A Public Statement Regarding
29. To my knowledge, Mr. Zundel himself has never appeared
to use the net directly. Though he appears to have at least
two email addresses (ezundel@cts.com, zundel@globalserve.net), he is not known to post articles, upload web-pages, or
write email on the net itself. Rather, he collaborates with
a person in California by the name of Ingrid Rimland,
apparently chiefly by fax and by telephone.
30. Ms. Rimland is webmaster of the "Zundel site."
I assume that she has authority to speak for Mr. Zundel,
since she literally does so every day in her publication of
"Zundelgrams." These are email messages which are
sent out to her mailing list, and from there to other
mailing lists and Usenet, for a total readership of
thousands, possibly tens of thousands.
31. The Zundel site's first appearance on the net, through
Ms. Rimland, was in 1995. After a few preliminary postings,
the Zundel site chose to "spam" the net with
propaganda, first in August 1995, then again in October.
This technique consists of sending a large number of copies
of the same material to different newsgroups. Usenet is
self-policing regarding technical transgressions such as
this (wasting bandwidth) and all the copies of this
propaganda were "canceled" and thus removed from
the net. With the exception of this incident, the Zundel
site has never had a presence on Usenet.
32. This absence is noteworthy. Why would one who asserts an
abiding interest in debate and open discourse on these
topics reject Usenet, which is, as we have seen, much better-
suited to debate? Mr. Zundel refuses to participate in the
chief forum on the net which actually justifies such labels.
33. I cannot meet Ms. Kulaszka's request for support
regarding the claim that the Internet "allows for
falsehood to be rebutted easily and effectively."
While this claim is true in some cases, it is absolutely
false with regard to her client's use of the net. The
Zundel site has published many falsehoods, including
outright and deliberate lies. The tactics used to spread
these falsehoods, which conspicuously avoid any form of
interactivity, have made rebuttal difficult in the extreme.
34. Falsehoods are published Ms. Kulaszka's client every
day, in "Zundelgrams." The "Zgrams," as
they are called, are an exercise in propagandizing;
opponents do not have an opportunity to rebut or refute
anything which may be said.
35. Examples of typical "Zundelgrams, " dated
March 21, 1997, regarding Zyklon B, and
March 4, 1997
regarding electronic terrorism and the Nizkor Project,
respectively, may be found at the following URL's:
http://www.webcom.com/ezundel/english/zgrams/zg1997/zg970321
.html, and
http://www.webcom.com/ezundel/english/zgrams/zg1997/zg970304
.html. Each is false and misleading.
36. None of the readers on the Zgram mailing list would be
made aware that Mr. Zundel's assertions are contradicted by
the historical record. The Zundel site keeps the addresses
on that list secret, so a response cannot be sent directly
to his subscribers or readers. Attempts in the past to
convince the Zundel site to include rebuttals in the Zgrams
have been uniformly rejected; no such interactivity has been
permitted.
37. On September 2, 1995 (http://www.nizkor.org/other-sites/correspondence/zuendelsite/cor-1.html), Ernst Zundel wrote, in an public letter to me, and those associated with
the Nizkor Project. In that, and the next two, open letters (September 13 (http://www.nizkor.org/other-sites/correspondence/zuendelsite/cor-3.html)
and 17 (
http://www.nizkor.org/other-
sites/correspondence/zuendelsite/cor-1.html
), 1995), he then proceeded to emit a litany of falsehoods,
lies, and mudslinging, about my organization, and the net in
general. Among them:
that I and my webmaster must consult
"superiors" who will decide what we can and
cannot do
that the all-volunteer Nizkor Project was
"far more lavishly financed" than the Zundel
site, resulting in a "David and Goliath
situation"
that the Nizkor Project was a "Jewish
connection" which made use of "tax-supported
funds"
that "there are ethnic-specific limits to enjoying
the freedom of the Internet"
And so on.
38. Refuting the falsehoods published by Zundel would be
quite easy on Usenet. But since Mr. Zundel posted on the
Web, it was not possible to make his readers directly aware
of challenges to his version of reality. The Zundel site
refused to cross-link from their copies of Mr. Zundel's open
letters to our replies; we had to wait for them to
transcribe our replies and put them on-line, a process over
which we naturally had no control. In at least one case, on
September 16, 1995, my correspondence with Mr. Zundel was
simply ignored, even though it had been both delivered by
private email and posted to public UseNet newsgroups. A copy
of this correspondence with Mr. Zundel may be found as URL
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/z/zundel-ernst/cor-4-article-txt.html.
A resubmission of the same correspondence a few weeks later,
which may be read as
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/z/zundel-ernst/open-letter-1095.html
, was similarly ignored. This refusal to respond became more
evident as further correspondence from Nizkor through the
end of 1995, and in January 1996, was not made available on
their website, nor were cross-links provided; interactivity
was terminated. This is a practical example of how
unidirectional linking breaks down, and provides another
indication of the refusal to provide true interactivity.
38. In January, 1996, we prepared an Open Letter regarding
the numerous errors and falsehoods of the past few months,
and published it on our website. We regarded this as our
definitive and final word on the falsehoods which the Zundel
group had been spreading over the previous months. A copy of
this letter can be found as URL http://www.nizkor.org/features/z-open-letter/.
39. Neither that response, nor the Uniform Resource Locator
(The "URL" is the electronic address for a
specific Web page.) with which people could locate it, has
ever been mentioned in a Zgram or on the Zundel site. It
has, to our knowledge, been totally and completely ignored,
though they have been contacted many times in email. They
continue to repeat the falsehoods which the response
addresses. The URLs where Zundel's original open letters
were located have been changed, so that our effort to engage
manually in bidirectional linking - interactivity - was
foiled. Finally, the Zundel site's webmaster, Ingrid
Rimland, removed my webmaster from her mailing list
explicitly to prevent him even from knowing whether she had
responded.
40. It has been well-established that the Zundel site
refuses to participate in the interactive forums of the
Internet. The question is, why? Mr. Zundel has stated that
he will "not debate in a sewer." The reality on
the Net is that Mr. Zundel will not debate at all. After
having worked to confront and refute Holocaust-denial for
over five years, and having paid close attention to Mr.
Zundel's work for much of that time, I believe that the
reason for this refusal is twofold.
41. First, Mr. Zundel knows that much of what he claims is
false. This seems obvious; even excepting the lies he has
continued to publish on the net after being made aware of
the truth, Mr. Zundel was twice convicted, by two separate
juries, for publishing material he knew at the time to be
false (the pamphlet "Did Six Million Really
Die?"). Second, Mr. Zundel and the Zundel site in
general exhibit a mind set which can only be described as
propagandistic. From this perspective, the net, and all
other forms of communication, exist not to engage in
discourse and arrive at understanding, but to spread
ideologies and recruit supporters.
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© The Nizkor Project, 1991-2012
This site is intended for educational purposes to teach about the Holocaust and
to combat hatred.
Any statements or excerpts found on this site are for educational purposes only.
As part of these educational purposes, Nizkor may
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provides them so that its readers can learn the nature and extent of hate and antisemitic discourse. Nizkor urges the readers of these pages to condemn racist
and hate speech in all of its forms and manifestations.
Ernst Zundel
&
Internet Interactivity
Experiences With the Zundel Site