"Does the freedom of opinion of the West permit the consideration of questions
like the crimes of America and Israel or an event like the Holocaust?"

 
Ernst Zündel
and the Zündel Heresy Trial
By Peter Meyer

In regard to the publication in Denmark in September 2005 of the Muhammad cartoons, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said:

[It's] part of our society [in Denmark] that we have freedom of expression, we have a free press and this freedom of expression is a vital and indispensable part of our democracy ... — Interview with Al Arabiya, February 1st, 2006

Even though it seems that the purpose of the Danish publication was to provoke an angry Muslim response leading to an intended anti-Muslim reaction in Denmark (and the rest of Europe), the Prime Minister's remark is nevertheless true of his country (at least insofar as this freedom of expression does not constitute opposition to the U.S./NATO goal of world domination). In contrast, it is not true of Germany. But that did not prevent the editors of the German newspaper Die Zeit and many other European newspapers from attempting to justify the (entirely unnecessary) republication on February 1st, 2006, of the caricatures on the basis of "freedom of expression"; and the editor of France Soir reprinted the Danish cartoons under a headline which declared: "One Has the Right to Caricature God".

But we must ask, along with the Iranian journal Hamshari:

The important question for Muslims is: Does the freedom of opinion of the West permit the consideration of questions like the crimes of America and Israel or an event like the Holocaust? Or is freedom of opinion only good for insulting the holy values of religions?

The answer is provided by Richard Itani:

Click to enlarge
© 2006 Studio Bendib. LLC

In many European countries, there are laws that will land in jail any person who has the chutzpah to deny not only the historicity of the Jewish holocaust, but also the method by which Jews were put to death by the Nazis. In some of these countries, this prohibition goes as far as prosecuting those who would claim or attempt to prove that less than 6 million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis. In none of these countries are there similar laws that threaten people with loss of freedom and wealth for denying that large percentages of gypsies, gays, mentally retarded, and other miscellaneous "debris of humanity" were also eliminated by the Jew-slaughtering Nazis.

Quickly now: what defines a hypocrite? Answer: a person who follows the letter of the law, but not its spirit. The laws against anti-semitism are just that: laws against anti-semitism enacted by hypocritical Europeans with blood on their hands from the genocides in their recent and distant past, and much guilt to atone for in their hearts and minds. — Cartoons and Hypocrisy [Page removed but available here.]

Ernst Zündel is one of those who have been prosecuted for claiming or attempting to prove that less than six million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis. Europe's much-vaunted insistence on the right of freedom of expression of opinion apparently does not apply when that opinion concerns whether or not six million Jews really died at the hands of the Nazis. Hypocrisy indeed.

This matter is not a question of anti-semitism (though some will say it is). It is a question of the right to discuss in public the evidence for or against claims that certain things happened, as they are said to have happened (said perhaps by people with a vested interest in portraying historical events in one way rather than another).

On February 9th, 2006, the trial of Ernst Zündel began in Mannheim, Germany.

Ernst John Kaminski wrote (when Ernst Zündel was still in jail in Canada, before being deported to Germany, where he was arrested upon arrival):

Ernst Zündel still languishes in a Canadian jail, in solitary confinement, denied of many of the basic privileges most prisoners, even actual criminals, take for granted.

A true hero of the Holocaust Revisionist movement for his outspoken opposition to the official Zionist version of World War II, Zundel was kidnapped by U.S. INS agents in February [2003] on the pretext of missing a scheduled appointment (Zündel claims he knew nothing about it), spirited off to Canada (where he resided for 42 years), and faces deportation to Germany and a long prison term, because in Germany it is against the law to contradict the Jewish version of what precisely happened during World War II.

In his Canadian prison ordeal, Zündel is not allowed to hear the evidence against him, who the witnesses are, or even what the accusations are. This procedure, permitted by Canadian anti-terrorist legislation, cancels the basic right under Anglo-Saxon common law of the defendant to know the charges against him, to face his accusers and to challenge their evidence in order to make a full and complete defense.

Canadian authorities allege that Zündel, while not personally violent, is a terrorist and supports serious acts of violence in Canada or abroad.

Zündel, an award-winning cartoonist, artist and videographer, was Canada's best-known revisionist. For publishing a slim booklet entitled Did Six Million Really Die? he was twice put on trial and convicted on a charge of spreading "false news."

It is important to understand that those who reject the Holocaust story do not dispute that large numbers of Jews were deported to concentration camps and ghettos, and that many Jews were killed during the Second World War. Every serious revisionist acknowledges that Europe's Jews suffered a catastrophe during the Hitler years. They were ruthlessly uprooted, taken from their homes, and herded into horribly overcrowded ghettos and miserable concentration camps, where many of them perished. Their property and their rights were taken away.

While conceding all of this, the men and women who have testified on Zündel's behalf have articulated their reasons for rejecting the idea that there was a German program to exterminate Europe's Jews, and for disbelieving the stories about mass killings in gas chambers.

So when someone is accused of "denying the Holocaust" one has to ask: What exactly are they accused of denying? If the accuser will then specify what the alleged denier is claimed to deny, then it may be revealed that this is not what is being denied. But if it is then the question is: What evidence is there that what is denied actually occurred? This is a historical question, to be answered by reference to historical evidence. The answer is not provided by the existence of laws making it illegal to put forward evidence which "offends" some ethnic or religious group (especially if that group benefits, or has benefited, financially or politically, from the suppression of any challenge to the generally accepted view).

Whether or not one agrees with Ernst Zündel's views on what happened during World War II the fact remains that everyone has a right to express their opinions as long as that expression is not an incitement to violence (and an examination of historical evidence is never an incitement to violence). It is a gross violation of human rights that Ernst Zündel was locked up in solitary confinement for two years in Canada and denied basic legal rights for stating what he believes (based on evidence he has presented in his writings) to be the truth. It is also a gross violation of human rights that he is now on trial in Germany, where, if convicted, will likely spend more years in jail.

What are the defenders of the "six million" claim so afraid of, that they seek to use the power of the German state to attempt to silence those who would present contrary evidence?

Perhaps what they are afraid of is that a public examination of what happened during 1917-1950 (and in particular during 1939-1945) will reveal that Jews were not the only people to suffer catastrophe. First there was the Armenian Genocide. Then many millions of Russians died in Stalin's purges in the 1920s and 1930s (as a consequence of the Jew Lenin's overthrow of Kerensky). About four million Ukrainians starved to death during the Holodomor, a famine which Stalin might have prevented if he had wished to (so considered by some to constitute genocide) — did you ever hear of it before? During World War II at least 22 million non-combatants died in Europe. Do we hear anything of the Ukrainians who died then? The Poles? The Russians? The Yugoslavs? Do we hear anything of the nine million Germans who died as a result of the policies of Eisenhower and Morganthau at the end of World War II? No. It is only "six million Jews" that we hear of — again and again, like a broken record.

The "six million" figure is the basis for the Holocaust Industry, which is not about making sure that Nazi cruelty is not forgotten — it is about extorting huge sums of money from Germany, Switzerland and any other country which can be tarred with the Nazi brush. Germany has so far paid out $60 billion and its politicians continue to grovel (as shown by Angela Merkel's performance before the Israeli Knesset in March 2008). In the late 1990s the World Jewish Congress managed to extort $1.25 billion from the Swiss banks.

It's not about morality or justice, it's about money (lots of it) and furthering Zionism. That's why it is illegal in ten European countries (countries in which Jews have a disproportionate influence) to question publicly the "six million" claim — since doing so may lead to general realization of the inconvenient (for the Zionists) truth that there was (and is) nothing unique or special about Jewish suffering, and certainly nothing that could elevate it to its present status as a quasi-religious dogma which cannot be questioned even in its minutest detail without eliciting veiled accusations of heresy and near-hysterical demands for punishment of the heretic.

For more information about Ernst Zündel, see The Zundelsite, including Who is Ernst Zündel?.

See also:

Now begins a show trial worthy of Stalin.

The show trial of David Irving lasted just one day (Febraury 20, 2006).

U.N. General Assembly adopts resolution condemning Holocaust denial

The U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution Friday condemning the denial of the Holocaust, with only Iran rejecting it as an attempt by the United States and Israel to exploit the atrocity for their political interests. ...

At the 192-member General Assembly, Iran stood by its stance that the Holocaust should be closely examined to determine its scope.

"Only by studying objectively what happened in the past, can we ensure that such crimes will never be repeated again," said Iranian delegate Hossein Gharibi. "The seriousness and sincerity of this endeavor would be indeed undermined by rendering political judgments on such events and closing the door to any inquiry on their characteristics, scope and extent." ...

Gharibi accused the United States and Israel of pushing the resolution "to pursue their narrow political interests through all means" and said Iran dissociated itself "from this entire hypocritical political exercise." "The Israeli regime has routinely attempted to exploit the sufferings of the Jewish people in the past as a cover for the crimes its has perpetrated over the past six decades against Palestinians," he said.

He was not alone in criticizing Israel.

Venezuela, while supporting the resolution, said Israel's "excesses under the pretext of legitimate defense has led to a new holocaust against the Palestinian people." The South American country, whose President Hugo Chavez is harshly critical of U.S. foreign policy, extended that comparison to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.

"The deaths of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were also a holocaust and therefore we should remember them," said Venezuelan delegate Marco Palavicini. "Hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis are victims of the invasion in the name of democracy. They too are victims of a holocaust."

— International Herald Tribune, January 26, 2007

The coreligionists of the victims of the Nazi Jewish holocaust are tireless in presenting themselves as victims despite most of them having been born after 1945, but at the present time it is the Palestinians who are the victims of a Jewish holocaust (with, this time, the Jews as the perpetrators), a holocaust which has lasted over sixty years and (to the great shame of the Europeans, and particularly the Germans) continues undiminished.

Other relevant pages:

A contributor (MM) to the comments section of an article on The Saker's Blog posted this comment (August 2, 2015):

The manner in which this tiny elite, or more precisely the ruling elements of this elite, the self-described ‘aristocrats of humanity’, have taken over the Western world is quite stupefying. As during their habitation in Europe during the Middle Ages they cunningly buy the elites, and the serfs are dragooned easily thereafter.

The cunning, if morally debased, manipulation of the Nazi Judeocide as the most successful brainwashing trope of all time, is also exemplary in its efficacy. Every other horror of WW2, and indeed of the rest of human history, every genocide, massacre and barbarity taken together, receive less attention than the fate of European Jewry. It has become a quasi-religion throughout the West, with ‘Holocaust’ museums, memorials, movies, plays, books, etc. proliferating like fungi after the rain. There has been deliberately created a hierarchy of human suffering, with the ‘Gods upon the Earth’ receiving constant attention, while the Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Congolese (under Leopold and in the last twenty years), Indigenous of the New Worlds, Soviets, Chinese, etc., are more or less ignored. And to even note this vile double standard will bring an instant shower of abuse as ‘antisemite'(TM) or, even more filthily ‘Holocaust denier’. One must either accept the Zionazi propaganda trope that the Nazi Judeocide was ‘unique’ in all human history, and uniquely important, or you are accused of denying it in its entirety.

As you observe, this process is open-ended. As Israel becomes, inevitably, more racist, fascist, fundamentalist and aggressive, so, too, will decent people everywhere begin to justly revile it more and more. And the Israelis’ unmatched arrogance and belligerence will only incite more resistance. And the Jewish Fifth Columns in the West will insist on more and more punitive repression of the ‘antisemites'(TM). Already the BDS movement, which is growing despite 100% uniformity of MSM abuse, is being made illegal in numerous places, as, of course, ‘antisemitism’. The vile nonentity, Hollande, recently threatened to close down websites promulgating ‘antisemitic conspiracy theories’. In other words the Jews will officially become what their narcissistic cult decrees them to be — a ‘Chosen People’, totally, uniformly and perpetually innocent of any wrong-doing whatsoever, even when butchering hundreds of Gazan children, or burning toddlers alive. There is no end point to this repression, because there are no bounds on Judaic narcissism, arrogance and belligerence. And, as always throughout their 3500-year history, they will create the scourge for their own backs.

An anonymous contributor to the comments section of the same article wrote:

[The] local MSM when running human interest stories designed to jerk a few tears, overwhelmingly turns to ‘Holocaust’ tragedies. I would say about 50% of the time. The rest of humanity, the 99.5%, get the other 50%. The Palestinians get none, save when useful for propaganda against Syria or Lebanon. Other victims of WW2, like the tens of millions of dead Soviets and Chinese get NO interest whatsoever. It’s as natural as the Sun rising, none dare notice, let alone mention the disparity, and the Jewish Lobbies exploit the Shoah ruthlessly and relentlessly. On one hand, I can imagine how the Shoah did drive many Jews to fear and hate non-Jews even more than their religion instructs them to, but it really leads them up a cul-de-sac where their belligerence and aggression will surely breed a mountain of hatred that will come back to bedevil them again. They seem driven to provoke hatred against themselves, as if to justify their own extreme xenophobia. Millions have been sacrificed on the altar of this goy-hatred already, in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza etc, and as the current truly evil Israeli regime shows, this hatred is only growing more and more extreme in its manifestations.

After his release from jail in Germany Ernst Zündel was banned from returning to live with his wife Ingrid in Tennessee. He died at his family home in Germany on August 5, 2017. The former content of his website has been removed and now has only a picture of him and his wife (who died soon after him).

Norman Finkelstein on the Holocaust Industry
Mass Starvation of Germans, 1945-1950
Re-Arranging the 20th Century: Allegro, non Troppo
Genocide Zionism Serendipity Home Page