A National Geographic article about Toronto has ignited a controversy because it contains overtly racist remarks by an outspoken neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier.
The generally laudatory article about the Canadian city in the magazine’s June 1996 issue accurately described Toronto resident Ernst Zundel as “one of the leading neo-Nazi propagandists in the world.”
It went on to quote him as saying, “Canadians deserves all the problems that are coming with immigration.”
Blacks are responsible for such problems as drive-by shootings, rapes and robberies, Zundel continued.
“I’m objecting to allowing hordes of racially unabsorbable populations to invade the living space of a specific race,” the article, written by Richard Conniff, also quoted him as saying.
Ellen Cole, chairwoman of the community relations committee of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Ontario Region, wrote a letter seeking an explanation from the National Geographic Society.
“Ernst Zundel, a German national with landed immigrant status, has been refused Canadian citizenship on the basis of being a security threat to Canada,” Cole wrote.
“He is, by all accounts, one of the largest distributors of neo-Nazi and Holocaust denial material in the world. He is a racist and a bigot with links to some of the most violent white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations worldwide.”
Cole wrote that a large number of politicians and field workers “would have been more appropriate to speak with credibility on immigration matters.
“Your choice to utilize Mr. Zundel gave him undeserved credibility and is a stain on your magazine’s good name.”
Toronto Mayor Barbara Hall, along with four other mayors in the Toronto area, are preparing a joint letter to National Geographic that will also protest the use of Zundel as a source.
“If anybody is unabsorbable, it happens to be Ernst Zundel,” said Janis Dembo, coordinator of the mayor’s committee on community and race relations.
“He’s not a legitimate voice. It’s reprehensible that they would actually publish his stereotypically racist comments about the black community.”
Bernie Farber, national director of community relations for the Canadian Jewish Congress, noted that Conniff did not quote the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan in a similar article he wrote for National Geographic on the city of Chicago, nor did he present any opinions from the American neo-Nazis who once threatened to march through a neighborhood in Skokie, III., where many Holocaust survivors lived.
“There are more credible voices out there to criticize Canada’s immigration policy than that of a neo-Nazi,” Farber said.
Not all of the Toronto newspaper columnists who have written about the controversy have been critical of National Geographic or of Zundel.
John Barber, who writes on municipal affairs for the Globe and Mail, said Zundel voiced what many people in Toronto whisper privately.
“Ernst Zundel is one of us,” Barber wrote.
Writing in the Toronto Sun, Peter Worthington argued that by quoting someone with “zilch credibility” such as Zundel, National Geographic “makes Toronto look more tolerant of dissent and more generous in accepting divergent viewpoints than it really is.”
Responding to criticism, National Geographic’s Conniff explained in a May 21 letter to the Globe and mail that quoting a source does not imply endorsement of that source.
“Most journalists I know have always believed, on the contrary, that the best way to hang a fool is to give him a chance to speak his mind,” Conniff wrote.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
