In September of 1992 Ernst Zundel laid a complaint with the Ontario Provincial Police Hate Literature Section in Ontario against Elie Wiesel for his book _Legends_of_Our_Time_ published by Schocken Books in New York. Ernst Zundel had purchased the book at the World's Biggest Bookstore in Toronto.
In the book Wiesel wrote his, by now, infamous paragraph about the Jewish obligation to hate Germans. Please note he wrote of "Germans", not "Nazis", the latter being universally reviled, demonized and systematically made "objects" to be hated!
You find that paragraph on page 142:
"There is a time to love and a time to hate; whoever does not hate when he should does not deserve to love when he should, does not deserve to love when he is able. Perhaps, had we learned more during the years of ordeal, fate itself would have taken fright. The Germans did their best to teach us, but we were poor pupils in the discipline of hate. Yet today, even having been deserted by my hate during that fleeting visit to Germany, I cry out with all my heart against silence. ***Every Jew, somewhere in his being, should set apart a zone of hate - healthy, virile hate - for what the German personifies and for what persists in the German***. (emphasis added) To do otherwise would be a betrayal of the dead."
In interviews with Canadian papers and radio, Zundel stated, "We want to test now whether the Hate Laws of Canada are only always applied against people like myself, who merely criticize Jewish actions or behavior, or also against Jews who advocate outright hate against Germans.
"I have never before gone after anybody through the courts but now I will. If the Canadian Jewish Congress . . . with all their lawyers, wants to hound me, well then, by God! the German and the Austrian community are going to fight back."
Zundel stated he intended to ask immigration authorities to ban Wiesel from entering Canada in the future - the same way Canada had banned others, and would ban David Irving, the British historian and eminent author - ***not*** for what he had actually said, but for what he ***might*** say in Canada!
(By the way, that is the reason why I don't take speaking engagements in Canada. I want to travel there!)
The Canadian Jewish Congress spokesman, Bernie Farber, stated in response to Zundel's action that, "The charges are so patently ridiculous that it doesn't warrant any further comment."
Even ten years before that Zundel action, back in 1980, according to a reminiscent letter from one of my cyber friends -
". . . when revisionism was first knocking on the rock-loaded heads of the mandarins of consensus reality, the media treatment accorded revisionists was beyond contempt. I recall magazine articles wherein the late Lucy Dawidowicz characterized Prof. Arthur Butz as a computer hacker who was using his tricks to prove that 'the concentration camps never happened.'
"Space-case Elie Wiesel was taking the same tack and that was about the extent of the color commentary: we were kooks, creeps and cutthroats.
"Such attitudes are still fomented in the media, especially on television, where the brain is easily lulled into a hypnotic state of infantilism suitable for pumping in sani-flush commercials and holohoax piety.
"But on Saturday, June 26, 1999, the Jewish-owned N.Y. Times, America's 'newspaper of record,' published a feature piece on contrarian historian David Irving, complete with a photo of him at his vacation home in Florida.
"It is delicious to savor the grudging respect the Times felt constrained to pay this heavy hitter in the field of the Second World War and international sleuthing.
"Is the Times beginning to intuit that Revisionism is the wave of the future?!"
Not only the Times. Whole countries are going ballistic.
Take just what's happening in Canada, according to the June 1999 Free Speech Monitor:
Hate Laws: Ont. A.G. Opposes "Unfettered Freedom"
Kenneth H.W. Hilborn, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Western Ontario, wrote to the Ontario Attorney General's Department in February to question proposals for changes in Canada's hate laws apparently agreed upon last November by all 10 provincial attorneys-general.
On May 11, Prof. Hilborn received a revealing response from Murray Segal, Assistant Deputy Attorney-General of Ontario. The tone is slippery and disturbing: such changes aren't meant for real historians like you; they're directed at people who use history and have an axe to grind. Segal also seems to wonder whether truth should be a defence. He said, in part:
"I understand and appreciate the concerns you have raised in your letter about the value of unfettered freedom of expression in the area of historical research. I recognize your point that reasonable historians will disagree about the meaning, interpretation or even the existence of historical events and that, on occasion, they may even take on a political dimension. However, it is also important to recognize that the Supreme Court of Canada, in the judgments of The Queen v. Keegstra and The Queen v. Andrews and Smith, ruled that unfettered freedom of expression is not completely desirable in Canadian society. Some expression in harmful to the values of tolerance and equality and, as such, there can be legitimate limits to expression. One area where expression can be limited is when it is aimed at promoting hatred against an identifiable group.
I would point out that, in the judgment given by [Mr. Justice] Dickson, for the majority in Keegstra, the Court questioned the need for a defence of truth. If the aim is to prevent the harm associated with promotion of hatred, what difference does it make to that harm whether the statements made where [sic] true? The Court stated that excusing a person who intentionally promotes hatred through the communication of truthful statements may be a recognition by Parliament of the importance attributed to truth in Canadian society, but it is not required under the Canadian Charter of Rights as necessary to justify the limit to expression created by the offence of willfully promoting hatred. As such, according the majority judgment in Keegstra, the defence of truth could be removed or modified.
Nevertheless, I can assure you that the Ontario officials who are participating in the federal/provincial consultation on possible reform of hate crimes give the value of freedom of expression very high regard. ... I can also assure you that ... Ontario does not support the idea of an outright repeal of the defence of truth."
However, he continued, there is "an underlying problem that officials are grappling with: the distinction between, on the one hand, those carrying out legitimate historical work and, on the other, those using 'history' as a vehicle to give legitimacy to their ultimate and underlying objective, which is to promote hatred against an identifiable group in Canada."
(Courtesy of the CANADIAN FREE SPEECH MONITOR, CDN Association for Free Expression. http://www.canadianfreespeech.com cafe@canadafirst.net)
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"It's an offence to their [the Holocaust survivors'] humanity," Ms. Kachuk [of Toronto's branch of B'nai Brith] said. "They (the revisionists) are demanding a strange kind of scientific proof for something [i.e. the Holocaust] that can't be proved scientifically."
(Quoted in: "Many angered by decision to prosecute: Jewish community torn by Zundel trial" by Kirk Makin, Toronto Globe and Mail, Feb. 28, 1985, p. 1)
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