Here's another one of those spunky newsgroup fireworks, useful for my newcomers who wonder what the Zundel dust is really all about.
Prelude verbal rockets between (I believe) McFeenstein - a nickname :) - and Slade) -
McFeenstein:
Zundel has been up on charges for breaking Canada's free speech laws on and off for almost 17 years. It would be very unusual for a person up on charges to be traveling freely about the world.
Slade:
When Zündel traveled, it was between the recurrent trials.
McFeenstein:
He has traveled extensively. He was also protected by the Canadian legislation, as affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada.
Slade:
*Protected* by the law he was being prosecuted under??
McFeenstein:
Yes. Read up on the *the appeal system* sometime and it may dawn on you. Although I'm not betting a lot on it.
Main sortie, courtesy of Slade:
No dawn in that statement, McFeestein. There's midnight between your ears.
The "false news" law was left over from the medieval England law, "De Scandalis Magnatum", whereby people could be criminally prosecuted for speaking at variance with the official truth. It was rescinded in England in 1888, but when Canada cloned its criminal code from Britain in 1892, somehow this "false news" law was copied to the Canadian books.
Prosecutions under this holdover from feudal times have been extremely rare. In 1907, a merchant in Alberta of American origin was indicted for claiming in an advertisement that Canada was unfriendly to his former countrymen. That was obviously a wicked lie, the jury reasoned, and convicted him. In 1951 and 1970, prosecutions under Section 177 (then Section 166) resulted in acquittals.
But when the Ruling class of Canada needed something to hit Zundel with, there it was, still on the books.
The "false news" which Zundel was charged with publishing was a 28-page revisionist booklet called "Did Six Million Really Die?" by an Englishman, Richard Verrall, under the pen name of Richard E. Harwood. It first appeared in Britain in 1974 and subsequently enjoyed a large underground circulation and numerous translations. Zundel's Canadian edition added four pages of introductory and concluding remarks by himself.
The Harwood pamphlet is an early and hastily written revisionist work containing a number of fairly obvious mistakes. To Sabina Citron, an activist with the "Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association," bringing a private complaint against it as "false news," it seemed like the surest means of prevailing against Zundel.
Bringing charges under the "group hatred" act requires the consent of the provincial attorney general, which was not forthcoming, quite possibly because Harwood contains nothing "hateful". Citron brought her private complaint against Zundel on November 18, 1983. The province of Ontario, under constant prodding by Jewish groups, later took over the case.
What followed, in early 1985, was widely called the Great Holocaust Trial. Though Zundel was convicted and sentenced to 15 months in prison, he proclaimed a victory of sorts, which the Canadian media grudgingly conceded.
His 22 defense witnesses, including half a dozen leading revisionists, succeeded in bringing scholarly criticism of the Holocaust to a daily audience of millions. Canada's reporters and their editors and publishers, bound by traditional standards of fairness and legal restrictions on coverage of a trial in progress, described the revisionist testimony each day with relative even-handedness.
When the trial finally ended, Canadian Jews erupted with volleys of scathing abuse for the nation's news media. They had, it was said, given "a parade of kooks from around the world" a serious hearing they did not deserve.
There was, of course, no "protection" WITHIN the law as McFeestein would have readers believe. There was only this provision to enable the upper classes to imprison lower class trouble makers if they "abused" their freedom of speech by saying something offensive to the powers of prosecution.
When the Canadian Supreme Court struck down the "false news" law in Canada, they did so from outside the law, not from a provision of the law itself. To say the law "protected" Zundel is as erroneous as asserting that a bullet saves a man's life when it is stopped by an armored vest. The law itself was squashed by the Supreme Court and consigned to the footnotes of history, where it belongs.
Meanwhile, the prosecution of Zundel brought exactly the opposite of its intended consequences. Not only did Zundel go free, millions of people came to hear of revisionism for the first time.
Instead of suppressing the quite modest circulation of that little booklet, millions heard of revisionism through the mass media as the events of the trial unfolded.
And there was yet a further consequence of this trial that is rocking the foundations of Canadian society: The organizations that have pretended for the last half-century to be based on fellowship, humanitarianism, and advocacy for a just society are being exposed as quite the opposite of their popular image.
The Anti-Defamation Leage of B'Nai Brith, the Canadian Jewish Congress, and other official Jewish organizations are exposing themselves as viciously partisan in protecting their own. Rather than champions of free speech and human liberties, as they have positioned themselves for decades, it is becoming more and more apparent that they are involved in a multi-billion dollar hoax.
Pushing more and more draconian legislation in Canada, they fight vigorously to prevent an open court hearing on the issues. They are now prosecuting Zundel on the basis of a "Hate speech" law, as revised in July of 1998.
The Canadian Human Rights Commission has recently ruled that "hate speech" is anything that makes the subject feel bad, regardless of whether the words spoken are true. Though the CHRC is on slender ground with this ruling under the current law, the steering committees for Canadian legislation have gone back to work and revised the law again, this time embodying within the statute the principle that truth is not a defense.
They have also specifically targeted the Internet by providing for search and confiscation of privately owned computer hard drives that contain "hate speech".
The Canadian Jewish Congress has filed briefs with the Canadian federal courts to prevent the courts from examining the legality of the Canadian Human Rights Commission hate speech hearings. When you think about it, it seems the courts would be competent to examine that issue in the light of current law, doesn't it? After all, the judges have law degrees, some familiarity with Canadian laws, and a working knowledge of what gives and what doesn't in legal proceedings.
Not to the CJC. Quite obviously, the last thing they want for Zundel is a fair trial.
Sort of sad, isn't it? You think of the ADL, you probably think of "tough but fair". But if ever that was the case, not no more. The world must pity forever the Jews who lost their property or their lives in the Second Great War of Europe, but the suffering of non-Jews, even at the hands of Jewish organizations, is beneath consideration. <end>
Thought for the Day:
"Holocaust Revisionism is a door opening wide to all the suppressed issues of our time."
(Letter to the Editor, Instauration)