ANGRY GERMANS OUST ZUNDEL LAWYER FROM GEORGETOWN LAW SCHOOL CAMPUS

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

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ANGRY GERMANS OUST ZUNDEL LAWYER FROM GEORGETOWN LAW SCHOOL CAMPUS

  By Bruce Leichty

  Washington, D.C. (10/8/07)--Although I had successfully engaged 
members of the German American Lawyers Association ("DAJV") in 
dialogue the day before, security guards ordered me off the campus of 
Georgetown University Law Center under threat of arrest on Saturday, 
October 6, 2007--even after I agreed to stop leafletting the DAJV 
conferees about the scandalous treatment of German national Ernst 
Zundel in the courts of both Germany and the United States.

  Ernst Zundel is the "thought criminal" who was recently sentenced to 
five years in prison in Germany for "inciting racial hatred" because 
of the dissenting historical viewpoints he has expressed about "the 
Holocaust" and its exploitation by Jewish pressure groups. Before 
that, he was illegally deported from the United States and denied a 
constitutionally-guaranteed habeas corpus hearing, and then deported 
from Canada after being declared a national security risk based on 
the use of secret evidence--a use since prohibited by Canada's 
highest court.

  I have represented Zundel since 2003 in an effort to obtain justice 
for him in the U.S., where he was abducted by federal marshals at his 
Tennessee home and taken away from his U.S. citizen wife Ingrid. The 
pamphlet I was handing out October 6, at the inaugural meeting of the 
German-American lawyers group in the U.S., was titled "Lawyers Alert" 
and consisted of an article by Ingrid Zundel on Zundel's conviction 
in Germany and an article I wrote on the defects in Zundel's U.S. 
arrest and court proceedings.

  The pamphlet prominently featured a quote from German judge Ulrich 
Meinerzhagen, who stated in his decision convicting Zundel of a 
speech crime: "It is irrelevant whether the Holocaust happened or 
not. Denying it is punishable under German criminal statutes." That 
quote caused a stir among at least a few conferees who spoke with me.

  I had been denied--without explanation--the right to register for 
this conference when I had tried to do so a few days before the 
conference was to begin. But my client Ingrid Zundel thought it would 
be timely for me to fly to Washington, D.C. anyway, to try to raise 
the consciousness of the membership of the association, which had 
been described to me as over 3,000 strong (I was later told that 180 
had registered for the D.C. conference). Ingrid and I then created a 
pamphlet with this specific audience in mind--and so on Friday, 
October 5, I entered McDonough Hall on the Georgetown Law Center 
campus, where the lawyers were meeting, and successfully distributed 
an estimated 70-80 pamphlets as participants were leaving a session 
on constitutional law.

  There were no brushes with Georgetown officials or security officers 
on that first visit, and instead I engaged in dialogue with several 
members of the association. One was a fellow alumnus of Boalt Law 
School (University of California at Berkeley) who had told me about 
the conference just a week earlier and urged me to network with 
lawyers there. He and I had spoken after a screening of the film 
"Soldiers of Conscience" at Berkeley (about U.S. conscientious 
objectors to military service), and when I challenged him about 
Germany's treatment of a different kind of conscientious objector 
(Zundel) he had expressed skepticism that such a harsh sentence had 
been handed down to someone for merely expressing his views on the 
Holocaust. He also attempted to justify imposing a criminal sentence 
for uttering falsehoods.

  Despite the Berkeley alum's hospitable demeanor while in Berkeley, 
he seemed somewhat shaken both by my appearance in Washington, D.C. 
and by the fact that my registration had been refused. Because he was 
at no time hostile to me and because he wanted more information on 
Judge Meinerzhagen's decision, I will refrain from naming him--not 
that he risks anything in Germany besides embarrassment, apparently: 
he told me that as a former German government official he was not 
concerned about expressing an interest in getting further information 
about the Zundel sentence. My conversations on my Friday visit to the 
conferees also included a conversation with one young German 
attorney, who grilled me skeptically for about 5-10 minutes. He 
finally asked me whether I believed in a "Jewish conspiracy," and 
after I refused to take that bait, he said that anyone who refused to 
take a position on that question could not criticize Judge 
Meinerzhagen for the Judge's comment on the irrelevance of the 
historicity of the Holocaust, indeed he declared that this was 
logically inconsistent. I pointed out the logical fallacy of his 
analogy--noting among other things that one question (historicity of 
the Holocaust) involved judicial determination of a crime and the 
other (existence of a Jewish conspiracy) did not--but he instead 
continued to taunt me that I was being illogical and bragged about 
his own superior (German) education in logic before walking away. By 
contrast, an American lawyer born in Germany who was part of the same 
three-way conversation stated that he was open to the viewpoints of 
Zundel and that Zundel should be allowed to express them.

  This German-born American lawyer suggested that the Zundel case 
symbolized the chasm between the United States with its legal 
pedigree in English common law, and Germany with its dependence on 
so-called "civil law" as influenced by the Roman empire. I pointed 
out to both lawyers that my ancestors fled Europe precisely because 
they were hounded for their resistance to state dogma in the same way 
that Zundel was resisting a modern form of dogma, and that I was 
determined to do my part in ensuring that America did not follow 
Germany's example of criminalizing speech.

  But if the conversations were relatively civil that day, they were 
decidedly hostile the following day. When I made my appearance at the 
conference the following morning, Saturday, October 6, I was accosted 
outside of the meeting room first by an agitated young German woman, 
Ms. Flimm, who told me that not only was my distribution of pamphlets 
prohibited but that I would have to pay for having dared show up at 
the conference despite having my registration refused (I simply told 
her truthfully that I had gone to none of the sessions). When I 
expressed my desire to at least hand out pamphlets by the elevators 
of the 12th floor meeting room, she said I would have to leave and 
physically shoved me in the direction of the elevators; I then asked 
to speak with her superiors. She called on someone who said he was 
the executive officer for the association, and who identified himself 
only as "Dietrich." Dietrich glared at me and refused to take my 
outstretched hand and reiterated that I would have to leave. Even an 
attorney slated to speak on the next panel (on the topic of global 
warming), Sebastian Deschler, of the Washington, D.C. office of 
Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe, attempted to forcibly usher me to 
the elevators. As Dietrich and Ms. Flimm hastily shut the double 
doors to the lecture hall to prevent attenders from seeing the 
developing ruckus, I asked Deschler what role he had with the 
association, but he gave me no clear answer.

  All three of them were then urged by an older attorney, who I 
subsequently learned was Werner Hein of the law firm Mayer Brown LLP, 
to let him handle the matter. Hein asked me to step further down the 
hall toward the elevators, where the two of us spoke rapidly and 
calmly for a few minutes. Hein said he was one of the founders of the 
association, and he made it clear that he wanted me to leave the 
building voluntarily so that he would not have to ask Georgetown 
security to remove me--which he indicated would be unpleasant for the 
association. I was "imposing" a topic on the association where it was 
not wanted, he said; I responded that it was a topic where discussion 
was very much needed.

  Hein said he was familiar with the issue of criminalization of 
Holocaust dissent, and he promised to read my pamphlet, but he 
alluded vaguely to difficulties caused by the subject and to other 
difficulties he was experiencing with the conference, including a 
speaker who had exceeded his time and a speaker who had offended the 
audience--although it was not clear what those matters had to do with 
my being present. He said that I should take my objections to the 
German Embassy; I told him I had already attempted to do so (I had 
participated in a protest at the German Embassy in D.C. several 
months ago and tried without success to get an appointment with an 
officer there).

  When I told Hein that I had come to reach out to German lawyers 
directly because the Zundel case was an issue of importance both to 
international human rights law and to the legal relations of our two 
countries, and because the American media had effectively blacked out 
the story, Hein's response was to suggest that if the Washington Post 
had not covered the story then it must not merit coverage. I reminded 
him that a man was in prison for his views.

  I knew, of course, that Hein was legally correct that I had no right 
as a non-registrant to pass out pamphlets to the members of the 
association on private university property, at least without 
permission of the university or the association. When I failed to 
persuade him of the importance of my being allowed to continue my 
distribution, I agreed--at his suggestion--that I would instead hand 
out the pamphlets right outside the building, as the attorneys 
exited. I figured this was probably unlikely to occur, and I knew 
that this was still Georgetown property as well, but since I had 
earlier been granted a "day pass" by Georgetown security, and since I 
now had permission from Hein to distribute the pamphlets at a 
different place, I thought I would give it a try.

  For about 10 minutes, therefore, I handed out a number of additional 
pamphlets to both German and U.S. attorneys who were still arriving 
for the day's events. A couple lawyers took a look at the title of 
the pamphlet and showed interest in my brief verbal synopsis, and 
asked who I was. Another threw it into a nearby trash can; she was 
the only person I saw doing that. After another lawyer said he had 
received and read the pamphlet the previous day and that it made him 
"kind of sick," I spoke with him for a few seconds on the importance 
of allowing dissenting voices. (Was he sick about Germany's treatment 
of a dissenter or about the fact that someone dared question 
Holocaust orthodoxy? I wish I would have asked.)

  And then suddenly security showed up in the person of "Officer 
Wilson" (with Officer Harris arriving somewhat later)--obviously at 
the behest of Werner Hein or his colleagues. Although Officer Wilson 
was initially courteous, he grew more threatening the longer I spoke 
with him. I eventually agreed with him, after failing to persuade him 
that Georgetown had effectively allowed me to distribute the 
pamphlets by giving me a "day pass," that I would discontinue 
distribution outside the building where the German lawyers continued 
to meet. All the while he was snatching away pamphlets that I was 
handing to incoming guests, but he did not succeed in preventing all 
distribution during our otherwise civil conversation.

  But he wasn't done with me. When I said that I wanted to deliver a 
pamphlet to the student newspaper before I left campus, his attitude 
became menacing. He issued me an ultimatum to leave or be arrested. 
He stated that I was not allowed to deliver a pamphlet to the student 
paper, even after I pointed out to him that he was effectively 
denying me the right simply to walk onto campus and deliver a letter. 
As I walked away, he was on his walkie-talkie describing me and 
telling someone that I was to be arrested if I had not left the 
campus within three minutes. I ambled back to the public sidewalk.

  For my part, I reasoned that I could have tried and should have been 
able to gain access to the office of the student newspaper, since 
entrance to the Georgetown Law Center campus is not prohibited to the 
public. True, entrance to at least some buildings is controlled by 
the need for the visitors to state their purpose and show their ID's. 
In my case, on October 6 I had explained to the guard at McDonough 
Hall that I had come "to talk with some of the German lawyers meeting 
there" and had then received the "day pass" sticker which I was 
wearing on my shirt when confronted by Georgetown security.

  But I also knew that Georgetown did have the right to control access 
to the campus, and that Georgetown had arguably delegated to this 
security guard the right to revoke or withdraw its consent, even if 
Georgetown had not originally prohibited my access to the campus 
earlier in the day and even if one of their other guests had 
purported to give me permission to remain. And as a visitor to the 
nation's capital with a full workload of cases in my home state of 
California, I could ill afford to be arrested even if the arrest was 
of dubious merit.

  If Georgetown wanted to grant or deny access to lawyers based on the 
content of their speech, whether verbal or written, there was nothing 
I could really do about it on October 6. That was clearly what this 
Georgetown representative was doing, since I was not posing a threat 
to public order or anything or anyone. The result? A few lawyers had 
their consciousness raised, and hopefully the unexpected appearance 
of a Zundel advocate in their midst will ultimately help pave the way 
for more discussion and reevaluation among German lawyers--whether 
inside or outside this Association. But for the time being the 
authorities stepped in to make sure that not too much information 
reached some people in a position to make a difference--and I am 
under no illusions about the fact that there are many powerful vested 
interests in both Germany and the United States who want to keep it 
that way.