After the January 1st Open Letter sent to the Zundelsite by Jamie McCarthy,
we decided that the time had come to go ahead with the debate.
Toward that end, we notified the Simon Wiesenthal Center on January 8th.
On January 10th, the New York Times ran an article calling for censorship.
by mid-January, the Nizkor people insisted that they had never talked of
a debate and were merely interested in "linking."
The text below covers some of the details and shows what unleashed the
Cyberspace standoff.
Here it is:
We put up this page to document that we have made every effort to secure
the cooperation of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in our attemps to rebut
the existing, erroneous image the world knows as the "Holocaust."
We purposely call it "rebuttal" although it was formerly known
as "debate." The Nizkor people choose to call it "linking."
We have our documents, and they have theirs. We choose our titles; they
choose theirs. The titles do not matter; the only thing that matters is
the evidence.
We ask the world-wide Internet community to inspect both sides and decide
for themselves who has the better evidence pertaining to what did and DID
NOT happen under Adolf Hitler's leadership in 1933-1945 and later in the
Nuremberg Trials and other "war crimes" trials.
Toward that effort we secured what we believed was genuine, albeit contemptuous,
"cooperation" from the Nizkor people with several back-and-forth
communiques. We believed we were getting somewhere.
While we stood poised at the cusp of a "first" - a lengthy document
had been prepared by Nizkor - and we were getting ready to start putting
up our rebuttal to their rebuttal, massive Internet censorship in Germany
broke out, first under the guise of restricting "pornography"
but soon with a clear focus on none other than Ernst Zündel and his
Zundelsite.
Below are two letters we wrote to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, informing
them of our intent and asking them for both copyright release and participation
in media:
January 5, 1996 (faxed January 8, 1996)
To: webmaster@wiesenthal.com
or: To whom it may concern:
9760 West Pico Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90035
Re: Permission to quote from Website
As you may already know, the Nizkor Project and the Zundelsite are involved
in a "historical first" - a world-wide electronic debate about
what did and did not happen in Auschwitz and other concentration camps
where people are claimed to have been murdered by Germans during World
War II in genocidal fashion.
The Revisionist claim, as many people know, is three-fold:
Some of our readers have alerted us to your 13-point rebuttal to these
points. (Your Website at http://www.wiesenthal.com/) We would like to write
a rebuttal to your rebuttal, but we noticed that the page carries a copyright.
May we use your material without running into copyright infringement? Also,
in fairness to both sides pertaining to the many murky issues which need
to be cleared up, would you do as Nizkor and the Zundelsite have already
done - link document-to-document so that fair-minded people can inspect
and weigh both sides of this very painful issue?
Anticipating your response, I am
Sincerely Yours,
Ernst Zündel
January 12, 1996
Rabbi Cooper
The Simon Wiesenthal Center
9760 West Pico Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90035
Re: 1) Permission to quote from your web site 2) Media interviews
Dear Rabbi Cooper:
I understand from a New York Times front page article (Jan. 10, 1996) that
you wish to censor access to the Internet by using your enormous influence
to persuade servers and providers as well as university presidents to act
as screeners of content of material transmitted. As you well know, not
many people share that view. For many years, I have been a spokesman for
an ethnic group to whom freedom of unfettered expression is very dear indeed.
In my capacity as broadcaster and host of "Another Voice of Freedom,"
I would like to do a radio interview with you (or with Rick Eaton, if you
wish) by phone next Tuesday, January 16, between 1-3 p.m. EST (10 AM -
1 PM Pacific Time). Would you please contact me by phone or fax so that
we may coordinate the time best suited for you?
I further understand that you will be in Ottawa in the 19th of of this
month. I would like to bring my crew and do a television interview with
you in Ottawa in the morning, possibly after you have finished your appearance
on Newsworld. This interview would appear on our weekly satellite "Another
Voice of Freedom" TV show the following week. This satellite television
show is aired from Mexico to the North Pole and from Hawaii to the Carribean.
Time available would be approximately 20 minutes. Should you have scheduling
problems, I would be more than willing to accommodate you time-wise. Frankly,
I think the world is dying to hear why you would want to censor people
- me, for example. I would be more than happy to let you state your view
point uncensored on my program. You may say anything you wish.
I might also add that we compress our radio programs (and soon our television
programs) and make them available to a global audience via our World Wide
Web site, the Zundelsite. This means that, theoretically, you could reach
up to million Internet viewers and listeners to share your point of view.
Finally, I would like to repeat my request for permission to waive your
copyright on a post on your web site so that we may reply on ours on a
matter that has caused great grief to millions of people world-wide - not
only Jewish people but also German people. I faxed you a letter, dated
January 5, 1996 on January 8th, requesting permission to put up on our
web site your 13 arguments rebutting the Revisionists.
We would like to put up our rebuttal, point by point, to your rebuttal,
which we will cite in full. Would you please be so kind as to reply to
us? As stated in our first request, we have already made similar arrangements
with the Nizkor site, who have gone to great lengths to put up a 175 page
rebuttal to a two-page, very popular summary Revisionist pamplet, known
as the "66 Questions and Answers on the Holocaust." The Nizkor
site, which is apparently, at least in part, funded by a British Columbia
area synagogue's free will donations, is linked to our Zundelsite. Both
sides consider this an honest start - given the acrimonious nature of the
subject matter we wish to put to public scrutiny with your cooperation.
I want to repeat that we are willing to link to your site on a reciprocal
basis on the same terms and conditions we have withNizkor. May we please
hear from you?
Sincerely,
Ernst Zündel
President, Samisdat
When no responses were received, Ernst Zündel called the Simon Wiesenthal Center and spoke to the Assistant Public Relations person, who assured him that a Mrs. Shapiro, Chief of Public Relations, would get back to him re radio and TV tapings. Nobody ever called back.
What followed next was the blocking of 1,500 sites on our server, Web Communications in Santa Cruz, California - which, in turn, resulted in the Zündel Mirrors, an event that is now part of pioneering electronic history.
Whether or not we remain on the Net is still an open question. Today, January 31, 1996, we are putting up Rebuttal #1. We don't know what tomorrow will bring, but we expect further censorship.