ZGram - 3/6/2004 - "Globe and Mail: 'Ernst Zundel, civil-rights champion?'"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

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

  March 6, 2004

  Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

  For your Sunday reading, here is an article that appeared in today's 
Canadian Globe and Mail. For once, a balanced one!

  [START]

  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 at 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 at globeandmail.ca


  <end>

    [Source: 
http://www.globeandmail.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040306/ZUNDEL06 
/TPComment/TopStories]