ZGram - 9/11/2003 - "Lucky his name wasn't Zundel"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

September 11, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Again, I am sending you two ZGrams back-to-back.  Today's ZGram shows 
how lenient the Canadian Government can be when it chooses to be 
lenient for a person calling openly for genocide.

Tomorrow's ZGram shows that when the Canadian Government chooses to 
inflict humiliation and discomfort  to the max, it can find ways to 
do so.

[START]

LUCKY HIS NAME WASN'T ZUNDEL
by Paul Fromm

Dear Free Speech Supporter:

	Like the Globe and Mail, we have consistently opposed 
Canada's restrictive
and censorious "hate law".

	The Canadian government has spent 8 years trying to deport 
Rwandan refugee
claimant Leon Mugesera as an inadmissible person for having committed war
crimes or crimes against humanity; namely, promoting genocide.

	It seems that, by any reasonable definition,  Mugesera was inciting
listeners to violence and, indeed, genocide against minority Tutsis in a
1992 speech. He repeatedly referred to the Tutsis as "cockroaches" (verbal
overkill, but permissible) and called for their "extermination". This would
seem to be a clear incitement to violence.

	Not so, says the increasingly bizarre Federal Court. Mugusera is just
another misunderstood would-be "refugee" and may stay.

	It's lucky for the Rwanadan that he's not a German or 
Ukrainian. It's even
luckier that his name is not Ernst Zundel. In a number of cases, including
that of Helmut Oberlander, our Federal Courts have been quite happy to
order the deportation of Germans and East Europeans for having failed to
admit they had been in certain military units, even when the documentation
of what they actually said has long since been destroyed and their actual
words lost.

	While Leon "Exterminate the Tutsi Cockroaches" Mugesera walks free,
dissident publisher Ernst Zundel rots in solitary confinement in the West
Toronto Detention Centre, without pen, chair, post-it notes, paperclips,
herbal supplements and medication, or hardcover books. The Federal Court
has thus far refused him bail. His crime is not advocating violence or
genocide. No, according to the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service
(CSIS), this pacifist, who has never been charged or convicted under the
Criminal Code of Canada of ANY crime, let alone one of violence, is alleged
to be a terrorist.

	In the Mugesera case, the Federal Court, apparently, rejected 
some of the
evidence as coming from sources that were biased. The entire public -- as
opposed to whatever evidence has been produced in the secret hearings --
case against Ernst Zundel is based on an hysterical guilt-by-association
report from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS). Yet, as Mr.
Zundel's defence team has demonstrated in hearings before the Immigration
and Refugee Board, CSIS is not just biased against Ernst Zundel, it is
pathologically hostile, having, according to Andre Mitrovica's book COVERT
ENTRY, been, at the very least, a passive accomplice to a 1995 mailbomb
assassination attempt aimed at Mr. Zundel. CSIS strictly instructed its
mail snooping operatives not to open any package from Vancouver addressed
to Mr. Zundel in May, 1995. That very month a powerful pip bomb with a
Vancouver return address was delivered by mail to Mr. Zundel's Toronto
residence.

								Paul Fromm
								Director
 
	CANADIAN ASSOCIATION FOR FREE EXPRESSION
____________________________


Assessing the violence in Mugesera's speech

GLOBE AND MAIL Thursday, September 11, 2003 - Page A22

A Rwandan proverb has it that "when the word climbs the hill, we cannot get
it down again."

The proverb was surely never truer than when Léon Mugesera, now living in
Quebec City, addressed a political rally in Rwanda in late 1992.
Human-rights activists, including Canada's Stephen Lewis, have described
those words as an incitement to genocide. The words have been at the centre
of eight years of jurisprudence in Canada over whether the federal
government may deport Mr. Mugesera. Now the Federal Court of Appeal has
ruled that Mr. Mugesera's words were misinterpreted, that they did not
violate Canadian law and that he is free to stay.

The word, however, remains on the hill for all to see. The word is
"extermination," and it appears repeatedly in Mr. Mugesera's speech. And
the Federal Court, though it did an excellent job in paring away falsehoods
about Mr. Mugesera that have persisted ever since an international
human-rights team wrote a hasty report about Rwanda in 1993, arrived at a
couple of questionable interpretations of the 1992 address.

Mr. Mugesera, then a regional politician and civil servant in Rwanda, spoke
at a time of great conflict, and the Federal Court was right to insist that
he be given latitude to address that conflict in his own way. As the court
said, "exceptional care and caution" is needed in judging him.

Canada's law against promoting hatred is a blunt instrument that
unreasonably limits freedom of speech, to such a degree that this newspaper
has taken issue with the law on many occasions. The country should not
deport permanent residents simply because they exercise the right to free
speech in an objectionable manner.

However, a line needs to be drawn at the incitement of violence, which is
covered by a separate provision in the Criminal Code. If Mr. Mugesera's
remarks were found to be an incitement to genocide, it would not matter
whether a link could be drawn between Mr. Mugesera's 1992 words and the
genocide that began 17 months later, in which between 500,000 and 800,000
Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed. Incitement to murder and genocide is
a crime in Canadian law whether or not the murder or genocide occurs.

After careful scrutiny, the Federal Court wisely discarded erroneous
allegations about Mr. Mugesera. There is no evidence that massacres took
place in the immediate aftermath of his speech. He was not a member of
Rwanda's governing inner circle whose views carried great weight. And the
court was right to be skeptical of the findings of human-rights groups that
visited Rwanda for two weeks in 1993.

However, the violent imagery, set around repeated descriptions of Tutsis as
"cockroaches," is difficult to dismiss. "Why do they not arrest these
parents who have sent away their children and why do they not exterminate
them?" Mr. Mugesera said. "Why do they not arrest the people taking them
away and why do they not exterminate all of them? Are we really waiting
till they come to exterminate us? . . . If justice therefore is no longer
serving the people . . . we must do something ourselves to exterminate this
rabble. . . . When you allow a serpent biting you to remain attached to you
with your agreement, you are the one who will suffer."

The court asserted that Mr. Mugesera cannot be blamed if others used his
words in preparing the genocide. Yet is he not responsible for setting his
words up on the hill? The court's comment also invites the question: Why
did those who planned the genocide use his words if they were not an
incitement?

Most problematic is the Federal Court's naive interpretation of a crucial
paragraph in the speech. That paragraph reads, in full: "Recently, I told
someone who came to brag to me that he belonged to the P.L. [Tutsi Party]
-- I told him, 'The mistake we made in 1959, when I was still a child, is
to let you leave.' I asked him if he had not heard of the story of the
Falashas, who returned home to Israel from Ethiopia. He replied that he
knew nothing about it! I told him, 'So don't you know how to listen or
read? I am telling you that your home is in Ethiopia, that we will send you
by the Nyabarongo so you can get there quickly.' What I am telling you is,
we have to rise up, we must really rise up."

The court finds it "strange" that Mr. Mugesera would use the positive
experience of the Falashas' return to Israel if he were intent on inciting
violence. This seems a blatant misreading of the paragraph. The Nyabarongo
River was a place of massacres in 1959; Mr. Mugesera said the mistake was
to "let you leave"; the example of the Falashas was a way of saying: We
will send you home again, to your true home in Ethiopia (the Tutsis were
not seen to be true Rwandans), via the river.

And the conclusion reinforces that message of violence: "Do not be afraid,
know that anyone whose neck you do not cut is the one who will cut your neck."

The court found that these statements did not violate Canadian laws against
incitement to violence. We are pleased the court gave wide latitude to free
speech, but troubled by its interpretation of Mr. Mugesera's statements.
The federal government should seek an appeal so that the Supreme Court can
take a look at this one.