One ZGram reader decided to walk us down memory line. He prefaced the Globe and Mail article below by writing:
"There's no doubt that since the CHRC Tribunal struck the Reva Devins roadblock last week--and is likely to strike similar roadblocks in the near future - the Jewish community in Toronto and elsewhere in Canada will be pausing to consider whether "getting" Zundel is beginning to be worth it."
Meanwhile, here's a very important newspaper article that came out in Feb. 28, 1985, (!) containing several telltale observations. Titled "Many angered by decision to prosecute: Jewish community torn by Zundel trial" and written by Kirk Makin, my readers are now invited to draw sage parallels to what happened right after one of the first larger Holocaust Busting milestones, the First Great Holocaust Trial.
Here goes:
Makin: While the jury deliberates in the trial of Ernst Zundel, it may take considerably longer for a verdict to be reached in the divided Jewish community.
Interviews held during the Zundel trial with both high- and low-profile members of the community indicate a large proportion viewed the trial as a risk and a moral obscenity that ought never to have occurred. In short, many consider the charges to have been hasty and foolish. There is considerable anger against those who brought the case to trial."
Ingrid: Through her "hate Zundel"-motivated action, Sabina Citron catapulted Ernst Zundel onto the front pages of every major Canadian paper and repeatedly into the prime time evening news for almost two decades. She, more than anybody else, has put Revisionism on the global map. Viva Citron! we say.
Makin: Supporters of the prosecution, on the other hand, have little time for the faint-of-heart.
The prime shrinking violets are the Jewish community leaders, says Sabina Citron, head of the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association, the group that spawned the charges. "We even have some bad leaders. I don't even consider them leaders. This is Nazi hate propaganda and we don't have to tolerate it."
Ingrid: Sabina Citron never grasped the wisdom of giving Ernst the Silent Treatment the other leaders had succeeded at before 1981. Sabina's eagerness allowed Ernst to break through the curtain of silence - and renew and invigorate his campaign for truth in history, using the trials as his media megaphone.
Makin: The people who are afraid to expose Mr. Zundel have the "galut" mentality, she said, using a Hebrew term applied to Jews who blindly comply with any demand or bow to persecution.
Ingrid: Nobody persecuted Jews in Canada! Nobody persecutes them today. Jews like Sabina Citron, B'nai Brith and others have persecuted Gentiles like Imre Finta, Ernst Zundel, Jim Keegstra and Doug Collins! Who's persecuting whom?
Makin: Helen Smolack, another association member, likens the revisionists--those who call the Holocaust a hoax--to rats nibbling and gnawing at a door. Until they are exposed to bright sunlight, she said with relish, they won't stop: they just get fatter. No one exposed Hitler until it was too late.
Ingrid: Now imagine the Holocaust Promotion Lobby howl that would be sent to heaven if ***we*** said Jews were rats!
Makin: Rabbi Gunther Plaut, of Toronto's Holy Blossom Temple, does not share their enthusiasm for a public confrontation with the revisionists. "I'm unhappy with the fact he (Mr. Zundel) has been afforded a platform and his view given the legitimacy of a hearing in court," he said in an interview.
"I think it was an error, regardless of how it comes out. Even if the jury convicts, I'm not happy. The pseudo-legitimacy they have been given is very harmful."
Ingrid: The wily Rabbi Plaut was not alone in this assessment. The Canadian Jewish News reported in an interview with Elie Wiesel that Wiesel, too, was against the persecution of Ernst Zundel and other Revisionists. Wiesel warned that courtrooms were not a good forum to debate the Holocaust. Some people wouldn't listen. Some people will not listen now.
Makin: Whereas revisionist literature was restricted in the past to small number of supporters and involuntary recipients, the publicity the movement has received may whet the appetite of new recruits, he said.
Ellen Kachuck, of Toronto's branch of the B'nai B'rith, said virtually everyone she has spoken to, both Jew and Gentile, was against the prosecution. "The anguish it caused has been tremendous. ... I think it was a much messier affair than we expected it to be in terms of things coming out we didn't want."
Ingrid: According to a government-funded study, supported by B'nai Brith and others, published in a book called "Hate on Trial," (Mosaic Press) the massive media coverage and impact Zundel had on Canada was awesome and is described and analyzed in detail. Phenomenal!
Makin: Fighting for the principle of freedom of speech was the last thing on the mind of the Zundel squad, Ms. Kachuk said. "My feeling is that anybody going to such trouble to discredit the Holocaust has to be motivated by something peculiar. And that peculiarity is anti-Semitism."
Ingrid: Balderdash and wishful thinking!
Makin: Doubtless, the trial widened the split between the two groups in the community. Those who prompted the prosecution have, in fact, been "ostracized" by the mainstream of the Jewish community, Ms. Kachuk said.
But it also forced the factions to close ranks against their tormentors--the revisionists who have committed what most Jews see as the indescribable insult of claiming their friends and relatives were not, after all, exterminated.
Ingrid: There is an ever-widening rift in Jewish communities the world over in how to cope with the snowballing, ever-expanding Revisionist movement. Check any search engines on the Internet for names or phrases like "Zundel", "Leuchter", "gas chambers" or "Revisionism". The genie is out of the bottle!
Makin: "You might disagree, but once the conflict has broken out, you have no choice but to be on the same side," said one Jewish community spokesman who asked not to be named.
Ingrid: Well, then - they will be shackled together as their "unsinkable" make-believe Titanic sinks below the waves after having struck ever more Revisionist icebergs!
Makin: An air of unreality pervaded Courtroom No. 3 of the University Avenue courthouse as witnesses were cross-examined - often harshly - about whether lampshades were made from human skin and whether inmates of Auschwitz held happy ballroom dances. One woman was taken from the courtroom with heart palpitations.
Ingrid: They never expected to be questioned on their fanciful tales, as they were by a competent defence lawyer who defended a tenacious truthsayer rather than a soothsayer, as the media tried hard to make fools believe. Their witness testimony proved so embarrassing to the prosecution that ***not a single survivor was asked to give testimony*** for the government in the subsequent Zundel Trial # 2! Dennis Urstein called the prosecution and even volunteered survivor testimony, but his stories were so ludicrous he was never called back to testify in the Zundel Trial in 1988!
Makin: The feelings of most Jews were perhaps best summed up in a passionate outburst by Auschwitz survivor Dennis Urstein, who told defence lawyer Douglas Christie:
"I'm very mad I have to go through this whole thing again. I say this to you as a human being, because that's what you are..."
With that his voice trailed off; he never finished the sentence. The inescapable impression was that Mr. Urstein was suddenly unsure whether he really *was* dealing with human beings.
Ingrid: Christie asked Urstein to start giving the names of the more than one hundred relatives he claimed to have lost in the Holocaust - he ran out of names before he had reached ten!
Makin: "It's an offence to their humanity," Ms. Kachuk said. "They (the revisionists) are demanding a strange kind of scientific proof for something that can't be proved scientifically."
Ingrid: The Holocaust claims by Holocaust Lobbyists and survivors have been debunked in forensic and scientific studies and evaluations from Fred Leuchter to Germar Rudolf to Lueftl and others. Science does not suspend its laws for liars and racketeers.
Makin: Mrs. Citron, an Auschwitz survivor, and Mrs. Smolack say they were under no illusions that the trial would be painless or uncontroversial.
There are regrets, they said. prime among them are the ordeal trust on their witnesses and the fact that playing the extermination "numbers game" with the revisionists almost trivialized the other forms of suffering.
"it wasn't just the killing," Mrs. Citron said. "A Jew had no right to even stand in a bread line. But they want us to concentrate on the numbers game. Does it make it less of genocide if it was several hundred thousand?"
Ingrid: Even Sabina Citron could not escape the impact of the Zundel witnesses testimony. Obviously it ***does*** matter if there were six million or only several hundred thousand. It means that 5.5 million, more or less, lied and benefited from sympathy and restitution in the billions of dollars they did not deserve, yet accepted callously. That is spelled FRAUD!
Makin: They expected, to some degree, there would be anger in the community. But Mrs. Citron maintains that a large number of Toronto's 130,000 Jews are behind the association's action.
If the Crown wins, Mrs. Smolack predicted during the trial, the doubting Thomases will be talking as if they had been supporters all along. And if the Crown loses? "Then I guess they will go running back into their little rabbit holes."
Ingrid: The CHR Association had at most a few hundred members when the trials started, hardly a representative number or cross section of the Jewish community in Canada. The court cases initiated by Sabina Citron have backfired in every action she has ever brought against Zundel. We may expect more, based on a decade's worth of history.
Makin: Mrs. Smolack said the association used to be part of the Canadian Jewish Congress but was forced to secede because of the discomfort caused by its activist stance.
The community leaders ("a self-perpetuating group hanging on for dear life') were hoping the revisionists would just go away, Mrs. Citron said. The showdown came in 1978, when the CJC leaders ordered the activists to cool down or leave, she says. They left.
Ingrid: The Leuchter Report, a direct result of Sabina Citron's and her fellow travelers' actions, exists today in 15 languages and has been distributed, one might estimate, in the millions, many copies pirated by eager dissidents from Russia to South Africa. Revisionism didn't go away. It will not go away.
Makin: The women now feel vindicated. The number of Zundel supporters who showed up for the trial put the lie to all those who claim they are a lunatic fringe that could only fill a phone booth with their supporters, Mrs. Citron said.
Supporters of the prosecution argue that a case such as Mr. Zundel's was inevitable sooner or later, so it was better to take the bitter medicine while survivors of the Holocaust were still alive to testify.
Ingrid: Wow! What logic! The greatest embarrassment have been the fanciful tales of the "survivors" - now recorded for the world to see. Some bitter medicine - for whom?
Makin: Crown counsel Peter Griffiths acknowledged in an interview that Mr. Zundel's people craved the publicity of a trial, "but I'm personally not convinced that is a strong enough reason not to prosecute people for promoting hate, whether it's against Jews, Pakistanis or others. It is fundamental to the society that all groups be protected."
Ingrid: For the umpteenth time: Ernst Zundel was NOT - repeat, NOT! - on trial for "spreading hate". He was never tried under the hate law. Crown Counsel Peter Griffiths knew that! Crown Counsel Peter Griffiths lied - knowingly!
Makin: David Humphrey, a Toronto lawyer who sometimes acts for the (Canadian Holocaust Remembrance A)ssociation, said something had to be done about Mr. Zundel, but the defendant couldn't help but win in the end.
"Of course, he's won. If he gets a year in jail, he's won. He got international press. His name is a household word. He has won to the subculture who thinks he has won, but to right-thinking people, he's lost."
Ingrid: He won. His victory was legal and moral. The Supreme Court of Canada struck down the False News Law because it threatened the Free Speech Provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Free Speech did matter after all - at least in 1992.
Thought for the Day:
"Perhaps you have been in Canada too long to understand how a Constitutional government works."
(A quote from a discussion on the Fight Censorship list)