For your Sunday reading, here is an article that appeared in
today's Canadian Globe and Mail. For once, a balanced one!
Ernst Zundel, civil-rights champion?
After more than a year in solitary confinement,
Canada's most famous Holocaust denier is still fighting deportation, KIRK
MAKIN reports, and he may rewrite the law in the process. All because he
wants to know what the secret case is against him
By KIRK MAKIN <kmakin@globeandmail.ca>
Ernst Zundel was framing a painting at his retirement
home, high in the Smokey Mountains of Tennessee, when a van pulled into
his driveway followed by three police cars. "It was a whole
armada," he recalls. "I knew what was coming next."
The van was from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
Service. "They put me up against my pickup truck, spread-eagled me,
and said I was being arrested and deported. Within five minutes, I was
gone."
That was Feb. 17, 2003. Since then, he has not seen his
wife or his home. In fact, he has yet to get out of solitary confinement.
Mr. Zundel was whisked back to Canada, the country he had
abandoned to escape the 20-year series of prosecutions that had made him
its most recognized extreme right-winger. Canada, in turn, wants to whisk
him back to Germany, where he faces at least five years in prison.
Ironically, the battle he is waging against that
deportation could make the famed purveyor of Holocaust-denying, neo-Nazi
material a champion of civil liberties.
Mr. Zundel is confined to a Toronto detention centre
because the government is holding him on a national security certificate
-- the controversial and Draconian procedure usually reserved for
terrorist suspects.
Now, just as he once compelled Canada's courts to grant
him freedom to express his views, he could again break constitutional
ground. This spring, the Ontario Court of Appeal is to hear his bid under
the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to quash the certificate. Win or lose,
its ruling will probably land in the Supreme Court of Canada, which could
declare the certificate unconstitutional.
If that happens, he will be a mixed blessing to rights
advocates. He is now 64 and into his second year in jail, but Mr. Zundel
seems every bit as unrepentant and provocative as when he first captured
public attention in the early 1980s.
"The Jewish community wants me on my knees," he
says in an exclusive interview. "I am the last man standing who has
not apologized. It would be the height of indignity for me to do
that."
A security certificate is signed by two federal cabinet
ministers who, based on secret intelligence, decide that an immigrant
should be deported as a danger to Canadian citizens. Even the alleged
spies and terrorists normally targeted this way are not permitted access
to the precise allegations against them.
Of the 27 security certificates issued since 1991 -- just
five since the 9/11 attack -- virtually all have involved suspected
terrorists from such countries as Iran, Lebanon and Algeria. Why, then,
use such an extreme measure against a Holocaust-denier?
"It is tragic that the whole Western world has
deteriorated," Mr. Zundel says. "We are going to be living in
Stalinist-time dictatorships."
His lawyer, Peter Lindsay, maintains that the case goes
straight to the heart of Canada's response to terrorism. "Mr. Zundel
lived here from 1958 to 2000 in a very public way. In all that time, he
hasn't committed a single crime. He has been charged a number of times
unsuccessfully for things he has said or pamphlets he has distributed, but
never for an act of violence. He is not some sleeper agent skulking around
in the shadows."
Slapping his client with a security certificate, Mr.
Lindsay argues, is just the sort of abuse civil libertarians warned of
after 9/11. "The problem is that this law doesn't just get applied to
Ernst Zundel. It gets applied to other people out on the fringes of our
society. There is an old expression that hard cases make bad law. Well,
there is no harder case than Ernst Zundel."
Although the government case relies heavily on accusations
revealed only in secret to a judge, an unclassified "summary"
compiled by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service accuses Mr. Zundel
of being a dangerous preacher of anti-Semitic, white-supremacist hatred.
Even if he doesn't advocate violence, it reads, he is dangerous because
he's seen as a guru by extremists who do embrace violence.
CSIC describes the white-supremacist movement as a network
of groups with a common racist ideology. "Many followers are
attracted by Zundel's messaging, his dedication to the cause and his
personal charisma," according to the summary. "By his
comportment as a leader and ideologue, the service believes Zundel intends
serious violence to be a consequence of his influence."
To Mr. Zundel, this is guilt by association. How others
interpret and apply his writing is not his business, he says: "I am
not the policeman for the right." He admits to speaking at meetings
attended by "headline-seekers," but he insists that he resents
how their crude tactics marginalize his views.
"The one hallmark that has always earned me the title
of being a coward in our circles is that I disdained the use of
violence," he says. "I never joined any of these right-wing
groups because they were politically impotent."
The inordinate secrecy of the security certificate
procedure has left Mr. Lindsay ill-equipped to attack the CSIS
allegations. He says he can only guess what facts, hearsay or falsehoods
may pepper the classified government documents.
"There could be someone lying through their teeth in
evidence that could be attacked and ripped to pieces. I believe in an
adversarial system, where both sides can challenge the other side's
evidence in an open forum. I don't care whether it is Ernst Zundel or
anyone else; there should be one system of justice that works for
everybody, including the marginalized and those no one else cares
about."
Of course, the government isn't alone in considering the
man a threat. "Ernst Zundel epitomizes and sanctions the worst form
of Holocaust denial," contends Bernie Farber, a spokesman for the
Canadian Jewish Congress.
"Once he had renounced his Canadian citizenship,
which is how we see it, there was no need for us to welcome him back. We
should not welcome a person whose life ambition it was to foment
hatred."
Security certificates ought to be used sparingly, Mr.
Farber concedes, but Mr. Zundel's status with violent neo-Nazis makes him
a genuine security risk. "He provides the kind of support, succour
and oxygen to those who do commit violent acts. Ernst Zundel is not a
clown. He is a serious player in the neo-Nazi scene worldwide."
Mr. Zundel came to Canada in 1958 at the age of 19, but
was never granted full citizenship. Soon after arriving, he fell under the
influence of Adrian Arcand, the famed ultra-rightist in Quebec, and grew
obsessed with his belief that Germans had been defamed by
"propaganda" stories about their unspeakably brutal treatment of
Jews.
"I realized I was a brainwashed young German,"
he testified last month before Mr. Justice Pierre Blais of the Federal
Court of Canada. "It really troubled me and shook me up. . . . I was
championing a lost cause. I did it for ethical reasons and for my father's
generation, who could not defend themselves."
In 1968, he ran for the leadership of the federal
Liberals, infuriating the party establishment. He finished far behind
Pierre Trudeau, but nonetheless gained a valuable podium from which to
espouse his views. He then moved to Toronto and almost died of cancer, but
recovered to throw himself into his graphic-art business, attracting
clients ranging from large corporations to Maclean's magazine. He also
wrote, under a pseudonym, several books about unidentified flying objects
to support publishing pro-Nazi, Holocaust-denial material to send around
the world.
By the late 1980s, Mr. Zundel was attracting
demonstrations of up to 3,000 anti-racists outside his home in downtown
Toronto, receiving hate calls by the score and bombs in the mail. Over the
years, he turned his home into a fortress with elaborate security devices,
lighting and 24-hour camera surveillance. Even so, in 1995, an arsonist
struck, causing $500,000 in damage to his home and that of a neighbour.
Finally, in 2000, he ended his stay in Canada, heading south to join his
wife in Tennessee.
Now, lodged in an isolation cell at the Metro West
Detention Centre, he rarely sees anyone. He takes medication for a heart
condition, bad circulation and serious dental problems, and is allowed
just 10 minutes of exercise a day. His tiny cell has a cot, toilet and
sink, but no toothbrush or towels. If he wants to write, he must perch on
a stack of transcripts and use his sink as a desk.
"I do not speak for weeks sometimes," he says.
"This is why my voice tends to give way in the courtroom. I'm not
bitching, but this is Canada -- it's not Turkistan. I do think somebody is
inflicting pain on me."
Mr. Zundel contends that he was turfed out of the United
States because of a clandestine request from Canadian authorities, and
that U.S. immigration authorities used as a their pretext a minor omission
he had made in his paperwork, something that rarely cause a newcomer such
grief.
Even so, the odds that he will stay in Canada are heavily
stacked against him. His deportation will be carried out if Judge Blais
finds that CSIS and the Solicitor-General acted "reasonably"
when they issued the certificate. It is an extremely low legal threshold,
and no appeal is possible.
Mr. Zundel says his great fear is that the secret evidence
against him has been concocted. As a graphic artist, he says he knows just
how easy it is to doctor a document or a photograph. "With
redigitalization and retouching, anything can be created. They could have
me making love to Golda Meir."
Even so, he insists that that he would rather spend his
old age in a German prison cell than agree to cease his Holocaust-denying
activities.
"For a lifetime, I have fought for equality for
Germans to tell their side," he says. "I would be like an
intellectual eunuch. People have directed hundreds of thousands of dollars
-- millions, actually -- to my legal struggle. I owe these people a fierce
fight."
Bench strength
The secret case against Ernst Zundel was compiled by the
Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
In a coincidence guaranteed to stoke a thousand conspiracy
theories, the man passing judgment on that case used to be in charge of
CSIS.
Before being appointed a judge of the Federal Court of
Canada in 1998, Pierre Blais was an MP and cabinet minister in the Brian
Mulroney government whose portfolios included a stint in 1989 as
solicitor-general -- and thus, the minister responsible for the security
service.
Because of this connection, Mr. Zundel's lawyer, Peter
Lindsay, asked Judge Blais to withdraw from the case. The judge flatly
refused.
So, there was a certain irony apparent one day in February
when Mr. Zundel, a man with no criminal record who is rated a serious
national security risk, testified at length about a litany of threats and
acts of violence that have been directed toward him.
As Mr. Zundel was describing how the authorities had
failed to notify him when charges were dropped against two Vancouver men
accused of sending a bomb to his home, the former solicitor-general
exploded.
"This is a very serious matter," Judge Blais
boomed, slamming a law book on his desk.
"We are talking about an attempt to murder Ernst
Zundel by manufacturing and mailing an explosive device. But he was never
told about what happened, and we don't know if these people are still
walking the streets or what happened.
"I can't believe this. If there are valid reasons, I
want them reported to me."
=====
Kirk Makin is The Globe and Mail's justice reporter.
Toronto Globe and Mail letters@globeandmail.ca
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