Zundelsite - Nizkor Exchange - Part I

Yesterday, September 1, 1995, we received an e-mail message we view with surprise and ambivalence. In view of the importance we attach to this message, we want to conduct our communication with the Nizkor Project people in public.

This is the communique we received. We post it here in full. It is followed by our reply.

Jamie McCarthy of Nizkor writes:

Mr. Zuendel,

My name is Jamie McCarthy. I am co-webmaster of the Nizkor web site, http://www.almanac.bc.ca/. As I imagine you know by now, Nizkor is dedicated to the refutation of the nonsense that is Holocaust-denial.

We have a collection of links to other sites on the web that are related to the Holocaust and its denial, and among them, of course, yours. See http://www.almanac.bc.ca/other-sites/denial-promotion.html.

You claim that you are interested in helping people discover the truth (in your comment about truth vs. coercion, at the bottom of each page on your site). A page of yours with a piece by Bradley Smith, http://www.webcom.com/~ezundel/english/worldwide.001.html, indicates that you are in favor of "a free marketplace of ideas." Your piece by Mark Weber, http://www.webcom.com/~ezundel/english/incorrect.006.html, proclaims in 24-point type, "Let Both Sides Be Heard."

I agree completely, Mr. Zuendel -- I am opposed to "gag laws" against Holocaust-denial or any other offensive type of speech, and I am very much in favor of the "free marketplace of ideas." That is why, on the site I co-webmaster, I have provided links to everything I could find on the net related to the Holocaust and its denial, whether I agree with it or not.

The question, Mr. Zuendel, is: are you?

I propose a test case. I am currently preparing a response to the lie-filled propaganda which the IHR calls "66 Questions and Answers on the Holocaust." You make this available on your site at http://www.webcom.com/~ezundel/english/incorrect.004.html. When I finish editing the responses, I will include links to your web page, so that people can see not only what you have to say about it, in your own words, but also can jump back to your table of contents and look around to see what else you are saying.

I would like your pledge, Mr. Zuendel, that when the response I'm editing is complete, you will do the same for me -- that you will put a link on your "66 Questions and Answers" page to the page on the Nizkor site that deals with those questions and answers.

Given that you claim, over and over, that "truth has no need of coercion," I trust that you will not insult your readers' intelligence by hiding from them an alternative viewpoint on those 66 Q&A.

Thank you. --

Jamie McCarthy
jamie@voyager.net jrm0@aol.com

Ernst Zündel responds:

Thank you kindly for your offer to make the Internet the open forum on which we can discuss, in a mature and civilized fashion, what is of such concern to all of us - namely what did or did not happen during what is, in our opinion, most inappropriately called "The Holocaust."

We want to get away from the mudslinging and settle down to science and reason - as I am sure you do. In point of fact, we should have done this years ago - before the Canadian Holocaust Trials. We would have spared Canada a painful, acrimonious debate and the Canadian tax payers millions of dollars because they had to pay to have me prosecuted at the behest of Jewish individuals. Had we been able then to have an open debate, maybe we would have laid some ghosts to rest. At least that was my hope.

I offered this public debate on the Holocaust in the early 1980s to the Canadian Jewish community, even inviting in writing well-known personalities like Dr. Morton Shulman and broadcaster Barbara Frum (both Jewish) to chair such a symposium. I offered a university setting and publicly stated, as an alternate option, that I would pay half of the rent for Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto's famous sports arena, if the other side paid half for this or a similar locale. I even enlisted the Chief of Police and was promised the assistance of the Police Ethnic Squad who broached the idea to Jewish community leaders - who promptly rejected the offer of a dialogue.

In other words - no takers!

Has this now changed? We would be overjoyed if your offer were genuine and sanctioned by the people who support the Nizkor Project. Were this the case, then serious dialogue could begin. Your offer is precisely what we have been hoping for - to be able to put our information out in the open for the entire world to see and to inspect. Intelligent people can judge for themselves and should not be denied what we consider valid and respectable forensic, historical, scientific and anecdotal data gathered world-wide by experts and ordinary citizens alike refuting serious charges routinely made - such as the extermination of races by gassing.

The information you present has been available for fifty years, broadcast from every roof top and officially rubber-stamped as "truth" and "fact" and "sanctified" by the Nuremberg Trials - proceedings that were described by the American Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, Judge Harlan Fisk Stone, at the time of these trials, as "a high grade lynching party" and a "sanctimonious fraud."

In the wake of half a century of unrelieved emotional abuse about what Germans and their allies allegedly did, we have not been allowed an appropriate defense. We have been harassed, beaten, bombed, fire-bombed, criminally charged, convicted, imprisoned, judicially gagged - and some of our fellow revisionists were even murdered! [See Victims of Zion page]- for trying to explain and to defend our view of our people's history. We, the victims of this persecution, agree that this must stop - if freedom of speech is to be preserved in what is left of the rest of the so-called "Free World."

As a matter of fact, we were discussing the very offer you have made to us yesterday with some of our leading revisionists and scholars just recently - how we could cross-link with you and get you to agree to cross-link with us so that both sides could be heard equally. Are you sure you have checked out this idea with your superiors? It has been our experience in the past that lower echelon people who are ". . . believers in the Holocaust" are just as eager as we are to evaluate both sides of the issue, but that, in the past, players "behind the scenes" who have hidden agendas and political goals would not agree to a free and open debate.

Please give us a couple of weeks so we can consult with other revisionists, scholars, our technical people and with our attorneys. We will be back with a response that will be fair to all.

Sincerely,

Ernst Zündel