The Nizkor Project: Remembering the Holocaust (Shoah)

A Public Statement Regarding
Ernst Zundel
&
Internet Interactivity
Experiences With the Zundel Site


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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