Worldscope

Ernst Zündel won another, big round against his persecutors in Canada on April 14. The misnamed Canadian Human Rights Tribunal agreed to adjourn indefinitely its hearings aimed at closing down the Zündel Website in the U.S. (actually controlled and operated by Dr. Ingrid Rimland) by holding Zündel responsible for its revisionist (“and thus anti-Semitic”) content. This devious plan misfired when a Zündel researcher discovered that a member of the tribunal, Reva Esther Devins, had written a viciously anti-Zündel press release in 1988, whereupon a conscientious Canadian judge ruled that Devins was unqualified to judge the Zundelsite fairly. He invalidated the tribunal’s previous decisions involving Devins as well, including its failure to qualify Dr. Alexander Jacobs and Dr. Robert Countess as expert witnesses.

There’s also heartening news from Spain, where an appellate court has transferred the appeal of Pedro Varela, sentenced to five years in prison last November for publishing and selling revisionist material, to Spain’s “Constitutional Tribunal.” The appellate court in Barcelona, the city where Varela has long operated the Europa bookstore, found that the publisher and bookseller’s conviction under a 1995 law, which allows Holocaust revisionism to be classed as “justification of genocide,” may conflict with Spain’s constitutional guarantee of free expression.

In Poland, the controversy over the Holocaust takes two forms. One, the bitter contention between Poles and Jews over who “owns” Auschwitz, draws the most coverage in Polish and international media. There are now, however, signs of a developing Holocaust revisionism in Poland. As SR 56 (July 1998) reported, editor Tomasz Gabis devoted much of a 1997 issue of the journal Stanczyk to a favorable consideration of Holocaust revisionism. Gabis has been recently joined by Dariusz Ratajczak, a professor at the University of Opole in Silesia, who was reportedly recently suspended from his teaching position after publication of his book Dangerous Topics, which forthrightly sums up the revisionist case against the orthodox Holocaust story. Since this January, Holocaust “denial” has been against the law in Poland.

Jean Plantin, editor and publisher of the scholarly, attractively produced French revisionist journal Akribeia, was arrested, strip searched, interrogated, and held by French police for twenty-seven hours in January in Lyon. Following Plantin’s release police, and an operative of the misnamed government “Office of Public Liberties” in Paris, searched his home in Saint-Genis-Laval, confiscating two computers and a dozen floppy disks. Plantin writes: “thus several years of work, research, translation, and editing have been wiped out.” His 75 year-old mother, director of the corporation that publishes Akribeia, was also brought to police headquarters in Lyon for questioning. Plantin, whose revisionist abilities were early recognized by Robert Faurisson, has been generous in his coverage of Bradley Smith and CODOH’s activities. Akribeia, 45/3 route de Vourles, 69230 Saint-Genis-Laval, France.

Closer to home at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, a recently planned “fireside,” Northwestern’s name for an informal chat with a professor in a dormitory common room, was canceled because the guest academic was Arthur Butz. The usual suspects complained for the usual reasons, and it was discovered that Butz was unqualified to speak on the subject because he is not a professor of Holocaust studies or whatever, merely a professor of engineering who happens to be the author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. The primary impetus for using display advertisements in student newspapers was the outcome when a similar fireside with Professor Butz was cancelled in February 1991 (see: SR 4) stifling diversity of opinion at that major university.