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Zundel deported to native Germany


Thanato

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TORONTO -- Infamous Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel ended more than four decades in Canada on Tuesday when he was escorted onto a plane to Germany to face prosecution for spreading hate.

Branded by a Federal Court judge as a risk to national security, Zundel was taken before daybreak from the jail where he had been held in solitary confinement for two years.

"He has been turned over to German authorities," Alex Swann, spokesman for Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan, told The Canadian Press.

Jewish groups were ecstatic.

"For decades, Zundel has spewed his venom and imbued his brand of hate in a new generation of white supremacist groups that had made him a hero," Frank Dimant of B'nai Brith Canada said Tuesday.

"We hope that this (deportation) signals a new and tougher approach by Canada to crack down without exception on practitioners of hate."

Zundel had been held under a national security certificate, which allows indefinite detention on secret evidence without charge or trial.

One supporter said Zundel had been subjected to "a kangaroo court."

Although civil libertarians who despised his views also decried the process, Zundel's lawyer Peter Lindsay said Tuesday he was "disappointed" they didn't make a bigger fuss.

"There's been an outcry at the last minute when it's too late," said Lindsay.

"Where were the civil libertarians when this has been going on for two years?"

German officials in the city of Mannheim had previously issued a warrant for Zundel's arrest over his U.S.-based website, which spreads his view the Holocaust was an elaborate hoax.

It's a crime in Germany to deny the Holocaust occurred or spread Nazi propaganda.

One close supporter said Zundel believed Canada had become "almost like a political police state" and was now looking forward to fighting the case in Germany.

"It's coming at a very volatile time," said Paul Fromm.

"There's a lot of discontent in Germany right now and he may well be a rallying point for . . . Germans who are sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust and German guilt."

A Canadian-based German diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, disagreed that Zundel's prosecution for a crime that carries a maximum sentence of five years in jail might spark social unrest.

"I don't think the case will get so much attention as here," he said. "I don't think he is one of the important people of the scene of the future."

However, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said German authorities would probably "throw the book" at Zundel to send a message to a resurgent neo-Nazi movement.

"The (Chancellor Gerhardt) Schroeder administration sees the Zundel case as a very important one," Cooper said from Los Angeles.

Zundel, 65, immigrated to Canada in 1958. He said he wanted to escape the military draft.

He came to public attention in the 1980s with several publications including The Hitler We Loved and Why, and Did Six Million Really Die?

Two attempts at prosecution ultimately foundered when the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the country's laws against spreading false news as a violation of free speech.

The trials catapulted the permanent resident into the public spotlight and Zundl became a familiar figure with his retinue of yellow hard-hatted followers in Toronto.

He was the subject of numerous threats and his home was once firebombed.

Zundel, who was twice refused Canadian citizenship, claimed to be a pacifist simply trying to set the historical record straight.

Last week, Federal Court Justice Pierre Blais ruled Zundel's association with neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups that espouse violence threatened national security and "the international community of nations."

Zundel headed to the U.S. in 2000 with the aim of staying permanently and gaining American citizenship.

He was arrested in Tennessee in early 2003 for overstaying his visa and was returned to Canada.

Conservative Immigration critic Diane Ablonczy said Tuesday that Zundel should never have been re-admitted.

Taxpayers wasted far too much money on him, Ablonczy said, adding his case was another example of how Canada's "due process has become overdue process."

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~Thanato

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