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March 2, 2010: Update on the Zundel Release, with a prison bill for $100,000
http://www.zundelsite.org/news_english/0089.html

Ernst Zundel, a German-born publisher and author, was held for seven years behind bars, first in Canada and then in Germany, for his peaceful expression of non-conformist views. From February 2003 to March 1st, 2010, he was the western world’s most prominent “prisoner of conscience.”

He is known worldwide as a publicist, organizer and defender of free speech, and as author of countless booklets, newsletters and essays. He has been a major figure in the Holocaust revisionist movement. Energetic, tenacious and courageous, he is dauntless in struggle against powerful adversaries and seemingly insurmountable odds.

During the 42 years he lived in Canada, Ernst Zundel was never convicted of a crime. He was, however, repeatedly a victim of violence and hate. He survived three assassination attempts, including by arson and pipe bomb. He’s also endured years of legal harassment and repeated jailings.

After more than four decades in Canada, including a failed effort to acquire Canadian citizenship, he moved to the United States, where in January 2000 he married Ingrid Rimland.

His wife, a gifted writer and noted author in her own right, was born in an ethnic German Mennonite community in Ukraine. As a child she and her family were victims of Soviet rule and the ravages of World War II. After the war she lived for a time in Paraguay and Canada, and then for years in California. Ingrid Rimland holds a doctoral degree in education, and is a naturalized US citizen.

On February 5, 2003, Ernst Zundel was arrested at their quiet home in the mountain region of eastern Tennessee. He was seized on the pretext that he had violated immigration regulations, or had missed an interview date with US immigration authorities, even though he had entered the US legally, was married to an American citizen, had no criminal record, and was acting diligently, and in full accord with the law, to secure status as a permanent legal resident.

After being held for two weeks, he was deported to Canada. For two years – from mid-February 2003 to March 1, 2005 – he was held in solitary confinement in the Toronto West Detention Centre, on the pretext that he is a threat to national security.

His arrest and detention generated wide media attention. A few Canadian newspapers, including Toronto’s prestigious Globe and Mail, and several independent analysts, acknowledged the injustice of his incarceration on an empty pretext.

The Canadian Association for Free Expression (CAFE), a free speech advocacy group, fought for Zundel’s release. “Mr. Zundel is quite literally a political prisoner,” said CAFE director Paul Fromm, who also served as Zundel’s legal representative in his detention hearings. “He is being held in solitary confinement solely for the non-violent expression of his political views.”

The allegation that Zundel might be a threat to national security “is mischievous nonsense,” said Fromm. “Zundel has been politically active in Canada for 40 years. He’s a public figure. His writings and speeches are available on-line. He’s been investigated for years by the police. He’s an open book. Zundel has never advocated or practised violence, nor have his followers,” Fromm added. “He’s a pacifist and a publisher.”

Zundel was held in Canada not because his views are unpopular, or because he was a “security risk.” He was in prison there because Jewish groups wanted him there, and because he promoted views that the Jewish-Zionist lobby considers harmful to its interests.

This lobby is the decisive, critical factor in the decades-old campaign to silence him. The only sustained and institutionalized effort to imprison Zundel has come from this lobby, which includes the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Canadian Holocaust Remembrance Association, and the League for Human Rights of B’nai B’rith (with the Anti-Defamation League, its counterpart in the US).

On March 1, 2005, Zundel was deported to Germany, just as Jewish groups had been demanding. Since then he has been held in the Mannheim prison were he faces years of imprisonment for the “thought crime” of “denying the Holocaust.” (“Holocaust denial” is against the law in Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland and some other European countries.)

On June 29, 2005, the public prosecutor in Mannheim formally charged Zundel with inciting “hatred” by having written or distributed texts that “approve, deny or play down” genocidal actions carried out by Germany’s wartime regime, and which “denigrate the memory of the [Jewish] dead. The first and foremost of the writings cited in the indictment are texts posted on the “Zundelsite” website, which is registered and maintained by his wife in the United States, where all such writings are entirely legal.

Zundel’s three-month trial concluded on February 15, 2007, when a court in Mannheim sentenced him to five years imprisonment for the crime of “popular incitement” under Germany’s notorious “Holocaust denial” statute. The 14 specific violations cited by the court included postings on the US-based “Zundelsite” website. The court thus upheld claims by German authorities to punish individuals for writings that are legal in the country where they are published. Jewish groups quickly, and predictably, expressed approval of the verdict.

In recent years, growing numbers of scholars, intellectuals and newspapers in Europe and other countries have condemned the laws in some European countries under which Zundel and others have been imprisoned, fined and forced into exile for expressing skeptical views on “the Holocaust.” These laws, critics point out, are selective, hypocritical and violate basic principles of free speech and free expression.

http://www.revisionists.com/revisionists/zundel.html

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