“What some call the promotion of hatred others call telling the truth. Quite often, whatever opinion the rich and powerful do not like they will find some means of calling ‘hatred.’ In any event, we believe in the right to promote hatred by any means that do not fall within the Common Law definition of assault.”

“. . . in the standard accounts of the Second World War, the Katyn Wood massacre used to be blamed on the Germans, and now it is blamed on the Soviets. How can I be sure that the same is not true for the holocaust?”

“. . . I can believe that Hitler was a bad man: this does not require me to believe that he ate human flesh.”

“. . . considered purely in itself, the revisionist material is as persuasive as that of the mainstream historians. At least one side in this debate is lying, and lying very fluently—but I am not able, on the basis of the evidence offered, to say who is lying.”

“I believe in the central fact of the holocaust. On the secondary issues mentioned above, where my authorities do not agree, I suspend judgment. Take away the freedom to argue with or against these authorities, though, and my assurance that they are right must be weakened.”

“Laws to compel belief in the holocaust do not mean it did not happen. But they do allow people to ask what kind of truth this is that needs laws to defend it. There are many people who know even less about the holocaust than I do, and who deny that it happened simply because David Irving is generally acknowledged to be an expert of sorts on the period, and he had to be locked up before he would shut up.”

Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals Proves Politically Correct in Latest Zündel Ruling

By Fred Lingel

In a decision issued Feb. 27, the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati has unanimously upheld a lower court’s judgment stripping historian and pacifist Ernst Zündel of his right to be heard on a petition for writ of habeas corpus which was filed when Zündel was first arrested by U.S. authorities in February 2003.

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The court held that the controversial German publisher had effectively bargained away his right to appear before a court because he last entered the United States under the Visa Waiver Pilot Program (VWPP) in May 2000. The court of appeals ignored Zündel’s arguments based on the U.S. Constitution and rejected his argument based on the expiration of the VWPP April 30, 2000.

Zündel has asserted that, because the VWPP had sunset by the time of his May 2000 entry, the attorney general and INS could not have permitted him entry as a “visa waiver” alien in May 2000, and were not entitled to enforce the agreement that “visa waiver” candidates have to enter into as a condition for not having to obtain a visa. Zündel was in a routine waiting period for U.S. permanent residence through his U.S. citizen wife, Ingrid, at the time of his arrest.

“Once again, Ernst Zündel has been betrayed by a federal judiciary which, in its rush to judgment, has tread roughshod on the Constitution and the letter and intent of the law in order to achieve a politically correct result,” said Zündel’s attorney, Bruce Leichty.

There is no precedent for denying an individual of Zündel’s immigration status a hearing on a habeas petition, said Leichty, who noted that the courts have routinely extended habeas rights even to illegal immigrants.

Recent appellate decisions have focused on whether enemy combatants held outside the United States have the right to habeas proceedings, but Zündel was never labeled as an enemy combatant or terrorist-despite ultimately being declared a “national security” risk by Canadian authorities after his summary removal from the United States.

“The law in this area is well established,” said Leichty, “and a different panel of the Sixth Circuit recognized in an earlier decision that immigrants like Zündel can obtain habeas hearings even after they are deported if they face a 20-year bar like the one imposed on Mr. Zündel. But this panel was not willing to apply the law.

“At the time of his arrest, Ernst Zündel was a target of several countries based on his controversial historical views about ‘the Holocaust,’ and even though he was protected by the First Amendment [in the United States], those protections have proved meaningless without judges willing to uphold them,” notes Leichty.

If the decision is allowed to stand, Zündel would be banned from reentering the United States until 2023. He is currently 67 years old.Just weeks before the Sixth Circuit decision, he was convicted in a German courtroom of “inciting racial hatred” because of his Holocaust revisionist views. Zündel asserted that he is a pacifist who is neither anti-Semitic nor racist but that he is simply a champion of his German people, and that he has the right to express different views about what happened during the World War II, including what happened to Jews.

Zündel will seek a rehearing from different judges at the Sixth Circuit based on the unconstitutional suspension of his habeas rights and on known conflicts of interest of at least two members of the panel, says Leichty. One of the judges gave a prohibited campaign contribution to the Bush reelection campaign after being appointed to the federal bench and another has a daughter working in Tennessee for the U.S. attorney’s office, which handled the opposition against Zündel’s petition in a Knoxville federal court.

Zündel’s attorney says he discovered both facts after the case was argued in January 2007. The judges adopted almost to the letter the argument of the Justice Department that sought to assert a distinction between the expiration of a “Visa Waiver Pilot Program period” and the expiration in April 2000 of the attorney general’s visa waiver authority itself-a distinction which was farcical, says Leichty.

The February appellate decision was issued “per curiam,” meaning that none of the judges acknowledged writing the decision, and it was designated “not for publication.” There have been recent attempts to limit the extent to which federal judges can issue unpublished decisions because it is believed that judges are less accountable to the law if they know their decisions will not be widely read and inspected, notes Leichty.

Only if Zündel was found to have entered the United States under the VWPP could the authorities have even thought about arresting him without a hearing, says Leichty. Typically, persons alleged to be deportable get hearings in front of immigration judges. Moreover, Leichty adds, even as to visa waiver entrants there are no published federal court decisions in which a court has ever denied jurisdiction over a habeas petition filed by someone who overstayed his visitor status.

Leichty states that at the time of Zündel’s arrest, INS had a policy of not taking deportation action against immigrants awaiting permanent residence through U.S. citizen spouses, even if they had overstayed visa waivers. Zündel had been given work authorization in the United States and permission to leave and reenter. Because a Knoxville judge and now the Sixth Circuit have claimed not to have jurisdiction, however, he has never been able to present those arguments. When Zündel challenges the latest decision, that will mean that he will have legal challenges pending in three countries. He has appealed his German “thought crime” conviction, and is also hoping to benefit from a recent Canadian Supreme Court decision which held that the “security certificate” proceedings under which he was detained in Canada are unconstitutional, because they permit secret evidence.

After a Canadian court declared him to be a national security risk, the Canadian government spent over $100,000 on a charter plane to fly Zündel to Germany, where he was promptly arrested on criminal speech charges for views expressed in Canada and the United States.

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The loss of liberty, to a generous mind, is worse than death. And yet we know that there have been those in all ages who for the sake of preferment, or some imaginary honor, have freely lent a helping hand to oppress, nay to destroy, their country . . . . This is what every man who values freedom ought to consider. He should act by judgment and not by affection or self-interest; for where those prevail, no ties of either country or kindred are regarded; as upon the other hand, the man who loves his country prefers its liberty to all other considerations, well knowing that without liberty life is a misery. . . .

Within minutes . . . Foxman had begun to advance up his scale of spleen. He was shouting about Auschwitz and six million and then ticking off the litany of Jews who had been killed in recent years only because they were Jews: congregants in Buenos Aires, the journalist Daniel Pearl, a volunteer at a Jewish charity in Seattle — “and now Ilan,” whose kidnappers assumed that all Jews are rich. “I still hear the good people” — Foxman uses the word good in this context to mean “saps” — “coming to us in the A.D.L., saying: ‘What are you worried about stereotypes? They’re words! Big deal.’ We sat with the minister of education in Spain not long ago, and she said to us, ‘When we say Jews are rich, when we say Jews are successful, it’s a compliment.’” Foxman was now full-out screaming. “And I looked at her and I said: ‘Your Excellency, no thanks. Those are words that helped pave the way to Auschwitz.’” (James Traub, “Does Abe Foxman Have an Anti-Semite Problem?,” New York Times, January 14, 2007. Here is the notice The Flogger took of this revealing portrait.)

spent literally years adding to, revising, and checking the entire article, so that it would pass the highest and most rigorous standards. His friend, the Pearl Harbor expert Commander Charles C. Hiles, helped immeasurably in repeated reading and checking over the material. We have been delighted and honored that Harry chose the pages of Left and Right to present what he proposed to be his final word on the subject, the culminating synthesis of a quarter century of revisionist inquiry.

"No one can legislate historical truth. In so far as historical truth can be established at all, it must be found by unfettered historical research, with historians arguing over the evidence and the facts, testing and disputing each other's claims without fear of prosecution or persecution."

"Those European countries that have them should repeal not only their blasphemy laws but also their laws on Holocaust denial. Otherwise the charge of double standards is impossible to refute. What's sauce for the goose must be sauce for the gander."

"Today, if we want to defend free speech in our own countries and to encourage it in places where it is currently denied, we should be calling for David Irving to be released from his Austrian prison. . . . Only when we are prepared to allow our own most sacred cows to be poked in the eye can we credibly demand that Islamists, Turks and others do the same. This is a time not for erecting taboos but for dismantling them. We must practice what we preach."

“Muslims who are outraged by the Danish cartoons note that in several European countries it is a crime publicly to deny, as the president of Iran has denied, that the Holocaust ever took place. They say that Western concern for free speech is therefore only self-serving hypocrisy, and they have a point. But of course the remedy is not to make the compromise of democratic legitimacy even greater than it already is but to work toward a new understanding of the European Convention on Human Rights that would strike down the Holocaust-denial law and similar laws across Europe for what they are: violations of the freedom of speech that that convention demands.”

Ronald Dworkin, “The Right to Ridicule,”
The New York Review of Books, March 23, 2006