Killing Thousands Is Less Criminal Than Contradicting The Official Line on the Holocaust

"There are many fine organizations the world over that focus on the free speech rights of writers, journalists, and dissidents. However, many of these organizations, including Amnesty International, actually favor imprisoning Holocaust 'revisionists.' Amnesty International has, by its own admission, lobbied governments to make Holocaust 'revisionist' books, speeches, and Internet postings illegal. Many other free speech organizations remain silent on the question of anti-revisionist laws.

"The Jews who were persecuted and killed by the Third Reich were victims of an authoritarian state that censored books and imprisoned authors. To censor books and imprison authors in the name of the victims of the Holocaust is a travesty. Employing fascist methods to honor the innocent victims of fascism is lunacy. Enacting fascistic laws in order to fight fascism is, by definition, self-defeating.

"The French government has found anti-revisionist laws quite useful in eliminating pesky political opponents. It is a crime in France to 'diminish' the Holocaust by not giving it the proper emphasis when speaking or writing about it. This ill-defined, subjective statute makes it easy to prosecute someone for the narrowest of reasons. Using this law, the French government has been able to prosecute political foes on the right (anti-immigrant politician Jean-Marie Le Pen), and the left (Ginette Skandrani, co-founder of France's Green Party).

"Advocates of anti-revisionist laws claim that these laws are needed in order to keep Holocaust skeptics from having an audience, yet in almost every case in which these laws have been enforced, they have only succeeded in giving the prosecuted revisionists a much greater audience than they otherwise would have had. Here is one example: 

"Chemist Germar Rudolf was an apolitical young doctoral student at the prestigious Max Planck Institute in Germany until, in 1993, he was hired by the defense team of a prosecuted German revisionist to prepare a chemical analysis report for the revisionist's upcoming trial. In retaliation, the German government arrested Rudolf, froze his assets, seized his books and computer, and sentenced him to fourteen months imprisonment. No longer able to finish his degree or find work as a chemist, and facing massive legal expenses for his upcoming trial, Rudolf was forced to rely on sympathetic revisionists to raise money. Rudolf became a full-time revisionist writer, arguably the most qualified scientific professional the revisionist community has. So what good did his prosecution accomplish, other than to drive a young would-be chemist directly into the arms of the aging revisionist community, giving them a new, young, energetic, and academically qualified spokesperson?

"The Germans are prosecuting Ernst Zundel for material he posted on his website while he was a legal resident of the United States. The German government's legal theory is that even though Zundel's writings were lawful in the country in which he was living, the fact that the Internet 'brought' Zundel's words into German 'territory' therefore gives Germany jurisdiction to imprison him. Amazingly, the governments of the U.S. and Canada have supported Germany's right to imprison Zundel for 'speech crimes' that were not committed in Germany, and that were not crimes in the country in which Zundel was living. This is an exceptionally dangerous precedent.

"It should be mentioned that Ernst Zundel faces up to ten years in prison (not counting the three years he's already served: two years in Canada, in solitary confinement in a six-by-ten foot cell, and one year in Germany awaiting trial). Germar Rudolf, currently awaiting sentencing in Germany as well, also faces up to ten years. To put these sentences in context, Mounir el Motassadeq, who was convicted in 2005 for his role in the Al Qaeda 'Hamburg cell' that carried out the 9/11 attacks, received only seven years.

"When writers whose only 'crimes' are Internet postings about history, controversial, offensive, or inaccurate they may be, face more prison time than a terrorist implicated in the murder of over three thousand people, something has gone terribly wrong."

-------------David Cole, Republican Party Animal, 2014 pps. 130-1