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Date Posted: 01:38:06 06/11/06 Sun
Author: Longinus
Subject: The Ernst Zündel Report (File B)
In reply to: Colonel Angus 's message, "The Ernst Zündel Report (File A)" on 01:35:00 06/11/06 Sun

Illustration on the Zundelsite

One of the hearings' central issues was the degree of control, if any, Zundel exercised over the content of the site, which was run by a Ukrainian-born, Paraguay-bred German Mennonite named Ingrid Rimland. At the time, Rimland lived in Carlsbad, California, and used a United States-based Internet service provider. Zundel and Rimland both claimed that Zundel had no role in the site's operation. Rimland affirmed in an affidavit, "I am the creator, designer, editor and primary electronic columnist of the Zundelsite." She asserted that "I decided on the name --'Zundelsite' -- because Mr. Zundel is the world's best-known skeptic of genocidal activities alleged to have happened in German concentration camps.... I do not recall consulting Mr. Zundel if I could use the word 'Zundelsite.' I unilaterally decided that I would."

Lawyers for the prosecution, however, argued that Zundel played an active role in running the site and supplying material. In a November 1995 letter to supporters, Zundel had called Rimland "my Webmaster," and in February 1996 referred to himself as the Zundelsite's "founder." Rimland had written in March 1996 that Zundel had himself "impacted the world in massive, major ways with nothing but an ordinary computer." Pressing the point, the prosecution brought Zundel's estranged wife, Irene, to testify that he paid Rimland $3,000 per month, which included money for the maintenance of the Web site, and that he was in constant communication with her by fax. Zundel "got out of bed in the morning and went straight to the fax machine," she testified. She explained that he would write English and German versions of Holocaust-denial documents, which he would fax to Rimland, who would type and proofread them, then post them on the Web.

On January 18, 2002, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal released its ruling in the matter of Citron and Toronto Mayor's Committee on Community and Race Relations v. Zundel, otherwise known as the Zundelsite trial. At issue was the charge that Zundel's Web site, a clearinghouse for Holocaust denial materials and other anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, would expose a minority (Canadian Jews) to "hatred and contempt," which is illegal under Canadian law. As many expected, Zundel lost, and was ordered to remove the offending sections of his Web site -- which, as the Tribunal noted, would cover the vast majority of the site. The ruling was unenforceable, however, because the Zundelsite is hosted by an American company.

This was a landmark case because it was the first to apply the Canadian Human Rights Act to the Internet, in effect ruling that it is illegal to create and maintain a hate site in Canada. It would appear that other hate sites have the right to a separate hearing before the Tribunal, but Citron and Toronto Mayor's Committee v. Zundel established the fundamental legal principles that would apply in future cases.

Despite their loss before the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal, Zundel and Rimland continued to maintain and expand the "Zundelsite" from their home in Tennessee, safe from further Canadian prosecution. In 2002 the Zundelsite joined a network of Holocaust denial sites which included that of Bradley Smith, the Institute for Historical Review, Frederick Toben's Adelaide Institute in Australia, and the Belgian VHO (Vrij Historisch Onderzoek). It continued to post Rimland's signature "Zgrams," which in recent years have been less devoted to Holocaust denial and more to fulminations against "Jewish power," anti-Semitic and anti-Israel conspiracy theories, and attacks on the U.S. government and the War on Terror.

Deportation Saga (2003 - )

Canadian 'Security Certificate'

In February 2003, officials from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service arrested Zundel at his home in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, for alleged immigration violations. After being held in INS custody for two weeks, Zundel was deported back to Canada, from where he had come to the U.S. two years earlier.

Facing possible deportation from Canada back to his native Germany, where he would be prosecuted for his neo-Nazi and Holocaust-denying activities, Zundel immediately applied to the Canadian government for refugee status. During hearings to determine whether he would be held in custody while his refugee application was processed, he attempted to portray himself as a human rights activist rather than a white supremacist. "I am known as the Ghandi of the right," Zundel said at the hearing. "What I defend with all my heart is my ethnic group."

Despite Zundel's claims, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service described him as a "lightning rod" for white supremacists, and on May 2, 2003, Canadian Citizenship and Immigration Minister Denis Coderre and Solicitor General Wayne Easter announced that under the provisions of the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, they were issuing a "national security certificate" against Zundel. (Such certificates are issued against persons whom Canadian intelligence services deem a threat to Canada's national security or to the human rights of Canadian citizens.) If upheld by a Canadian federal judge, this certificate would automatically deny Zundel refugee status, and require his deportation from Canada.

Zundel responded by launching a number of legal actions designed to stall or derail the confirmation of the security certificate by federal Justice Pierre Blais. Twice Zundel filed unsuccessful motions to have Justice Blais recuse himself on the grounds that he was biased against Zundel.

Zundel also filed two constitutional challenges to the law under which his case is being adjudicated; one such challenge was rejected by an Ontario court on jurisdictional grounds while the other made its way through Canada's federal courts.

While these legal challenges were being heard, Zundel attempted to secure his release from prison. After nearly three months of hearings to determine whether Zundel should be freed on his own recognizance while awaiting a ruling on the security certificate, Justice Blais ruled, based on both public and secret evidence, that Zundel may reasonably be described as a threat to the security of Canada, and that he therefore should remain in custody. Zundel's supporters characterize this ruling as capricious, and claim that Zundel's civil rights are being violated.

In February 2005, capping two years of legal proceedings, Canadian Federal Court Justice Pierre Blais ruled that Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel may reasonably be described as a threat to the security of Canada; under the country's immigration laws he is therefore subject to deportation to his native Germany. Zundel is not a citizen of Canada.

In a scathing 63-page decision, Justice Blais described Zundel as a hypocrite who cultivates a pacifist public image while guiding, aiding and supporting neo-Nazi groups around the world, including some that "propagate violent messages of hate" and work to accomplish "the destruction of governments and multicultural societies."

Justice Blais' ruling was not subject to appeal. Canada deported Zundel to his native Germany in March 2005.

Incitement trial in Germany

Zundel’s long-expected trial in Germany began on November 8, 2005, but was almost immediately delayed after Judge Ulrich Meinerzhagen learned that the defense team included Horst Mahler, a disbarred right-wing German lawyer who had himself been convicted of inciting hatred against Jews in January 2005. Mahler had joined the defense team as the assistant of attorney Sylvia Stolz; Mahler and Stolz were both dismissed by Judge Meinerzhagen, who then adjourned the trial to give a new lawyer time to prepare a case in Zundel’s defense.

German authorities had charged Zundel with inciting racial hatred and defaming the memory of the dead in March 2005. Zundel had been returned to Germany after running afoul of immigration laws in the U.S. and Canada. He has had a long career promoting Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi ideology.

Ingrid Rimland

According to an autobiography posted on her Internet site, Ingrid Rimland became a "marginal celebrity" before she met Ernst Zundel. She had several novels to her credit and a burgeoning speaking career about such subjects as special education -- she holds an Ed.D. and raised a developmentally disabled child -- and her experiences as a young woman of German descent who grew up in Paraguay and then came to America.

Nevertheless, Rimland did not achieve notoriety in earnest until late 1995, when she became the Webmaster of www.zundelsite.org, one of the earliest Internet Web sites devoted to the rehabilitation of the reputation of Adolf Hitler and the denial of the genocide of European Jewry during World War II. Although Rimland and Zundel told a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal in 1997 that Rimland was the sole proprietor of the Zundelsite, other evidence suggests she has worked quite closely with Zundel on the site, and that he paid her a monthly fee for her efforts. More recently, Rimland and Zundel married and moved to Tennessee.

During the past several years Rimland has expanded and transformed the Zundelsite. Its library of Holocaust denial materials are grouped into "courses"; a visitor who clicks on "Revisionism 101" is directed to "basic revisionist articles offered as a detoxification program to cure the politically correct of the Hollywood version of the Holocaust." "Revisionism 201" and "Revisionism 301" are also available. The site was recently integrated into a online network of Holocaust denial that includes the pages of Bradley Smith, the Institute for Historical Review, the Adelaide Institute in Australia, and the Belgian VHO (Vrij Historisch Onderzoek). Each now shares a common menu that provides easy access to the contents of all the sites.

Rimland has also become known for her "ZGrams," daily columns (distributed through a listserv) that cheerlead for Zundel and other deniers and offer conspiratorial commentary. The "ZGram" of April 26, 1999, is characteristic. Responding to (incorrect) reports that the two teenage killers in the then-recent massacre at Columbine High School were motivated in part by a preoccupation with Hitler and Nazism, she wrote:

These were not manly Aryan teenagers -- these were punks acting like extras out of one of those horrible Hollywood psycho-thrillers! ....They were and are not Hitler's children! They are the product of democracy's failure to provide decent role models to young people...Don't blame Hitler -- he had no hand in raising them! ....Had these two punkers been given correct information about a genuine contemporary moral leader...these youngsters would have known that once there lived a well-bred Aryan man who thoroughly despised all mind games with a brutal and satanic twist, decried all aberrant, unhealthy sexuality, [and] had no use whatsoever for Marilyn Manson shock rock....

The argument is seamlessly of a piece with Holocaust denial: if only these two teenagers had been Nazis, they never would have been mass murderers.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 "Zundel-Haus" ­ Ernst Zundel: His Struggle, His Life. Posted on www.zundelsite.org. No author is listed for this 60-page document; however, its revelations suggest that it was either written by Zundel himself or by a follower (probably Rimland) in close consultation with him.

2 Richard Harwood is the pseudonym of Richard Verral, the former editor of Spearhead, the magazine of the English neo-Nazi National Front.

3 Liberty Bell, June 1976 and January 1977.

4 Probably a reference to the 1978 NBC mini-series "Holocaust."

5 Christie has attended Holocaust denial conferences and founded the Western Canada Concept Party, which advocates the secession of western Canada for the purposes of creating an ethnically homogenous state founded on Christian culture and European heritage. He has made bigoted remarks about recent immigrants but is more discreet than his extremist clients; he has not publicly endorsed denial of the Holocaust.

7 In Errol Morris's documentary about Leuchter, Mr. Death, the chemist who tested the samples (not knowing at the time what they were) said, "I don't think the results of The Leuchter Report have any validity."

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