New Trial is Ordered for Teacher Cleared of Anti-semitism Charges

The province of Alberta has ordered a new trial for former high school teacher James Keegstra, whose 1985 conviction under Canada’s anti-hate statute was recently reversed on a technicality.

The decision to retry Keegstra, announced last Thursday by Alberta Attorney General Kenneth Rostad, was generally welcomed by Canadian Jewish leaders. But other people, including the current mayor of Eckville, a position Keegstra used to hold, expressed concern that a new trial would provide a platform for Keegstra’s views and endow him with an aura of martyrdom.

Keegstra was fined $5,000 in 1985 on being found guilty of wilfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group — in his case, Jews — a violation of Canada’s anti-hate law.

As a high school teacher in Eckville, a village of about 900 in rural Alberta, Keegstra taught his classes for over a decade that Jews were behind all of the world’s troubles and that the Holocaust was a hoax.

Keegstra was brought to trial at the complaint of his students’ parents, none of them Jews. There were no Jews living in Eckville at the time, nor are there now believed to be any Jews living in the village.

The Alberta Court of Appeals overturned the verdict last month on grounds that Keegstra should have been allowed to challenge the impartiality of the jurors in the 1985 trial.

Rostad said the decision to retry was based entirely on the law and the evidence, which remains strong.

“The case was sent back for retrial on two technicalities, not on the evidence itself,” the attorney general told the Toronto Globe & Mail.

He dismissed as a mitigating factor the high cost of the case so far, saying justice, not cost, determined whether a trial would be held.

Les Scheininger, president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, said, “It is only proper that the anti-hate provisions of the Criminal Code be invoked in this case, and that it be pursued to its ultimate resolution.”

He emphasized that “for over 14 years, Keegstra subjected a captive audience of impressionable young people within a school setting to his abhorrent and noxious views.”

CONCERN ABOUT ADVERSE PUBLICITY

Manuel Prutschi, national director of human relations for the congress, said fomenting hatred is a serious crime calling for vigorous prosecution.

The League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith Canada issued a statement expressing gratification over the decision to retry Keegstra.

“The Supreme Court of Canada has recognized the importance of the legislation and the inherent dangers of hate propaganda,” said Mark Sandler, national chairman of the league.

The Calgary Jewish Community Council noted in a statement that a new trial would again place Keegstra in the center of media attention, a fact it called unfortunate. Nevertheless, “Keegstra was found to be guilty by his peers and should not be deemed to be innocent due to a technicality,” the council said.

But Alberta Legislator Sheldon Chumir, the Liberal Party’s designated critic of the Attorney General’s Office, said he “would have preferred to let matters be left to lie.”

Chumir, who is Jewish, believes a new trial could prove counterproductive, giving Keegstra even more publicity and creating a martyr.

He also pointed out that a new trial could create a different chemistry. “New evidence may come in. Witnesses can do things differently; you may lose some witnesses.”

But Prutschi of the CJC countered, citing a study made after the first trial of Ernst Zundel, a German-born Holocaust revisionist living in Canada. A survey found that the Zundel trial had served as a very good educational tool.

“It opened up people’s eyes and touched their hearts. So it had positive rather than negative results among the greater public.”

Chumir, although opposing a new trial for Zundel, said, however, that he would like to see the Alberta government get tough with racial violence.

“The government has shown a lack of concern for racist-motivated violence,” he said.