Intermittently I like to tell of life at the Zundel-Haus via a segment of Ernst Zundel's monthly Power letter that goes to his supporters. This one was shipped in July and summarizes some things that I could only touch upon in previous ZGrams, since this past month has been so incredibly busy.
Sit back and relax and enjoy! By now it has arrived in 41 different countries!
Ernst Zundel:
To my friends around the world!
Newsletter time is here! The time races on with dizzying speed. Another month has already flashed by. There is so much to report - and so little space and time to report it in! However, I know from the amount of concerned calls and letters which reach me that some of you are worried already if all is well with us here.
No reasons to worry!
The team was kept hopping till the end of June with the frantic activities of our enemies who seemed hell-bent on getting the Justice Campbell order overturned, which for the time being stopped the Human Rights Tribunal Hearings in their tracks.
Our enemies were in an absolute frenzy! They inundated the court with a blizzard of papers and stalled and balked at proceedings that would have delivered the "famous" Bernie Farber, spokesman for the Canadian Jewish Congress, for cross-examination by Doug Christie.
As I outlined in my last letter, Farber had been their spear carrier or top gun in their attempt to bamboozle the Federal Court into an expedited appeal. They had hoped to ride one more time on a wave of "victimhood" to an easy and quick victory, having undoubtedly been spoiled by the many easy pushover victories they have been granted by a succession of judges who saw things magically almost always their way in matters pertaining to Ernst Zündel.
All they had to trot out was "hate", or so they thought - how I subjected them to "hate" on the Internet etc., and how they got their "feelings" hurt! As a result, some of the most amazing decisions in Canadian judicial history were made. My own attorneys, not exactly newcomers to law and legal decisions, were frequently simply aghast at the rulings!
Foot dragging by courts, postponing decisions by judges was one of the devices frequently employed, in the hope that I would simply give up in despair. Grinding me into dust with legal fees and even the lawyers' costs for my many Jewish and governmental detractors was another device employed.
And then, all of a sudden, they were in a desperate hurry - when it appeared that we had them in a corner!
Many a times I was advised by even close friends and financial supporters as well as attorneys in Canada, the USA and Germany, whose advice I frequently seek, to consider if maybe the time had not come to throw in the towel - that maybe I simply had run out of options and space to maneuver. Some suggested that even the Reich in the end had to surrender to overwhelming force. The idea was broached to me more than once in the last four years that to surrender to overwhelming odds was not a shame - that it was a time-honored "survival tactic." I will admit that there were some moments - not many! - in this seemingly never-ending nightmare of court appearances, appeals, judicial reviews and the marathon Human Rights Tribunal Hearings and betrayals when I longed to see an end to it all. It was one man and his supporters, many of them "little people", against the biggest money and media smear in the world!
However, upon closer examination, reflection and meditation - or prayers, as my Christian friends would call it - where I went "within myself" and where I usually consult that inner voice of conscience, I always discovered that there were still some options, admittedly sometimes slim ones, open to me. All I needed to do was to find the resolve and marshall the last "nerve reserves". All I needed to do was to search for the witnesses and mobilize the financial support - and then convince my equally fatigued attorneys and staff to rally around one more time! For one more round of combat with the forces of evil, decay and corruption!
In this fashion, we would master crisis after crisis, overcome lows, and banish despair and sometimes even paralyzing hopelessness when we were hit over the head one more time with a clearly politically correct court or tribunal decision by a judge with an obvious political or professional desire to cow before my tormentors. At such times, I would time and again go back to the teachings of that German military genius, Clausewitz, and to times in German and even American history and recall battles and events where men I admire, like Fredrick the Great and George Washington at Valley Forge, faced seemingly insurmountable odds - and went on to overcome them and achieve ultimate victory over their enemies - TO SET THEIR PEOPLE FREE!
I have come to realize in the last few years more keenly than ever before the need and usefulness of role models, of HEROES, and the presence of such heroic figures in our history books. I have come only now, in my early sixties, to realize how truly heroic men and women in history can pull one up, can stiffen one's spine - and invariably rob one of one's flimsy, self-serving excuses to give up and cave in.
This is what has given me the will and the determination to carry this grueling legal struggle, this fight, where our enemies obviously intend to take no prisoners but want to destroy the lives and reputations of their victims. On and on, we will, we must fight, from the defense to the offensive - again and again! Frankly, sometimes I am amazed myself, as my life unfolds, at the frantic pace, the constant attacks, law suits, motions, appeals, appeals from appeals etc. etc.
What a life!
I must admit that sometimes I have even wondered if a kind God has given me only a limited intelligence in order not to scare me out of my wits - for surely, as I look back on the last few months, this was clearly the time to get scared. I don't want to bore you to tears with too much court minutiae, but I must give you the barest outline. It's been one heck of a rough ride!
The last newsletter, Power # 243 of June '99 set the stage and outlined the dizzying pace of all these legal proceedings we were involved in. I left off where Bernie Farber did not show up for the first scheduled cross examination by Doug Christie. I explained that he did not show up for cross examination by the intervenor, Paul Fromm, either. Doug Christie had to return to faraway Victoria, B.C. on other legal business. In the end, Farber was supposed to appear on the 22. of June '99, a date my attorney assured me was fixed and agreed to. Well, you guessed right. Mr. Farber did not show up!
Doug Christie had wasted his time again. I was out of his fees - plus the flight. He incurred the jet lag and inconvenience. My Jewish detractors got away with one more arbitrary mischief - and then they keep wondering why the whole world doesn't always love them as they should!
Additionally, on June 15, '99 we had a court appearance scheduled in Ottawa in the SIRC citizenship matter - now four years old already. Doug was too busy, too fatigued, maybe even too fed up to come back one more time, so Barbara and I drove back to Ottawa alone to appear before Judge McKeown.
Each court appearance casts a shadow before it in the form of lots of studies of precedent, the preparation of books of authority, memoranda of facts and law - stuff like that. Often, weeks will be spent on such preparation, and thousands of dollars, while the verbal arguments inside a courtroom before an actual judge are sometimes less than an hour long.
That's the way it was on that 15th of June 1999!
I had decided that we would drive by car, because a plane ticket would have been almost $600 each for me and my lady attorney, plus taxi fare to and from the airports. With my car, I could do it for $120, not $1,200.
My alarm clock awoke me at 2:30 a.m. that morning. I jumped out of bed, showered and shaved in a hurry, prepared some sandwiches, grabbed some non-fluoridated drinking water, some health tape lectures in which I am interested about products like Cayenne pepper and its beneficial qualities, about DSMO, MSM, Vitamin C and E etc. and roared out into the night, swiftly getting on the Parkway and steadily making my way eastward in the direction of Ottawa. I was listening to these lectures, once in a while popping in a tape of German songs in the cassette player - and think and think and think again!
I was jolted out of my meditations by my insistently ringing car phone. My lady lawyer was demanding to know where I was, fearing I might have overslept. She was mollified when I told her that I was only minutes away. Soon, the beam of my headlight caught sight of her outside her home where she stood, waiting for me in the dark. The files she had prepared were quickly stashed away, and we were one more time Ottawa-bound. The old Chrysler gobbled up the miles. We had to stop once to tank up - and on and on we drove. We made it in good time - and, boy, were we surprised!
This was to have been a rather perfunctory hearing. My side had mustered Barbara and myself, along with some friends. "They" had brought lawyers from the Ministry of the Attorney General, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, The Security Intelligence Review Committee and the Minister of Immigration. Nine lawyers, scribes, secretaries or whatever sat waiting. There they were - all in the courtroom already. Why was that? To impress the judge? To intimidate us? To reveal how "serious" this was - what an enormous "security threat to Canada" I was?
They had brought piles and piles of documents along, and soon a very poisonous presentation took place before a visibly uncomfortable older judge, McKeown, of Scottish extraction. I have been in Canadian courtrooms half my life, it seems, yet time and time again I am shocked at how lawyers will misstate, obfuscate, twist and turn things out of context and will character assassinate you before a judge - without batting an eyelash!
My lady lawyer presented her arguments in a businesslike, professional, clear, logical way. She said that this "investigation" was four years old, that the information, much of which it was based on, was outdated, stale and often provably false - that the minister who signed the papers had been replaced, that the first judge had died halfway into the proceedings etc. - that no harm to Canada had come through me in over 40 years!
The judge looked visibly pained. He actually twisted uncomfortably in his chair, rubbed his chin, nervously stroked his hair - while Barbara's gentle but insistent voice drove home the legal arguments. We were challenging the jurisdiction of the current SIRC judge based on information in documents which, we were contending, as already stated, were by now woefully moldy!
The government's lawyers naturally wanted to plow ahead. After all, the Jewish lobbyists have bragged for years that they intend to charge, try, convict and deport me from Canada in handcuffs, as Sabina Citron stated already 15 years ago in a TV interview - ". . . to Germany where they know how to deal with Nazis."
Stripped of all the hypocrisy and legalese and the politicians' mumbo-jumbo, this is their ultimate goal!
Judge McKeown did not take three weeks before he made his decision. He ruled tersely that the SIRC Hearings against me would go on!
Taking my clues from Clausewitz, the military strategist, I immediately asked my attorneys to counter-attack and to appeal the McKeown decision!
Little did I know that on that same day, in that same building, in that distant city, Canada's capital, a different judge, this time Judge Evans, who had already steamrollered me in a previous judgment in favor of Sabina Citron, would render another humdinger of a judgment against me!
This judge, this time, really did it!
We had asked him to rule on the very core of the ongoing, parasitic Human Rights Tribunal hearings - did these people even have the right, under the legislation, to do what they did?
Judge Evans took 33 pages to tell us he would NOT rule on what my attorneys had told me for over two and a half years he MUST rule - namely on the bias of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, on whether or not a web page on the Internet is like a tape recorded telephone message, and whether or not the commission even had jurisdiction over an American based web page!
Incredibly, and to the everlasting shame of Canada's Federal Court, Judge Evans ruled against us on every single issue, handing the Jewish lobby groups of Canada a hefty chunk of other Canadians' Freedom of Speech right on a silver platter. He stated that the hearings must be carried through to their conclusions. Then, and only then, should a higher court look at the decisions of the Tribunal and decide whether they had jurisdiction or not, in view of all the Internet intricacies!
This is analogous to a patient complaining to a court that the medical treatment he receives is grievously harming him and perhaps even killing him - only to be told by a politically correct judge that the treatment must be completed before the doctor can be ordered to stop what he is doing.
What we have here is legal or judicial malpractice at its worst!
If this ruling holds after yet another legal challenge on my part, this time to the Federal Court of Appeal, it means that I will be stuck with tens of thousands of more dollars in legal fees, only to find out in a few years' time, if I should ever be so lucky, that the Commission was wrong all along - and had no right, by law, legislation or territoriality, to even try me in the first place! The same scenario is unfolding as in my nine year litigation in the False News case - which I won in the end, but it cost me a decade of my life and more money and struggle than I care to remember.
But remember? It gave us the Leuchter Report?!
My lawyers told me that this was a judgment meant to bankrupt me financially! They said that they had never seen anything like it in all of Canadian legal history!
The kicker was that Judge Evans had asked for submissions on costs, meaning that most likely I would have to pay all the legal fees of my tormentors and even of the government, in addition to my own attorneys' fees.
In less than a week, the Human Rights Commission was the first to submit its bill. They expected me to pay $8,500 for their legal fees in this one Judicial Review!
My attorneys told me that since the Jewish Intervenors were using the most prestigious law firms in Canada, some charging $300 an hour for their services, and since they are in the habit of packing the courtroom with more than one lawyer, I could expect bills totaling $60,000 - $80,000, perhaps even $100,000. At that sum, even I felt a little queasy!
I asked my advisors how much time I would have to pay, for I simply could not raise that kind of money. In what we Germans call "Galgenhumor" - humor in the shadow of the gallows - I even asked if I could sit up jail time in lieu of the money. In Germany, this is possible. I once "earned" DM 975 by serving one week in 1991 in connection with the aborted Leuchter Congress in Munich.
No, I could not trade jail for money in Canada, was always the somber answer.
I asked if I could not write a letter of protest or explanation? Appeal to the Judicial Council in Ottawa? This is an organization which oversees the conduct and behavior of judges.
I was told that was a possibility.
Like a drowning man reaching for the proverbial straw, I reached for that solution before I could see myself go under. I mulled the whole matter over for a night and a day, then gathered up my courage, called my lady lawyer and asked her to help me in formulating a tough, no-nonsense letter or submission to Judge Evans on this matter of costs. We noted down some of the points to be covered.
She agreed and set to work. Overworked or not, my lady lawyer, one more time, came to my rescue!
A few days later, the fax machine jumped on late at night with a shrill ring, just as I was doing my mail. It was my savior lady, herself burning the midnight oil. Page after page of a legal document materialized right before my eyes as if by magic wand. Miraculously, in spite of time constraints and fatigue, Barbara had produced another one of her brilliant texts.
I spotted a date of a case she had cited in the text, of only the day before, by the same Judge McKeown we had seen only a few weeks before in Ottawa, and who had ruled against me in the SIRC matter. I faxed her back just that one page with a note: "This is brilliant, but is this a typo?" To my astonishment, she informed me: "No. The date is correct." She had read about that particular case in the newspaper in a small article - only the day before! She thought it sounded interesting, and that it might be useful. That lady is one crackerjack of a researcher! She immediately called the Court in Ottawa, where we are, by now, familiar names and faces. A sympathetic clerk faxed her the decicion in the case. She included it as the clincher in her spirited and to-the-point argument!
That argument was simply put - that Canada had no right to ask me, a private person, to bear the costs for all this litigation that was going to be affecting all of Canada, especially in an area where entirely new law was being quasi written in judicial no-mans-land like the Internet by these lengthy hearings. Boy, was that some submission! I tell you!
I was pleased! She was pleased that I was pleased! We sat back and waited - exhausted but satisfied that we had, one more time, stood up to the forces of wrong!!
<end of Part I>
To be continued tomorrow
Thought for the Day:
"Are not all true men...who ever lived, soldiers in that same army, enlisted under heaven's captaincy, to do battle against the same enemy, the empire of Darkness and Wrong?"
-Thomas Carlyle, Scottish philosopher