Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel has blamed Jewish groups for a letter bomb that was sent to his home here.
The 56-year-old German immigrant received on May 15 a 6-pound homemade pipe bomb filled with nails.
Zundel became suspicious because the parcel, camouflaged to look like a book, was unusually heavy for its size. But he waited five days before turning over the unexploded device to a police bomb squad unit for detonation.
The bomb had a Vancouver address that two years ago had belonged to Tony MacAleer of the white-supremacist Internet group Liberty Net.
But Zundel said he was certain that Jews were behind the attempted bombing.
“I think it is about time for those in authority to take their blinders off and overcome their own prejudices,” Zundel said in a press release in which he called on the authorities to “investigate leftist and Jewish violence as diligently as they pursue people of the right, before someone gets seriously hurt or killed.”
On May 7, the day before the 50th anniversary of the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany, an arsonist set fire to Zundel’s home. The Victorian house, which also serves as his headquarters for disseminating Holocaust-denial propaganda, suffered $75,000 in damage.
At the time of the fire, Zundel was on a speaking tour in British Columbia, where he addressed other Holocaust revisionists.
When he returned to Toronto, Zundel held a news conference. When only a handful of journalists showed up for his May 12 briefing, Zundel claimed it as proof that Jews control the media.
Police are investigating all leads concerning the May 7 fire, including a phone call to the Toronto Sun by someone claiming responsibility in the name of an unknown organization called Jewish Armed Resistance.
Canadian Jewish Congress officials, who have been quick to disassociate themselves from all violence against Zundel, denied the existence of any such Jewish vigilante group.
According to CJC spokesman Bernie Farber, “Many year ago, there was an offshoot of the Jewish Defense League called Jewish Resistance, but it hasn’t been active for at least 20 years.”
On May 12, after Zundel held the briefing, six police cruisers rushed to his house in response to a 911 emergency call.
Four suspects were picked up on a nearby side street: Marvin Weinstein, a member of Toronto’s Jewish Defense League; Irv Rubin, a JDL militant from Los Angeles; and two activists with Toronto’s Anti-Racist Action.
Weinstein said he was only attempting to take photos of the fire damage to Zundel’s home and the adjoining building. The four were released after 20 minutes of questioning.
Cartoonists across Canada, spoofing Zundel’s Holocaust-denial claims, responded to the news of the arson attack with the caption, “what fire?”
On Aug. 27, 1992, Zundel was acquitted by the Supreme Court of Canada of disseminating hate propaganda after he had been convicted of hate crimes there in 1985 and 1988.
Zundel was originally convicted in Canada’s courts in February 1985 on charges of distributing a 32-page Holocaust denial pamphlet titled “Did Six Million Really Die?”
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.
