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News :: Right Wing |
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Neo-Nazi Activist Arrested In Tennessee For Visa Violations |
Current rating: 0 |
by gehrig
(No verified email address) |
11 Feb 2003
Modified: 02:14:48 PM |
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Some good news for a change. Article and my commentary (after the article) on the arrest of Ernst Zündel, one of the pivotal figures in the history of Holocaust denial. |
Reknowned Neo-Nazi activist held in Blount County jail
by Anna C. Irwin
of The Daily Times Staff (Maryville Tenn)
Feb. 8 -- A GERMAN national known for his claim there was no mass extermination of Jews before and during World War II is being held at the Blount County Jail.
Ernst Christof Friedrich Zündel, 63, has been called 'Canada's leading pro-Nazi and Holocaust-denial propagandist' by the Anti-Defamation League, an organization founded to combat anti-Semitism.
Zündel is being held for the Immigration and Naturalization Service pending action regarding an alleged immigration violation. He was taken in custody Wednesday at his home in Wear's Valley.
Sevier County Chief Deputy Doug Watson and Sgt. Darrel Lee accompanied INS agents led by Gary Slaybough who made the arrest.
Slaybough, head of the INS office in Knoxville, said the arrest was made without resistance. Sarah Mouw, a spokesman for the INS district office in New Orleans said Zündel is 'not in a legal immigration status. In layman's terms, it is an expired visa.'
Zündel's wife, Dr. Ingrid Rimland Zündel, said in a report on the Web site dedicated to Zündel's activities that her husband was told he had failed to show up at a scheduled immigration hearing in May 2001. She said they were never notified of a hearing.
The Zündels left Canada and moved to Sevier County in early 2001 after several lengthy court battles, some regarding his publishing activities including books, pamphlets and videos with titles such as 'Did Six Million Really Die?' and 'The Hitler We Loved and Why.'
The verdict in one of his most recent court battles denied his bid for Canadian citizenship. He has lived in Montreal and Toronto since immigrating in 1958 at age 19 to avoid the draft in his native Germany.
His autobiography 'Zündel-Haus' published on Zündelsite, a Internet site maintained by his wife, said he had been taught to 'hate Hitler and all he stood for and had been brainwashed by Allied occupation authorities-produced books in post-war German Schools.'
However, he said in the autobiography he learned after he came to Canada how to 'counter the poison, the false picture of history.' He worked as a graphic artist and eventually founded Samisdat Publishers Ltd. The company was known as a major outlet for Holocaust-denial materials.
Zündel no longer publishes such materials, but his Web site is considered by the Anti-Defamation League as a 'repository of Holocaust-denial propaganda.'
The Canadian government tried to shut down the Web site based on the Canadian Human Rights Act. A tribunal ruled in January 2002 that it is illegal to create and maintain a 'hate' site in Canada. 'Zündelsite' now operates from the United States and is updated regularly by Zündel's wife and lists a Pigeon Forge address to send donations.
The INS would not say if or when Zündel may be scheduled for a court appearance, possibly in the nearest immigration court at Memphis or in the court serving the district office in New Orleans.
'I don't know what his immigration status is, but he is a bad boy,' Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said in an interview with Knoxville-based Associated Press writer Duncan Mansfield from the group's New York headquarters.
'He is an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier. He is somebody America could do without,' Foxman said, 'but I am sure his legal rights will be protected.'
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My comments:
Zündel is one of the key people who brought Holocaust denial to North America. It was for one of his trials in Canada that he hired the hapless doof Fred Leuchter, self-proclaimed engineer and expert in execution equipment, to write "The Leucther Report" -- a paper supposedly proving scientifically that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. (See the Errol Morris documentary _Mr. Death: the Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter_ for more, including an appearance by Zündel.)
David Irving first became involved in Holocaust denial, incidentally, when he published the UK edition of the Leuchter report under his own imprint, Focal Point Press. (Irving also appears in the documentary.)
The most interesting thing about the Zündel case, I think, is the way it demonstrates that laws against hate speech -- including laws in European nations against Holocaust denial -- are ineffectual in the age of the Internet. Zündel himself went from Austria to Canada and then to Tennessee, taking his website with him, but the site remained essentially unchanged.
My personal reaction, of course, is that this calls for a bottle of champagne.
@%< |
See also:
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/z/zundel-ernst/
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