Canadian Court Ruling Lets Zundel Reapply for Citizenship

Ruling that a governmental security committee was biased against him, a federal court has given Toronto-based Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel a green light to reapply for Canadian citizenship.

The Aug. 1 ruling came in the wake of a finding by Canada’s Security Intelligence Review Committee that Zundel posed a threat to security and should be denied citizenship.

Zundel, the author of the pamphlet “Did Six Million Really Die? Truth At Last Exposed,” has been denied use of the mail for his activities and has twice been convicted of breaching Canada’s hate laws.

In each case, however, the decisions were overturned.

Last week’s ruling elicited strong criticisms from Jewish groups.

“Zundel has been dodging through our legal system and showing the Canadian courts that the hate law is toothless,” B’nai Brith Canada said in a statement.

The organization called for an appeal of the federal court’s decision, adding in the statement that it “finds it astonishing that Canada’s security and intelligence services can be chastened for holding biases against ideologies and individuals who propagate hatred.”

A German national with landed immigrant status, Zundel has said he intends to reapply for citizenship soon and that he will sue the federal government if it is not granted.

If Zundel is denied citizenship, he could be deported to Germany, where he has been convicted under laws that bar Holocaust denial.

Meanwhile, Zundel has issued a thinly veiled threat to a leading Jewish publication, the Canadian Jewish News, that he would bring a libel suit if he is publicly called a hatemonger.

“The publishing or spreading of hate literature in Canada is an indictable, criminal offense,” he wrote in a letter to the editor published Aug. 1.

“You and the media will have to get used to it that I will no longer be libeled by the term `hatemonger’ attached to my name.”