jews to extort compensation; and that Germans concocted "evidence" of "genocide" to please their conquerors.

Holocaust denial, which is anti-Semitism tarted up with the trappings of historiography, is a crime in Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Switzerland. And in Austria, which criminalizes speech that "denies, grossly trivializes, approves or seeks to justify" Nazi atrocities.

In 1989, in two speeches in Austria, Irving said, among much else, that only 74,000 Jews died of natural causes in work camps and millions were spirited to Palestine after the war. An arrest warrant was issued. Last November Irving was arrested when he came to Austria to address some right-wing students. Last week, while Europe was lecturing Muslims about the virtue of tolerating free expression by Danish cartoonists, Irving was sentenced to three years in prison.

What folly. What dangers do the likes of Irving pose? Holocaust denial is the occupation of cynics and lunatics who are always with us but are no reason for getting governments into the dangerous business of outlawing certain arguments. Laws criminalizing Holocaust denial open a moral pork barrel for politicians: Many groups can be pandered to with speech restrictions. Why not a law regulating speech about slavery? Or Stalin's crimes?

Some defenders of the prosecution of Irving say that Europe -- and especially Austria, Hitler's birthplace -- rightly has, from recent history, an acute fear of totalitarians. But that historical memory should cause Europe to recoil from government-enforced orthodoxy about anything.

American legislators, using the criminal law for moral exhibitionism, enact "hate crime" laws. Hate crimes are, in effect, thought crimes. Hate-crime laws mandate enhanced punishments for crimes committed as a result of, or at least when accompanied by, particular states of mind of which the government particularly disapproves. Governments that feel free to stigmatize, indeed criminalize, certain political thoughts and attitudes will move on to regulating what expresses such thoughts and attitudes -- speech.

For several decades in America, the aim of much of the jurisprudential thought about the First Amendment's free-speech provision has been to justify contracting its protections. Freedom of speech is increasingly "balanced" against "competing values." As a result, it is whittled down, often by seemingly innocuous increments, to a minor constitutional afterthought.

On campuses, speech codes have abridged the right of free expression to protect the right -- for such it has become -- of certain preferred groups to not be offended. The NCAA is truncating the right of some schools to express their identity using mascots deemed "insensitive" to the feelings of this or that grievance group. Campaign finance laws ration the amount and control the timing and content of political speech. The right to free political speech is now "balanced" against society's interest in leveling the political playing field, or elevating the tone of civic discourse, or enabling politicians to spend less time soliciting contributions, or allowing candidates to control the content of their campaigns, or dispelling the "appearance" of corruption, etc.

To protect the fragile flower of womanhood, a judge has ruled that use of gender-based terms such as "foreman" or "draftsman" could create a "hostile environment" and hence constitute sexual harassment. To improve all of us, people with various agendas are itching to get government to regulate speech of this or that sort.

Even open societies have would-be mullahs. But the more serious threats to freedom are mullahs who control societies: Irving, expecting a suspended sentence, had planned to travel to Tehran to participate in a conference, organized by Iran's government, to promote Holocaust denial.

The Los Angeles Times
February, 25 2006

Trust the Truth

Editorial

DAVID IRVING IS THE KIND OF creep who will stand up in front of a crowd of Holocaust deniers and brag, "This hand has shaken more hands that shook Hitler's hand than anyone else in the world." As a once-respected World War II historian, he has arguably done more than anyone else alive to add a gloss of academic respectability to the grossly inaccurate notion that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Yet his sentencing this week in Austria to a three-year prison term for denying the Holocaust back in 1989 is a much more hateful expression than anything that has ever come out of Irving's mouth.

Words don't kill millions of people; governments and their armies do. Austria is hardly doing a convincing job of repudiating its own fascist history by using the blunt force of its police power to lock up a nonviolent, nonthreatening, noncitizen crank. And perversely (though predictably), the publicity generated from the case has given fresh oxygen to Irving's unspeakable views.

And that's just the practical objection. Symbolically, jailing a historian for his opinions is much more dire. Europe may have produced the two most murderous ideologies of the 20th century, but both were eventually defeated by the enduring product of the 18th: the Enlightenment. Thinkers such as Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson understood that progress is best advanced not through the edicts of rulers about what discourse is acceptable, but by the freest and most skeptical inquiry from all levels of society.

Ideas and scholarship should compete, and rise or fall on the strength of how they survive open peer review. By declaring certain ideas off-limits, many European governments, from France to Britain to nations of the former communist East, are showing a lack of faith in the truth to win out. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, for instance, recently pushed through a law prohibiting the "glorification" of terrorism, an act that will surely drive the country's violence-espousing Islamic extremists into the shadows, where their conspiratorial worldviews will fester off the radar of both the public and the police.

At a time when Pakistani clerics are offering million-dollar rewards for the heads of Danish cartoonists, and European citizens (if not their governments) are making the most rousing defenses of free expression in a generation, the contrast couldn't be more clear: Countries that tolerate free speech thrive; those that don't, don't. That principle is worth defending more than the "right" of people not to be offended or hear lies.

Although he made an unpersuasive, last-ditch courtroom conversion to accepting the Holocaust, Irving will now serve as a martyr to a movement that doesn't deserve one — and a symbol of a weak governing class that has lost faith in one of the Continent's greatest intellectual achievements. Even hateful speech should be free.

BBC News
2-16-06

David Irving: Tests Europe's free speech

The reputation of David Irving, the Holocaust-denying historian, was shattered at a libel trial six years ago, to the delight of those disgusted by his revisionism.

But as Europe proudly flexes its freedom of speech credentials in the ongoing row over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, even some of his enemies are uneasy that he now faces up to 10 years in an Austrian jail for his unpalatable historical views.

The British academic will go on trial in Vienna next week over two speeches he made in Austria in 1989, in which he disputed the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz.

While a number of European countries have laws against Holocaust denial, nowhere has the ban been more sacred than in Germany and Austria, whose very identities have been forged from the rejection of what was perpetrated in the middle of the 20th Century.

And yet among Vienna's chattering classes, there are the first rumblings of debate.

At the heart of the matter is whether the distortion of such a fundamental period of history is a greater problem than the suppression of the right to express contrary interpretations - however unpleasant, and indeed inaccurate, they may be.

CounterPunch is the bi-weekly muckraking newsletter edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. It is published in a hard-copy, print edition, and online at www.counterpunch.com. Fearlessly antiwar, anti-imperialist, and “progressive” in its politics, Counterpunch regularly features columnists like Robert Fisk, Ralph Nader, Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, Vincente Navarro, and U.S. Rep Maxine Waters.

The following essay was published in the Counterpunch Print Edition, February 1, 2004. It is also available on the Counterpunch website.

STAR CHAMBER REDUX
By Alan Cabal
Counterpunch (Hard-Copy Edition),
February 1, 2004,
and Counterpunch Online Edition,
www.Counterpunch.com

In a cold cell in Toronto, Canada, a 64 year-old painter and pacifist sits on a fat stack of trial transcripts and marks his 365th day of solitary confinement on February 19. He sits on the transcripts because his jailers will not permit him to have a chair. He has no criminal record and has not been charged with a crime, and yet he wears the same orange jumpsuit as the murderers and rapists housed elsewhere in the prison. He is not permitted to confront or cross-examine his accusers in court. The "evidence" against him includes hearsay, double-hearsay, and triple-hearsay.

The object of the exercise is to deport this man to Germany, where he faces a five-year prison sentence for the crime of "defaming the dead." This man hasn't lived in Germany since he was 19 years old, and hasn't set foot in Germany for years. He emigrated to Canada in 1958, and in the year 2000 he moved to the United States to live quietly with his American wife in the rolling hills of Tennessee. There, he painted landscapes and still life in his studio and collected rare recordings of hymns and gospel music until he was hauled off one bright morning in broad daylight at about 11:00 a.m. in front of God and everybody and whisked to Canada by American law enforcement officials. His name is Ernst Zundel, and he is the world's premier thought- criminal.

Ernst Zundel is the most widely recognized figure in the growing number of historians, both amateur and academic, questioning the veracity of orthodox accounts of the events which took place in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II, specifically with reference to the number of Jewish dead and the means by which they came to their demise. He has been put through the Canadian legal system before on this issue.

In 1984 he was charged with "spreading false news" under an obscure 700 year-old law imported to Canada from England intended to deter wandering minstrels from mocking the aristocracy. It had been used only twice before in Canada. That trial was focused on a publication, "Did Six Million Really Die?" Zundel didn't write it, he merely published it, but that was enough to arouse the ire of the Jewish Lobby. That trial was in 1985 and lasted seven weeks. He lost that trial, but the verdict was overturned on appeal when it was determined that the judge was biased.

The second trial was on the same charges, but this time Ernst commissioned the forensic examination known as the Leuchter Report, which alleged that the industrial gassings of human beings so crucial to the orthodox narrative could not have happened. He lost that trial as well, but was exonerated in 1992 when Canada's Supreme Court ruled the "False News Law" unconstitutional and struck it from the books. This 4-3 ruling held that minorities have the right to state their own opinions, "even if the majority regards them as wrong or false."

In 1996 the Canadian Human Rights Commission initiated a "Human Rights Tribunal" against him which dragged on for five years. This trial centered on the "Zundelsite" (www.zundelsite.org), a website based in America and owned and operated by Ingrid Rimland, an American citizen.

"Ernst was believed to be the mastermind who controlled me," she explains. "This trial's purpose was twofold: one, to bankrupt Ernst financially by stringing out the hearings, and two, to force him to shut down the website. Knowing he wouldn't and couldn't do that, the plan was to charge and imprison him with contempt of court --- in other words, criminalization by the back door to facilitate deportation to Germany.

"I flew from San Diego to Toronto in 1996 and offered on the very first day when court opened to testify that it was my website, but was not allowed to do so. We were not married then. Ernst lost that trial as well. One of the many bizarre rulings of that trial was that 'truth is not a defense' --- only the feelings of an aggrieved and threatened 'minority' count. The Tribunal ruled in 2001 against Ernst, but stated in its summary that it was a 'symbolic' ruling, since the Zundelsite was an American website and could not be shut down by Canada."

He has been physically assaulted in numerous ways on numerous occasions by thugs of various persuasions. These assaults included beatings, booby-trapped mailings, a bomb that exploded in his garage in 1984, another bomb sent through the post 11 years later, and an arson attack which destroyed his home and its contents. He has never been convicted of a crime and in no way does he promote violence or hatred of any kind in his work. His only "crime" is that of questioning historical events.

He was arrested at his home in rural Tennessee by local authorities last year and handed over to the INS, ostensibly for missing an interview with immigration officials and "overstaying his visa." In fact, no such violation occurred. He was notified of an interview scheduled for June 12, 2001. His attorney at that time couldn't make the interview and requested a rescheduling, a routine request, routinely granted. He received no reply. The attorney sent another letter again requesting a rescheduling on May 6, 2002. Again there was no reply. Zundel's American wife, Ingrid Rimland, has the return receipt verifying that the letter was, in fact, delivered to the INS. The agency claims to have no record of either letter.

The couple never abandoned Ernst's Adjustment Of Status application, nor were they ever informed that it had been considered abandoned. They had been advised by INS that the procedure could take as long as three years, and that no status check would be allowed.

"When Ernst was arrested," Ms. Rimland explains, "we were prevented from calling a lawyer. A Warrant for Deportation lay ready in Knoxville and was signed and dated after the arrest. In the room where this was done, a poster with the Star of Israel was posted prominently on the wall.

"Through the Freedom of Information Act --- some 30 pages withheld for 'security reasons' --- we found out that some coded messages had been faxed on the very day of our first scheduled appointment between US Immigration and Canadian Immigration. Who in Canada was interested in causing us grief that day? A good place to start would be to check into some non- profit outfits that are fattening themselves on the taxpayers' trough by shrieking 'Hate!' for gain.

"After Ernst was arrested, we immediately applied for habeas corpus. We were turned down by a judge within hours in a one-sentence ruling. Not even our attorney was allowed to speak up. We appealed to the Sixth Circuit Appeal Court. Within days we were turned down again, this time in a one-paragraph ruling. Through FOIA we found out that there was ex parte communication prior to this ruling between a clerk who has a Jewish-sounding name and an immigration official who was exceedingly nasty to me when I tried to find out where my husband had been taken, and why. I understand it is illegal for court officials to solicit information on a pending court case behind the judge's and the accused’s backs."

On June 17, 2003, accompanied by two INS officers, Ernst Zundel was deported to Canada by plane.

"On that very day," states Ms. Rimland, "Germany swore out an arrest warrant. Why on that day? Who notified them, and on what grounds? An impartial judge could surely find out by requesting the missing FOIA pages.

"Through various documents and private sources, some at the highest levels of Germany's government, we learned that the original covert plan had been to get Ernst shipped to Germany, where 'insulting the memory of the dead' is on the books as a criminal offense, and where a 5 year sentence is a foregone conclusion for so-called 'Holocaust Denial.' Whoever masterminded this kidnapping evidently didn't know that the US always deports back to the country of entry, not to the country of nationality. Ernst ended up in Canada, and Canadian taxpayers are now stuck with the bill."

Ernst applied for political asylum on the grounds that it was a certainty that he was facing a prison term in Germany for his historical inquiries and theories. In 1992, after numerous appeals following the "Second Great Holocaust Trial", as it came to be known in revisionist circles, the highest court in Canada had ruled that Mr. Zundel had the right to speak his mind and express his views as he saw fit, "Seven if the majority regards them as wrong or false," as the court phrased it.

His adversaries came up with a solution. Two Ministers of the Canadian Parliament decided that Zundel might be a "terrorist." A "Security Certificate" was sworn out. This instrument is the only method by which Ernst could be deported to Germany, as he would otherwise be fully qualified for asylum in Canada, where he lived as a law-abiding permanent resident for 42 years. The quality of the evidence presented against him often goes like this:

"Mr. Zundel allegedly had 'sporadic contacts' with a now-dead U.S. based white supremacist named William Pierce. Pierce wrote a book called 'The Turner Diaries.' Timothy McVeigh loved 'The Turner Diaries', which supposedly describes a bombing similar to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, for which McVeigh was convicted."

Note that the date, time, place, and nature of these "contacts" between Zundel and Pierce go unspecified, nor is there any suggestion that Zundel had anything to do with the authorship of the infamous Turner Diaries. There is no assertion or evidence that Zundel had any contact with McVeigh. It's all innuendo intended to link Zundel to violence and terrorism.

Here's a pertinent excerpt from a Factum filed with the Court of Appeal for Ontario on January 21 by Mr. Zundel's legal counsel, Peter Lindsay and Chi-Kun Shi:

"Information and/or evidence has been secretly presented to Mr. Justice Blais in the absence of Mr. Zundel and his counsel, which information and/or evidence may be used according to the Act to determine both whether Mr. Zundel should continue to be detained and whether the issuing of the Certificate was reasonable. Where secret information and/or evidence has been presented to Mr. Justice Blais, sometimes a summary has been given to Mr. Zundel and his counsel and sometimes no summary of the information and/or evidence has been made available to Mr. Zundel and his counsel, even though the information and/or evidence may be used according to the Act both to determine whether Mr. Zundel should continue to be detained and whether the issue of the Certificate is reasonable.

"It is a fundamental principle of our adversarial system that one party presents its case fully and then the other party responds, knowing the case it has to meet. What has happened in this case is that after the Minister and Solicitor General presented their case and while Mr. Zundel was in the middle of presenting his response, the Minister and Solicitor General have secretly presented more of a case against Mr. Zundel. The additional case being presented is not limited to reply evidence. It is not limited at all. The case can secretly change in any way while being responded to. Mr. Zundel and his counsel do not know if it has changed in this case. Neither does this Honorable Court. It is not an overstatement to say that this is completely contrary to the fundamental principles of our judicial system"

No other historical narrative is possessed of an orthodoxy protected by law. It is in the nature of history to be subject to review and revision. The surest way to interest people in a field of inquiry or study is to prohibit it. The "Holocaust Industry", as Norman Finkelstein dubbed it, behaves in every way like a fanatical cult. The persecution of Ernst Zundel has been and continues to be both relentless and utterly ruthless. This most recent and ongoing episode flies in the face of a thousand years of Anglo-Saxon law. The man may hold provocative views, but he is a committed pacifist. He is guilty only of expressing an unpopular viewpoint. For him to be held in solitary confinement without having even been charged with a crime and without bail for a year while the court proceeds against him in some hideous replica of a Star Chamber or something out of Lewis Carroll is an affront to justice and public decency that goes far beyond anything that Mr. Zundel has to say.

CANADA’S “PAPER OF RECORD,” THE TORONTO
GLOBE AND MAIL, COMES DOWN FIRMLY
AGAINST ZUNDEL’S IMPRISONMENT

ZÜNDEL DOESN’T WARRANT A SECURITY CERTIFICATE

Editorial,
Toronto Globe and Mail,
March 6, 2004

Ernst Zündel has been in a Canadian jail for more than a year. Seized at his Tennessee home by U.S. immigration agents and delivered here, he is facing deportation to Germany on claims that he is a danger to Canadian citizens. In the meantime, he languishes in a tiny cell at Toronto's Metro West Detention Centre in solitary confinement.

Tough luck, many will say. Mr. Zündel is depressingly well known to Canadians as a Holocaust-denier and extreme right-winger who spent decades here spreading his noxious opinions about Jews. We would all love to see the back of him. But is he dangerous? So dangerous, in fact, that we need to pen him up in an isolation cell for 12 months and counting?

The federal government is holding Mr. Zündel on a national security certificate, a special procedure that allows it to bypass many of the standard rules of due process to protect public safety. Those cases almost always involve suspected terrorists. If two cabinet ministers decide that an individual poses a risk, they can have him locked up indefinitely pending deportation. The suspect is not allowed to see the precise evidence against him, and his odds of overturning the order in court are slim. The government must show only that it acted "reasonably," a preposterously low legal hurdle.

These are extreme measures in a democratic society, and Ottawa should use them only if it believes a suspect is likely to do physical harm to people or property. Odious as he is, Mr. Zündel poses no such risk. He has never been charged with a violent crime and does not urge others to commit violence. He is a crank, not a terrorist.

It is hard to know exactly how Ottawa defends its decision to jail Mr. Zündel, because, under the security-certificate process, it can keep most of its evidence secret -- a provision that severely limits Mr. Zündel's right to mount a defense. But a summary compiled by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service argues that even if he doesn’t actually advocate violence, he is dangerous because of the influence he exerts on his followers.

"By his comportment as a leader and an ideologue, the service believes Zündel intends serious violence to be a consequence of his influence."

That, says Mr. Zündel, is guilt by association. He is right. It is precisely the sort of argument that was used to lock up leftists in the days of the Red Scare. You are a Communist and Communists advocate violent revolution; therefore you are conspiring to commit violence against the state. Guilty as charged.

If Mr. Zündel can be jailed and deported for his "comportment" as an "ideologue," then every Greenpeacer and anti-abortion activist must fear imprisonment. Their rhetoric is pretty wild, too. Perhaps the anti-poverty campaigner with a nose-ring handing out pamphlets at the mall also "intends serious violence to be a consequence of his influence." Now that CSIS has the power to read minds, who knows where it may stop?

The real danger to Canadians comes not from obnoxious nuts like Ernst Zündel, but from a government that casually discards their most precious Rights.

THE INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST WHO HAS, IN THE PAST,
BEEN MORE CRITICAL OF ZUNDEL THAN ANYONE ELSE
IN THE CANADIAN PRESS, COMES OUT FIRMLY
AGAINST ZUNDEL’S IMPRISONMENT

WHAT SHOULD WE DO WITH AN AGING NAZI APOLOGIST?

Veteran investigative reporter Bill Dunphy spent six years probing Canada's white supremacist movement. He has made a study of Ernst Zündel and says that, for all his hate-mongering, Zündel's legal rights should not be denied.

By Bill Dunphy
The Hamilton Spectator,
May 14, 2004

Our government has seized and branded Ernst Zündel, stripped him of his human rights, tried him in secret and found him wanting, and will now hand him over to a foreign government anxious to throw him in jail for the crime of speaking the horrible lies that roil in his twisted mind.

None, save the sorry band of self-deluded haters and malcontents who make up Canada's dysfunctional white racist "movement," has stood up for Ernst Zündel. None have decried the shameful abuse of power, the cynical political calculation that is this government's decision to label Ernst Zündel a "threat to Canada's security". This is wrong.

Today I stand up for this Nazi apologist. Today I stand with the haters, the anti-semites, the racists, the cruel and ignorant who are Ernst Zündel's natural constituency and his only friends.

Today I ask, who is the real threat to our freedoms, our ideals, our security: this aging hater, this semi-retired painter with his crumbling and ineffectual network of the deluded; or a cynical and mighty government that chooses to wield an immense, nearly extra-judicial power in secret, and to use it to crush a man few seem willing to defend?

As an investigative reporter I spent six years in the early 1990s monitoring and exposing the rapid rise and inevitable fall of Canada's white racist movement, an ugly, cyclical blooming that brought them to membership levels and influence they'd not seen in Canada since the mid-1930s.

Zündel and the burgeoning propaganda machine that was his three-storey downtown Toronto headquarters was one of a few key hubs the movement revolved around. I got to know Zündel personally and professionally. And while I never had access to the fruits of the phone and fax and e-mail taps the government employed, I did learn much about his work through open questioning, careful observation and, at different times, the reports of a number of informants who worked inside his bunker and would pass along what they'd seen and heard.

The international scope and depth of his network of supporters who gladly consumed his e-mails, faxes, newsletters, videos, satellite TV shows and radio shows was astonishing, but not dissimilar to the network of supporters developed by the evangelical Christian ministers whose techniques he studied with the rapt attention a six-year-old boy bestows on professional athletes.

He had an impressive amount of energy and he earned impressive amounts of alms from his supporters. But anyone who got close to him understood that despite the occasional sacrifices and gestures of monetary and moral support for others of his ilk, Ernst Zündel cared about one thing -- Ernst Zündel. It's what kept him from building a real movement, from exercising real power when it appeared he might have it.

But for all his power, and the power and numbers of the other Canadian white racists, for all the fear they struck into the hearts of the righteous, the white racist movement in this country accomplished little more than hobbling the Reform Party's rise and sparking pathetic street battles in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver.

At every turn they were bugged, monitored and infiltrated by a host of well-funded and mostly honorable police and intelligence agencies. On every street corner they were out-hustled, out-organized and overwhelmed by their political polar opposites -- the anti-fascists, a fanatical but poverty-stricken coalition of street kids, high school students, anarchists and communists. For their part, mainstream anti-racists and human rights groups ensured Zündel, and the Heritage Front and their ilk, enjoyed no rest from legal challenges, charges and harassments. It worked.

As a political force, this so-called movement has been essentially spent for nearly eight years. Doubtless the haters will regroup, rise in some fashion and be crushed once more. Ultimately hate does not run deeply enough in Canadian society to nourish their shallow roots.

Throughout it all Zündel -- who did this country a favour by wiping off the books our disgraceful False News laws -- has never once been convicted of a criminal offence in this country, never once found to have violated the hate crime laws that rest snugly around the throat of free expression in this country.

His supporters say it is because he is an honorable man, a law-abiding man.
I look at his life and his lies and say the absence of criminal acts to support his supposed political principles is evidence of shrewdness or cowardice. But we could say the same about many of us. Many.

Still, in 1995, the government reached for the rarely used security certificate provisions of our immigration laws to brand him a threat to national security and deny him citizenship.

After exhausting his appeals and seeing clearly the Canadian government's intention to deport him from his home of 40 years, Zündel fled Canada for the arms of his love-sick American web-mistress. It matters not if he was motivated by love, or her American citizenship. They set up house in rural Tennessee, he slid into semi-retirement and prepared to open his own art gallery. His influence, reach and power has been waning for years.

But for some reason he bungled the slam-dunk of his American citizenship application and was arrested by the FBI and immigration authorities, who swiftly deported him to Canada where he made his absurd and insulting claim for refugee status. It was a bogus claim that would not survive for very long in a system that's dealt with much better frauds than he. But our government had no stomach for allowing that process to come to its inevitable conclusion, and promised to remove him swiftly.

"Just watch me," said Immigration Minister Denis Coderre in hollow echo of Pierre Trudeau's 1970 pledge to crush the terrorist cells of the FLQ (Front de Liberation du Quebec). Calculating correctly that there was no political cost, no "down side" to slipping on the jackboots to kick a reviled old man out of our country, our government cobbled together their best insults and innuendo, and Lord knows what secret "evidence", and branded Ernst Zündel a threat to national security.
I know this man, his local and international contacts and I know this movement. And after reading the 58 page "unclassified" summary of the government's case, I can assure you there is no justice here.

Their "evidence" is riddled with errors and misinformation, hearsay and inflammatory innuendo. Dead men walk again, and the shattered bits of shoddy secret networks long since collapsed under the weight of their own ineptitude are made whole and menacing once again. It is a shameful piece of dishonest, unreliable tripe.

So today I stand with my enemies, people who loathe me as much as I pity them, and I say we are governed by cowards. Freedom is much, much stronger than Ernst Zündel. But it may be no match for our complacency.

MAJOR BRITISH COLUMBIA DAILY ALSO
OPPOSES ZUNDEL’S IMPRISONMENT
EVEN ZÜNDEL MERITS FAIRNESS

Editorial,
Times-Colonist
(Victoria, British Columbia),
May 09, 2004

Ernst Zündel is an odious individual. His hateful neo-Nazi views are, or should be, repugnant to all Canadians. He is not the sort of immigrant this country wants, and he deserves to be sent back to Germany.

But the way the federal government is trying to get rid of Zündel is wrong -- it is using law that is so sweeping in its scope that it may be, as Zündel's lawyer Doug Christie argues, unconstitutional.

It would allow him to be deported on evidence that amounts to mere assumption and subject him to a kangaroo court process where no defense can be mounted.
The Canadian Security and Intelligence Service calls Zündel the patriarch of Canada's white supremacist "movement."

It argues he is a risk to national security -- a finding essential for his deportation under this procedure -- because he is trying to "destroy the multicultural fabric and underpinnings of Canadian society."

Most Canadians aren't aware of any "movement," apart from the weirdos that turn up every once in a while on the fringe of other demonstrations to yell and wave swastikas.

And most Canadians would be surprised to learn that the country's multicultural fabric could be torn apart or society toppled by Zündel's rants which are not, in fact, broadcast widely.

But this is the basis for CSIS's security certificate against Zündel. And the Federal Court judge who begins hearing the case today is instructed by the new immigration law that facts constituting inadmissability to Canada include those for which there is a reasonable belief "may occur."

There's no need for evidence that what Zündel is preaching is harming national security. CSIS and other government officials can present evidence to back up this claim. But the hearing will be closed. Zündel won't be able to hear what evidence they submit against him.

The judge will make up his mind after hearing only one side of the case, in secret.
Only one of more than 30 security certificates issued since the early '90s has been rejected. The Federal Court is being used as an administrative convenience to remove Zündel without having to go through a long judicial process.

Zündel is a bad man. This procedure is just as bad and should never be used again.

COLUMNIST FOR THE TORONTO SUN
ALSO OPPOSES ZUNDEL’S IMPRISONMENT

DICTATES OF FREEDOM

By Marianne Meed Ward,
Toronto Sun columnist
Toronto Sun,
January 25, 2004

HOLOCAUST denier Ernst Zündel will continue to "enjoy" the hospitality of the Metro West Detention Centre for the forseeable future. A judge ruled last week that he must remain behind bars until it's determined whether he's a threat to national security. If so, he could be deported to Germany.

Zündel has been in jail since last February [2003] under a special security certificate. No criminal charges have been brought against him. His supporters are having a field day with that, and I don't blame them. When we are willing to trade off personal freedoms (as in the freedom to be released or charged) for security, we're getting pretty close to -- dare I say it -- Nazi Germany, the regime that committed the very wrongs that Zündel denies.

How ironic. It's also ironic that Zündel and his lawyers are appealing to notions of justice that were patently absent to citizens in Hitler's Germany.

From a national security point of view, though, it may not matter where Zündel ends up. The concerns about him are based in part on the contents of a Web site Zündel ran. He could run the site from anywhere.

Besides, there are many people like Zündel in Canada with a lower profile (so they're still on the streets) but with views just as vile. I know, because every time I write about the Holocaust, or anything related to Jews, I hear from them. All their twisted theories about what did and didn't happen in those dark years of Hitler's Germany, about how many really perished, about whether there even were gas chambers, and about an ongoing global Jewish conspiracy.

The best defense against people like that is not banishment but education. Unless we know our history, we're much more susceptible to the distortions, twisted logic and outright lies of those who deny history for their own purposes.

THE TORONTO EYE OPPOSES
ZUNDEL’S IMPRISONMENT

Editorial,
The Toronto Eye,
May 9, 2004

Anti-Semite though he is, we'd never considered Zündel to be in the same category as Osama bin Laden. So imagine our surprise when we learned that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) had just issued Zündel a national security certificate, citing links to terrorism and incitement of violence.

In truth, we all know the things of which he's guilty: spreading hate, fear and prejudice. Terrorism isn't one of his crimes, and we all know that, too.

So declaring Zündel a terrorist now is not the result of any startling new information. It has to do with political pressure, and that's not just a guess on our part: on May 2, Citizenship and Immigration Minister Denis Coderre declared he would not allow anyone the opportunity to "make a mockery of our [refugee] system."

The new security certificate admits Zündel has "virtually no history of direct personal engagement in acts of serious violence." It labels him a terrorist partly because he "seeks to destroy the multicultural fabric and underpinnings of Canadian society." Citing opposition to official multiculturalism as a type of terrorism risks expanding the war on terror to include everyone to the right of Pierre Trudeau.

Anti-terrorism provisions should not be used as a catch-all solution. Misapplying terminology in this way damages its credibility, and undermines the efforts against real terrorism. It has also, of course, damaged the integrity of our refugee system. If the fault in this case lies with officials who weren't on the ball, let's see someone deal with them. If it's the system that's at fault, then let's see the federal government start fixing its shortcomings.

Our current conceptions of terrorism were formed in fear. It wasn't too hard to predict (as PEN Canada and other organizations did when the bill was debated) that the term could be used as an excuse for authoritarianism-- or that it could start us down a slippery slope into a not-too-distant dystopian future. It's too bad one of the precedents on that slippery slope happens to involve a man for whom most traditional supporters of civil liberties are unwilling to fight.

PROGRESSIVE WRITER (AND ANTI-RACIST ACTIVIST)
MARK HAND OPPOSES THE ZUNDEL IMPRISONMENT

“Canada deserves ridicule and censure for its absurd hate-speech laws. Further, its imprisonment of holocaust denier and white supremacist Ernst Zundel for ‘immigration’ reasons for the past year-and-a-half also should be criticized by anyone who believes people should have the right to free expression (Canada has not charged Zundel with any acts of violence), even if you disagree with their views. During the Red Scare in the U.S., thousands of anarchists and socialists were rounded up for their political beliefs and many were deported. Most Americans supported the draconian treatment of Goldman, Berkman, et al. due to their political beliefs.”

Mark Hand Fighting Fascism With Honesty Press Action
(www.pressaction.com),
September 28, 2004

Mark Hand, a frequent contributor to “Counterpunch” and “Z Magazine,” is the founder and editor of the website Press Action. Although vehemently opposed to Ernst Zundel’s views, he has frequently chided fellow progressives for turning a blind eye to the censorship and violence directed against Ernst Zundel, as in this letter to “Turning the Tide,” the online newsletter of People Against Racist Terror (the letter is undated, and can be found at www.prisonactivist.org/pubs/ttt/letters.html):

“The summer issue of ‘Turning the Tide’ was highly informative. Perhaps better than previous issues, it covered a wide range of topics with exhaustive reporting. With each issue, however, I find myself disagreeing with what I perceive as your simplistic analysis of certain topics, and this one is no exception.

“What I find particularly objectionable is your failure to condemn the fire attack on Ernst Zundel's office in Toronto, and your argument that the letter bomb was ‘ill-advised' only because it posed to great a threat to innocent parties. You go so far as to judge Zundel ‘guilty’ based on his political views, and mark him as a legitimate target for arson and bombing.

“There's nothing wrong with supporting peaceful protests against Zundel, based on your opposition to his political views. But to support the kind of violent attacks against him you reported in the summer issue leaves you wide open to charges of the utmost hypocrisy. It transforms the people who have been waging this campaign, and their supporters, into the type of characters they claim to be fighting. As far as I know, Zundel hasn't been charged with any of the same type of violent acts perpetrated by his opponents. If there was even the hint of his involvement in such activities, the Canadian government would surely jump at the chance to deny him legal resident status.

“Hitler's Germany was one of history's most vicious examples of statism because the Nazis tried to control all aspects of people's lives. They persecuted people not only for their religion or ethnic origin, but for their deviant ideas -- an unwillingness to conform to the edicts of the state. The Canadian activists apparently share similar views with the Nazis. they continue to support government sanctions against unlicensed speech and thought. Horrible violence is what made Hitler's Germany so evil. And it's violence by these so-called anti-fascists in Canada that puts them in the same category as the neo- Nazis who operate in today's Germany.”

Sincerely, Mark Hand
Arlington VA 22210

LEFTIST ANTIWAR NEWSLETTER, “AXIS OF LOGIC”
(www.axisoflogic.com), EXPLAINS TO ITS READERS
WHY THE ZUNDEL IMPRISONMENT IS WRONG

Axis Editorial Note: A few weeks ago, we began publishing news and commentary about the arrest and deportation of Ernst Zundel from the U.S. to Canada, his imprisonment there. Now we present his trial proceedings. When we began this series, we had more new subscribers to Axis of Logic than on any single issue since we opened this website. We have not had a single Axis reader "unsubscribe" because of these controversial reports - at least not to our knowledge.

We believe it is critical to report on the life, imprisonment and deportation of Mr. Zundel. The issue is freedom. Freedom to think, write and speak "outside the box" of what is deemed politically correct. To those who are not concerned about the government actions against Mr. Zundel, I ask: Are freedom of expression and freedom of thought only for those with whom you agree? Are these basic freedoms only for those whose opinions and views you find acceptable? If your answer is "yes" to those questions, I ask who is it that has the right to determine what is politically correct? Who is it that has the right to determine what is acceptable or unacceptable?

Almost certainly most of us would agree that it should be illegal to scream "Fire!" in a crowded cinema when there is no fire. But a special interest group - Zionists in this case, can have a person imprisoned and deported for reporting his findings and opinions on WWII, I ask how any of us can feel secure. You may categorically disagree with everything Ernst Zundel has ever said or wrote. But does that give you the right to imprison him? to deport him?

The hearing of my good friend and political activist, Amer Jubran took place last week. He too is under threat of deportation because he dares to express his views about the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli government. In my view, this is fascism, pure and simple. It cannot be tolerated in the "land of the free and home of the brave". It should not be tolerated in Canada or in any other country around the world.

I urge you to oppose the actions of the few well-moneyed and powerful who would have Ernst Zundel die in prison at the hands of the "thought police" whose stranglehold on free expression grows every day in this country.
Les Blough, Editor, Axis of Logic Newsletter (http://www.axisoflogic.com/cgi-bin/exec/view.pl?archive=3&num=936)

NON-OPINION PIECES ABOUT THE ZUNDEL CASE

FROM THE AP:
ZUNDEL ENTITLED TO RETURN TO THE U.S.
TO CHALLENGE HIS DEPORTATION

(Of course, the question is, will the Canadian government
respect the decision of the U.S. courts?)

ZÜNDEL ENTITLED TO CHALLENGE U.S. DEPORTATION

Associated Press
August 12, 2004
Knoxville, Tenn. -

Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel is entitled to a hearing to challenge his deportation to Canada, a federal appeals court says.

Mr. Zündel, 65, has been held in solitary confinement since [January 2003] last year in a detention centre in Toronto, where officials consider him a security threat and are trying to deport him to his native Germany.

A graphic artist and publisher, Mr. Zündel gained notoriety with a 1980 pamphlet questioning the Holocaust and with books bearing such titles as The Hitler We Loved and Why.

He lived in Canada for decades. In 2000, he moved to the United States on a temporary visa. He married Ingrid Rimland, a naturalized citizen from the former Soviet Union. They moved to Tennessee, opened an art gallery and maintained Mr. Zündel's Holocaust denier website.

In February, 2003, U.S. immigration agents arrested Mr. Zündel for overstaying his visa and for failing to follow through on his attempts to attain permanent residence here. U.S. District Judge James Jarvis refused to hear a petition then to stop his deportation. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled last week that Mr. Zündel is entitled to the hearing.

The Justice Department contends that he has already been deported, rendering his appeal moot. The appeals court said, however, that that was a matter for the U.S. District Court in Knoxville to decide.

Mr. Zündel faces hate crimes charges in Germany over his writings.

FROM THE TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

ERNST ZÜNDEL: CIVIL-RIGHTS CHAMPION?
Kirk Makin
Toronto Globe and Mail,
November 25, 2003

Ernst Zündel was framing a painting at his retirement home, high in the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee, when a van pulled into his driveway followed by three police cars. "It was a whole armada," he recalls. "I knew what was coming next."

The van was from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. "They put me up against my pickup truck, spread-eagled me, and said I was being arrested and deported. Within five minutes, I was gone."

That was Feb. 17, 2003. Since then, he has not seen his wife or his home. In fact, he has yet to get out of solitary confinement.

Mr. Zündel was whisked back to Canada, the country he had abandoned to escape the 20-year series of prosecutions that had made him its most recognized extreme right-winger. Canada, in turn, wants to whisk him back to Germany, where he faces at least five years in prison.

Ironically, the battle he is waging against that deportation could make the famed purveyor of Holocaust-denying, neo-Nazi material a champion of civil liberties.

Mr. Zündel is confined to a Toronto detention centre because the government is holding him on a national security certificate -- the controversial and Draconian procedure usually reserved for terrorist suspects.

Now, just as he once compelled Canada's courts to grant him freedom to express his views, he could again break constitutional ground. This spring, the Ontario Court of Appeal is to hear his bid under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to quash the certificate. Win or lose, its ruling will probably land in the Supreme Court of Canada, which could declare the certificate unconstitutional.

If that happens, he will be a mixed blessing to rights advocates. He is now 64 and into his second year in jail, but Mr. Zündel seems every bit as unrepentant and provocative as when he first captured public attention in the early 1980s.

"The Jewish community wants me on my knees," he says in an exclusive interview. "I am the last man standing who has not apologized. It would be the height of indignity for me to do that."

A security certificate is signed by two federal cabinet ministers who, based on secret intelligence, decide that an immigrant should be deported as a danger to Canadian citizens. Even the alleged spies and terrorists normally targeted this way are not permitted access to the precise allegations against them.

Of the 27 security certificates issued since 1991 -- just five since the 9/11 attack -- virtually all have involved suspected terrorists from such countries as Iran, Lebanon and Algeria. Why, then, use such an extreme measure against a Holocaust-denier?

"It is tragic that the whole Western world has deteriorated," Mr. Zündel says. "We are going to be living in Stalinist-time dictatorships."

HIS lawyer, Peter Lindsay, maintains that the case goes straight to the heart of Canada's response to terrorism. "Mr. Zündel lived here from 1958 to 2000 in a very public way. In all that time, he hasn't committed a single crime. He has been charged a number of times unsuccessfully for things he has said or pamphlets he has distributed, but never for an act of violence. He is not some sleeper agent skulking around in the shadows."

Slapping his client with a security certificate, Mr. Lindsay argues, is just the sort of abuse civil libertarians warned of after 9/11. "The problem is that this law doesn’t just get applied to Ernst Zündel. It gets applied to other people out on the fringes of our society. There is an old expression that hard cases make bad law. Well, there is no harder case than Ernst Zündel."

Although the government case relies heavily on accusations revealed only in secret to a judge, an unclassified "summary" compiled by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service accuses Mr. Zündel of being a dangerous preacher of anti-Semitic, white-supremacist hatred. Even if he doesn’t advocate violence, it reads, he is dangerous because he's seen as a guru by extremists who do embrace violence.

CSIC describes the white-supremacist movement as a network of groups with a common racist ideology. "Many followers are attracted by Zündel's messaging, his dedication to the cause and his personal charisma," according to the summary. "By his comportment as a leader and ideologue, the service believes Zündel intends serious violence to be a consequence of his influence."

To Mr. Zündel, this is guilt by association. How others interpret and apply his writing is not his business, he says: "I am not the policeman for the right." He admits to speaking at meetings attended by "headline-seekers," but he insists that he resents how their crude tactics marginalize his views.

"The one hallmark that has always earned me the title of being a coward in our circles is that I disdained the use of violence," he says. "I never joined any of these right-wing groups because they were politically impotent."

The inordinate secrecy of the security certificate procedure has left Mr. Lindsay ill-equipped to attack the CSIS allegations. He says he can only guess what facts, hearsay or falsehoods may pepper the classified government documents.

"There could be someone lying through their teeth in evidence that could be attacked and ripped to pieces. I believe in an adversarial system, where both sides can challenge the other side's evidence in an open forum. I don't care whether it is Ernst Zündel or anyone else; there should be one system of justice that works for everybody, including the marginalized and those no one else cares about."

Of course, the government isn't alone in considering the man a threat. "Ernst Zündel epitomizes and sanctions the worst form of Holocaust denial," contends Bernie Farber, a spokesman for the Canadian Jewish Congress.

"Once he had renounced his Canadian citizenship, which is how we see it, there was no need for us to welcome him back. We should not welcome a person whose life ambition it was to foment hatred."

Security certificates ought to be used sparingly, Mr. Farber concedes, but Mr. Zündel's status with violent neo-Nazis makes him a genuine security risk. "He provides the kind of support, succor and oxygen to those who do commit violent acts. Ernst Zündel is not a clown. He is a serious player in the neo-Nazi scene worldwide."

Mr. Zündel came to Canada in 1958 at the age of 19, but was never granted full citizenship. Soon after arriving, he fell under the influence of Adrian Arcand, the famed ultra-rightist in Quebec, and grew obsessed with his belief that Germans had been defamed by "propaganda" stories about their unspeakably brutal treatment of Jews.

"I realized I was a brainwashed young German," he testified last month before Mr. Justice Pierre Blais of the Federal Court of Canada. "It really troubled me and shook me up. . . . I was championing a lost cause. I did it for ethical reasons and for my father's generation, who could not defend themselves."

In 1968, he ran for the leadership of the federal Liberals, infuriating the party establishment. He finished far behind Pierre Trudeau, but nonetheless gained a valuable podium from which to espouse his views. He then moved to Toronto and almost died of cancer, but recovered to throw himself into his graphic-art business, attracting clients ranging from large corporations to Maclean's magazine. He also wrote, under a pseudonym, several books about unidentified flying objects to support publishing pro-Nazi, Holocaust-denial material to send around the world.

By the late 1980s, Mr. Zündel was attracting demonstrations of up to 3,000 anti-racists outside his home in downtown Toronto, receiving hate calls by the score and bombs in the mail. Over the years, he turned his home into a fortress with elaborate security devices, lighting and 24-hour camera surveillance. Even so, in 1995, an arsonist struck, causing $500,000 in damage to his home and that of a neighbor. Finally, in 2000, he ended his stay in Canada, heading south to join his wife in Tennessee.

Now, lodged in an isolation cell at the Metro West Detention Centre, he rarely sees anyone. He takes medication for a heart condition, bad circulation and serious dental problems, and is allowed just 10 minutes of exercise a day. His tiny cell has a cot, toilet and sink, but no toothbrush or towels. If he wants to write, he must perch on a stack of transcripts and use his sink as a desk.

"I do not speak for weeks sometimes," he says. "This is why my voice tends to give way in the courtroom. I'm not bitching, but this is Canada -- it's not Turkistan. I do think somebody is inflicting pain on me."

Mr. Zündel contends that he was turfed out of the United States because of a clandestine request from Canadian authorities, and that U.S. immigration authorities used as a their pretext a minor omission he had made in his paperwork, something that rarely causes a newcomer such grief.

Even so, the odds that he will stay in Canada are heavily stacked against him. His deportation will be carried out if Judge Blais finds that CSIS and the Solicitor-General acted "reasonably" when they issued the certificate. It is an extremely low legal threshold, and no appeal is possible.

Mr. Zündel says his great fear is that the secret evidence against him has been concocted. As a graphic artist, he says he knows just how easy it is to doctor a document or a photograph. "With redigitalization and retouching, anything can be created. They could have me making love to Golda Meir."

Even so, he insists that that he would rather spend his old age in a German prison cell than agree to cease his Holocaust-denying activities.

"For a lifetime, I have fought for equality for Germans to tell their side," he says. "I would be like an intellectual eunuch. People have directed hundreds of thousands of dollars -- millions, actually -- to my legal struggle. I owe these people a fierce fight."

"We are talking about an attempt to murder Ernst Zündel by manufacturing and mailing an explosive device. But he was never told about what happened, and we don't know if these people are still walking the streets or what happened.

"I can't believe this. If there are valid reasons, I want them reported to me."

ZUNDEL’S LEGAL TEAM EXPOSES THAT CSIS (CANADA’S DOMESTIC SPY AGENCY) KNOWINGLY ALLOWED A BOMB THAT WAS SENT TO ZUNDEL’S HOUSE TO REACH ITS DESTINATION (two articles)

ZUNDEL SUBPOENAS FORMER CSIS OPERATIVE
Defense wants to probe allegations agency knew
Holocaust denier was target of plot.

By Kirk Makin, Justice Reporter
Toronto Globe and Mail,
September 15, 2004

It isn't often that the accused catches the cop, but Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel managed the feat yesterday.

After a three-month legal chase, Mr. Zundel finally cornered an elusive ex-security services agent -- John Farrell -- long enough to subpoena him to Mr. Zundel's deportation hearing.

Mr. Zundel and his defense team believe the former Canadian Security Intelligence Service agent has vital information about a purported CSIS campaign against Mr. Zundel. They intend to question him about allegations that CSIS was aware that Mr. Zundel was the target of a bomb plot in the 1980s, but that the agency purposely failed to warn him.

However, first, they had to get close enough to Mr. Farrell to serve a subpoena.
At the height of their cat-and-mouse game last spring, a principal at a Toronto elementary school where Mr. Farrell now teaches allegedly grabbed defense lawyer Peter Lindsay in a bear hug as Mr. Farrell disappeared out a side door.

According to court documents, the Toronto Catholic District School Board later supplied a phone number and address for Mr. Farrell. However, the phone number was out of service and the address turned out to be a strip mall.

In late July, Mr. Justice Pierre Blais of the Federal Court of Canada issued a special "order for substitute service," permitting the school board itself to serve the subpoena on Mr. Farrell. When he showed up last week, it did so.

Judge Blais was taking no chances yesterday when Mr. Farrell appeared in court. After asking the ex-agent to identify himself, Judge Blais said: "The order of this court is that you shall stay until the disposition [of the legal motion to compel him to testify]."

The government is seeking to deport Mr. Zundel using a rarely used security certificate. It alleges that his Holocaust-denial activities in the past 30 years have inspired violent terrorists. Under the legal procedure, details of the CSIS allegations are withheld from Mr. Zundel's defense team.

In an attempt to batter CSIS's credibility, Mr. Lindsay has made much of a recent exposé of the agency -- Covert Entry -- written by journalist Andrew Mitrovica. In writing his book, Mr. Mitrovica relied heavily on information from Mr. Farrell.
The book includes passages that describe a powerful pipe bomb delivered to Mr. Zundel during a period when CSIS was methodically intercepting his mail. Suspicious, Mr. Zundel took it to the police, who detonated the explosive and reported that it could easily have killed him.

"Farrell is convinced that the package containing the pipe bomb delivered to Zundel's home was intercepted either by himself or Pilotte [another agent]," the book said. "This raises the possibility that the intelligence service was aware of the package's potentially lethal cargo before Zundel received it."

Mr. Farrell's lawyer -- John Norris -- argued yesterday that his client should not be compelled to testify because he has no "material" evidence to contribute to the hearing. Mr. Norris said any conclusions drawn in the excerpt are those of Mr. Mitrovica, not Mr. Farrell.

However, Judge Blais was cool to his arguments. Not only is the pipe-bomb issue material to the case, he said, but it is a very grave allegation that needs to be illuminated.

Judge Blais also gave short shrift to Mr. Norris's concerns about Mr. Farrell being forced to incriminate himself or break the Canada Evidence Act by revealing classified information. Mr. Farrell "opened the barn door" by collaborating with Mr. Mitrovica, Judge Blais observed.

Arguments over whether to quash Mr. Farrell's subpoena continue tomorrow.

CSIS INTERCEPTED ZUNDEL'S MAIL, EX-AGENT SAYS

By Kirk Makin, Justice Reporter
Toronto Globe and Mail,
September 17, 2004

Canadian Security Intelligence Service officials intercepted Ernst Zundel's mail and used commercial flights to send packages they were worried could have contained bombs to Ottawa for analysis, a former CSIS agent testified yesterday.

In compelled testimony at a deportation hearing for the Holocaust denier, ex-agent John Farrell said he warned his superiors several times that using commercial flights to send the packages was highly risky.

"You were personally aware of this?" asked Mr. Justice Pierre Blais of the Federal Court of Canada.

"Yes," said Mr. Farrell, 37.

"CSIS ignored you, putting the lives of Canadians at risk?" asked defense lawyer Peter Lindsay.

"Yes," Mr. Farrell said. "To the best of my knowledge."

Mr. Zundel did receive a package containing a pipe bomb during the period in which CSIS was monitoring his mail. He took it to police.

Mr. Lindsay grilled Mr. Farrell throughout the day about illegal mail opening and possible law breaking by CSIS. Mr. Farrell confirmed statements he made in a recent book - Covert Entry - that Mr. Zundel's mail was intercepted for several years.

However, Mr. Farrell distanced himself from some statements in the book that author Andrew Mitrovica attributed to him, including an opinion Mr. Farrell allegedly expressed that CSIS intentionally violated the law in its campaign against white supremacists.

"I didn't write that. And I didn't say that," Mr. Farrell testified.

However, Mr. Farrell conceded that in his view, CSIS's motto ought to be: "Lie, deny, and then act surprised."

Asked why he felt that way, Mr. Farrell said: "Because that was typical of what was going on in the service."

Mr. Lindsay hopes to expose CSIS as a rogue agency that will stop at nothing to attain its goals, which would taint the evidence it has assembled to justify deporting Mr. Zundel under a rarely used security certificate.

Under the security-certificate procedures, the evidence was presented in strict secrecy to Judge Blais. The defense must guess at what CSIS is alleging in its attempt to portray Mr. Zundel as dangerous to national security.

After 18 months of legal jousting, the hearing has increasingly taken on a surreal quality, its participants noticeably punchy. Yesterday, Mr. Farrell issued a sharp warning to Mr. Lindsay at one point not to be high-handed with him. Shortly afterward, Mr. Lindsay rebuked Judge Blais for ignoring Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence. Meanwhile, Judge Blais, a one-time solicitor-general of Canada with responsibility for CSIS, took turns upbraiding just about everyone.

Early in the day, he demanded that Mr. Farrell's lawyer, John Norris, move to a distant seat where he would be less inclined to make legal objections. He also chastised CSIS lawyer Murray Rodych for making baseless objections.

Mr. Lindsay, meanwhile, went after Mr. Rodych himself. "I see my friend, Mr. Rodych, is laughing again; snorting like a rat," Mr. Lindsay observed angrily.
Judge Blais also launched a tirade at Mr. Mitrovica, who was sitting in the back of the courtroom and apparently signaling his reaction to testimony. "You have a concern, Mr. Mitrovica, expressed with your body language?" the judge said sharply.

As Mr. Mitrovica began to defend himself, Judge Blais grew angrier. "You seem to laugh, to smile," he said. "I do care about managing the courtroom. It's not a show."

Prosecutors spent much of the day jumping up and down to object to questions, often on the grounds that responding to a question might jeopardize national security. Mr. Farrell was sent into the hallway so many times that Judge Blais apologized for the mileage he was putting on his shoes.

Mr. Zundel shook his head silently several times and stared at the courtroom clock.

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