|
Revitalizing the
archives
From 1998 until
2002, injusticebusters was in the throes of an identity crisis.
What was it? What were we doing? We grappled with editorial policy
at the same time we were learning the nuts and bolts of building
and posting a website. Once we had a secure, paid site I had
full editorial control, although I talked regularly to Richard
Klassen who was forced to move his family several times and did
not always have access to the internet.
I began following
other threads to stories of police and prosecutorial misconduct
and the site took on another facet to its character: a newsclipping
scrapbook where stories could live longer than they would in
print form. I also began picking up other stories of wrongfully
convicted people. It was an explosion. By 2003 there were over
700 pages. I also had contact with several other people (Don
Smith, Leon Walchuk, Monique Turenne, the Vopnis) and kept these
stories going.
When Richard
Klassen began to make progress in bringing his civil claim to
court, the government and police defendants alleged he was breaking
the rules of court by publishing discovery material on the internet.
This claim
was absolutely false. However, rather than risk being thrown
out of his civil claim, Klassen undertook before Judge Mona Dovall
to sever all ties with the website.
Now that some
of the dust has settled, I have been going back through the material
we had posted in the early days. In the spirit of keeping the
scrapbook alive, I have been reformatting and placing links.
The original material remains intact. I hope the information,
which chronicles our struggle is useful to you.
The identity
crisis is over. We know who we are --Sheila Steele, March
28, 2005
|
Free speech:
not always popular
Zundel has now been returned
to Germany to face charges there
 Hate cannot be banned; haters must
be persuaded their bigotry isn't working for them
Injusticebusters' response
to the banning of the Zundel site: Hateful speech can be combatted with persuasive
speech. The answer to lies is truth. Driving ignorance underground
is self-defeating. How can we know what our enemies are thinking
if we shut them up? Bring the hatemongers to a podium and debate
them! Provide more resources for education so our children will
be able to effectively argue against those who rewrite history.
More often than not,
laws that are designed to shut down one group of people will
be used very differently than their purported intent. This applies
to all of human endeavor. Mind control backfires. The human imagination
persists.
Now that I have run out
of my stock responses to this highly dubious decision, and worry
that we might be next, I direct you to our response to child porn | free speech | No
means no
Ontario appeal court approves
Zundel hearing
By KIRK MAKIN, JUSTICE
REPORTER, Globe and Mail , Mar. 12, 2004
The Ontario Court of Appeal
has scheduled a rush hearing of a constitutional challenge by
Ernst Zundel to ensure the case is heard before the internationally
known Holocaust-denier can be deported to Germany.
Over objections from the Crown
yesterday, Mr. Justice Marc Rosenberg said a three-judge panel
will hear the case in mid-May.
Mr. Zundel aims to strike down
a controversial anti-terrorism measure known as a security certificate
that is used to deport non-citizens who may pose a security risk.
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 Canadians.
Even alleged spies and terrorists
normally targeted this way are not permitted access to the precise
allegations against them.
Judge Rosenberg made his ruling
yesterday after hearing defence lawyers Peter Lindsay and Chi-Kun
Shi argue that their client has been in solitary confinement
for a year and faces deportation as soon as a Federal Court of
Canada judge completes a review of his case.
They also cited a dramatic
speech made by Federal Court of Canada judge to a security conference
in 2002. It went unreported at the time, but Mr. Justice James
Hugesson roundly condemned the security certificate procedure.
The veteran judge said there
was widespread discomfort on the Federal Court bench about the
way fundamental legal rights are denied under the process. "I
can tell you because we talked about it; we hate it," he
said. "We hate hearing only one party. We hate having to
decide what, if any, sensitive material can or should be conveyed
to the other party."
The judge said he felt like
"a bit of a fig leaf" used to cover a dubious procedure.
"This is not a happy posture
for a judge, and you are in fact looking at an unhappy camper
when I tell you about this function," Judge Hugesson said.
"With these national security affidavits, if they are successful
in persuading the judge, they will never see the light of day.
The fact that something improper has been said to the court may
never be revealed."
While Justice Department lawyers
strive to be fair at security certificate hearings, he said there
is no substitute for having two opposing parties reveal the shortcomings
of the each other's arguments.
"It does not matter how
good and how honest the lawyer is," he said. "If you
have a case that is only being presented on one side, you are
not going to get a good case."
Mr. Zundel retired to the United
States three years ago. Last year, he was arrested and returned
to Canada after failing to make a routine appointment with U.S.
Immigration Services. The federal government commenced deportation
proceedings.
Mr. Justice Pierre Blais of
the Federal Court of Canada has been conducting a review of the
certificate for several months, and is scheduled to hear final
arguments in early May. Since there is no appeal of a certificate
review, an adverse decision would mean Mr. Zundel's immediate
deportation.
"If this proceeding is
not expedited, it will likely be moot," Mr. Lindsay told
Judge Rosenberg yesterday. "The German government has already
offered to pick Mr. Zundel up on two existing warrants for denying
the Holocaust. Mr. Zundel could be on a plane to Germany and
a jail cell before his constitutional rights are determined."
Mr. Zundel lived in Canada
for 42 years with a clean criminal record.
However, Crown counsel Donald
MacIntosh argued that the courts have already effectively decided
against the constitutional issues Mr. Zundel intends to raise.
He said that in any case, an Ontario Court of Appeal ruling would
not be binding on Federal Court judges.
The only unclassified portion
of the security certificate against Mr. Zundel accuses him 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 those who do.
Of the 27 security certificates
issued since 1991 - only five since the 9/11 attack - virtually
all have involved suspected terrorists from such countries as
Iran and Algeria.
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, Mar.
6, 2004
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.
Rights group orders Zundel
to kill hate site
By KIRK MAKIN, JUSTICE REPORTER,
Globe and Maiy, January 19, 2002 Page A7
The Canadian Human Rights Commission
yesterday ordered Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel to kill off a
Web site featuring hate propaganda that targets Jews and the
Holocaust.
The commission said that whatever
free-speech protection may exist for hate material on the Internet
is vastly outweighed by the social benefits of eliminating hate-mongering.
"It bears repeating that
the expression in those documents does nothing to advance the
underlying values of freedom of expression," commissioners
Claude Pensa and Reva Devins said.
Michelle Falardeau-Ramsay,
chief commissioner of the CHRC, said the impact of the unregulated
Internet to spread hatred could not be underestimated.
The ruling came six years --
and millions of dollars in legal expenses -- after Mr. Zundel
was accused of using his so-called Zundelsite to continue a life-long
battle against Jews.
The commission conceded that
ordering Mr. Zundel to "cease and desist" from using
his Web site has a certain futility. It noted that the material
can be easily transferred to any number of "mirror sites"
where sympathizers could recreate it.
However, law professor Ed Morgan,
a senior official with the Canadian Jewish Congress, said the
human-rights battle has been more than worthwhile.
"There is a lot of symbolic
value in this," Prof. Morgan said in an interview. "This
has got to be a blow to the Canadian-based, neo-Nazi movement.
If there are Canadian-based sites, this will shut them down."
Prof. Morgan said the ruling
is in line with a provision the federal government put in its
recent antiterrorism bill that permits the regulation of Internet
material.
After interrupting the human-rights
inquiry with legal motions and appeals since 1996, Mr. Zundel
suddenly announced last year that he had lost interest in fighting
it.
In an interview yesterday from
his new home in the Smoky Mountain region of Tennessee, Mr. Zundel
had little to say about a ruling he described as tiresome and
irrelevant.
"You're talking to the
new Ernst Zundel," he said. "They used to accuse me
of Holocaust denial. Well, now I'm in Canada-denial. I have put
Canada behind me."
Mr. Zundel, who remarried recently
and sells his own paintings for a living, said he does not intend
to risk returning to Canada, lest he be stopped on some pretext
at the border.
"I'm not going to give
them the satisfaction," he said. "I will not set foot
in Canada again."
The commission described the
Zundelsite yesterday as a place in which "Jews are vilified
in the most rabid and extreme manner," equating it to a
schoolyard bully whose constant taunting "can erode an individual's
personal dignity and self-worth."
The commissioners added that
the ease with which vast amounts of hate information can be posted
on the Internet renders it a much greater threat to social harmony
than the telephone ever was.
RCMP 1998 GUIDELINES
ON HATE CRIMES AND HATE PROPAGANDA vague and general enough
to be useless and therefore dangerous in the hands of police.
See how
the RCMP is handling porn
From the University
of Missouri at Kansas City School of Law | Visit Jurist | for a whole list
of famous
trials
| or chronological prepared by Dr. Linder
| Inherit
the wind
Smith
trial | Bernardo
tapes |
|
Truth can never be
told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd. William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell