Posted on 02/15/2007 10:57:59 PM PST by Muentzer2005
A German neo-Nazi publisher was yesterday sentenced to five years in prison for inciting racial hatred and denying that the Nazis murdered six million Jews.
Ernst Zündel, who was extradited from Canada to face trial in Germany in 2005, received the maximum sentence available for the crime of Holocaust denial after being found guilty on 14 counts ...
"You might as well argue that the sun rises in the west, but you cannot change that the Holocaust has been proven," he said, referring to Zündel's work Did Six Million Really Die? The prosecution accused him of using "pseudo-scientific methods" in an attempt to overturn the accepted facts on the Holocaust.
But campaigners for Zündel, 67, said he was a peaceful advocate of the right to free speech who was being denied that right. His supporters filled the courtroom.
At the close of the trial Zündel - who also wrote The Hitler We Loved and Why, and has described Hitler as "a decent and very peaceful man" - asked the court in Mannheim to set up an international commission of historians to explore the Holocaust. He said he wanted "hard facts" and not just witness statements, and that if the commission could prove Jews were gassed he would "hold a press conference at which I would publicly apologise to Jews, Israelis and the world".
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
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WHAT??? Are you serious? Do you think FReepers are stupid or something? Ernst Zundel and his odious wife are very active in the Holocaust denial "trade". He has a website at which he spews his garbage, and his word is golden to Jewhaters and Neo-Nazis alike. Please inform yourself before you post on this topic, as there are many here who know the real score. A simple painter, he is not...
What "truth" is Zundel being punished for uttering?? Please do expand upon that thought.
I can't believe what my pupils read this morning.
I can't believe who is teaching our children today.
Ironically, Europe never learned a lesson after WW2.....freedom of speech and freedom not to listen!!!
You said: Should a man be jailed because he argues that the sun rises in the west?
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15 words that end the debate, in my view. Well said.
The best response to hateful speech is more speech exposing the hate to the truth.
I think they are already there. When you can be put away for 5 years for stating a opinion and when you see SWAT teams busting in a house and taking a child at gunpoint to ship him to a mental asylum because he was home schooled, that's pretty totalitarian.
This principle troubled me when the CIA "rendition" program broke. Seems we renditioned Zundel. The Canadian Tribunal's line about "the truth is no defense" reminds me of a Rehnquist death penalty decision in US Supreme Court. Appeallant had newly discovered exculpatory evidence, sought rehearing. Rehnquist, writing for majority held that so long as all legal process had been properly observed, at the level of SCOTUS, "innocence was irrelevant".
Be afraid, very afraid. The slope is slippery and elevating angle.
"The American viewpoint is what put an end to those attrocities"
actually, the american and the soviet viewpoints.
Ernst Zundel propagandized for our terrorist enemies. Many neo-Nazi writers do the same and have their unholy alliance with Islamo-fascists.
You certainly do. Then again, so do I.
When Ernst Zundel was nailed in the US his visa had expired. He was therefore an illegal alien. One could argue that he married his German-born American wife to seek cover for his Holocaust-denial website, by trying to claim it was she not he who is responsible for it. It was all a gambit to keep publishing his filth.
You certainly do seem to have great empathy for that man, the author of the book The Hitler We Loved and Why.
you are the first voice of historical perspective I have read on this thread. thank you.
simply put, germany was burnt to the ground by 1945. this means no food, no water, no law and order, nothing but chaos and wondering which military unit will move through next. This is a situation no living american has experienced IN the US, and furthermore germany is surrounded by potential, current, or former enemies, and was even partitioned, and of course they would ban anything (nzi paraphanelia, certain speech) that would benefit the supporters of the nsdap.
this is not a moral post (for the confused, i am not saying this is right or wrong, simply that the germans do have some fairly compelling reasons for some of their laws, for better or worse.
or to put it another way, if you think this law is wrong, what do you think of similar laws they have proscribing nsdaq paraphanelia, the name, etc.
Thanks for the clarification!
Thats fine. Nail him for that and leave him alone for his holocaust denial delusions.
Right now with the direction things are headed, propagandizing for the enemy will be protected speech, while criticizing the enemy will be punished as hate speech. This is a step in that direction.
This man will get his just reward in the afterlife, in the meantime, "let him rave on that men shall know him mad".
Julius Streicher was convicted at Nuremberg for a reason.
From the Nuremberg trials:
"CONCLUSION. It may be that Streicher is less directly involved in the physical commission of the crimes against Jews than some of his coconspirators. The submission of the Prosecution is that his crime is no less worse for that reason. No government in the world, before the Nazis came to power, could have embarked upon and put into effect a policy of mass Jewish extermination in the way in which they did, without having a people who would back them and support them, and without having a large number of people who were prepared to carry out the murder themselves. (See Chapter XII on Persecution of the Jews.)
It was to the task of educating and poisoning the people with hate, and of producing murderers, that Streicher set himself. For 25 years he continued unrelentingly the perversion of the people and youth of Germany. He went on and on, as he saw the results of his work bearing fruit.
In the early days he was preaching persecution. As persecution took place he preached extermination and annihilation and, as millions of Jews were exterminated and annihilated, in the Ghettos of the East, he cried out for more and more.
The crime of Streicher is that he made these crimes possible, which they would never have been had it not been for him and for those like him. Without Streicher and his propaganda, the Kaltenbrunners, the Himmlers, the General Stroops would have had nobody to do their orders.
In its extent Streicher's crime is probably greater and more far-reaching than that of any of the other defendants. The misery which they caused ceased with their capture. The effects of this man's crime, of the poison that he has put into the minds of millions of young boys and girls goes on, for he concentrated upon the youth and childhood of Germany. He leaves behind him a legacy of almost a whole people poisoned with hate, sadism, and murder, and perverted by him. That people remain a problem and perhaps a menace to the rest of civilization for generations to come."
And may I also remind you that Bin Laden flew no planes on 9-11, yet he is as culpable as the ones who did, as he incited, with his fatwas (WORDS) the actions of those, and many other Islamofascist killers.
(One of the interesting rulings by the Tribunal, when Zundel's Canadian attorney presented evidence that Zundel had not written the words he was being accused of saying was "The truth is not a defense in this court."
L
A publisher of anti-semitic swill.
He paints pictures.
So did Hitler. And Hitler had a cute little doggie too.
Jeez...
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