Holocaust Denial Now Punishable By Prison Time In Canada
It’s something that has been discussed in this country for years: the proposal of making Holocaust denial a criminal offence.
It was buried in Bill C-19, Division 21, Section 332. This wasn’t a stand alone Bill, but rather, slipped into a budget. Most likely, very few people know about it.
332 (1) Section 319 of the Criminal Code is amended by adding the following after subsection (2): Willful promotion of antisemitism (2.1) Everyone who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, willfully promotes antisemitism by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust (a) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or (b) is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.
(2) Subsections 319(4) to (6) of the Act are replaced by the following: Defences — subsection (2.1) (3.1) No person shall be convicted of an offence under subsection (2.1) (a) if they establish that the statements communicated were true; (b) if, in good faith, they expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text; (c) if the statements were relevant to any subject of public interest, the discussion of which was for the public benefit, and if on reasonable grounds they believed them to be true; or (d) if, in good faith, they intended to point out, for the purpose of removal, matters producing or tending to produce feelings of antisemitism toward Jews.
Forfeiture (4) If a person is convicted of an offence under subsection (1), (2) or (2.1) or section 318, anything by means of or in relation to which the offence was committed, on such conviction, may, in addition to any other punishment imposed, be ordered by the presiding provincial court judge or judge to be forfeited to Her Majesty in right of the province in which that person is convicted, for disposal as the Attorney General may direct.
Exemption from seizure of communication facilities (5) Subsections 199(6) and (7) apply, with any modifications that the circumstances require, to subsection (1), (2) or (2.1) or section 318.
Consent (6) No proceeding for an offence under subsection (2) or (2.1) shall be instituted without the consent of the Attorney General.
(3) Subsection 319(7) of the Act is amended by adding the following in alphabetical order: Holocaust means the planned and deliberate state-sponsored persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by the Nazis and their collaborators from 1933 to 1945; (Holocauste)
Would “Conservatives” oppose this on free speech grounds? Would they fight for the principle that even controversial speech must be protected? Will they object to it being slipped into a budget? Not exactly.
Kevin Waugh, a “Conservative”, introduced Bill C-250, a Private Member’s Bill, that would do basically the same thing. Interestingly, Waugh’s lacked some safeguards that Bill C-19 had, such as remedies to prevent prosecution.
It’s unclear why this was introduced twice in the House of Commons. Perhaps Waugh’s Private Bill was a backup plan in case Schedule 21 got removed from the budget.
Both versions have the provision that consent from the Attorney General is required for a prosecution. While this may be seen as a check, it opens the possibility of politically selected cases.
Where’s Pierre Poilievre on this free speech issue? Where’s Maxime Bernier?
Remember the flack Iqra Khalid caught for M-103? That was a Motion simply to “study” Islamophobia, and she has heckled for a long time afterwards. She never proposed putting anyone in prison.
For what it’s worth, Senator Paula Simons was willing to speak out on this. However, she’s very much in the minority when it comes to addressing the subject.
According to the OED, a “mythos” is a “traditional or recurrent narrative theme or pattern; a standard plot in literature.” For many, the Holocaust Mythos conjures up the hope of universal redemption from the absolute evils of racism, anti-Semitism, and militant White nationalism. Arising out of the allegedly planned extermination of the Jewish people by “Nazi” Germany and its collaborators, the story has acquired canonical status in officially-constructed “memory cultures” throughout the West. In Canada, where the politically correct Trudeau regime clearly craves recognition as a humanitarian superpower, the government has followed in the footsteps of Germany and several other European states by enshrining the official narrative in the Criminal Code, s. 319. Henceforth
(2.1) Everyone who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes antisemitism by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust
(a) is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years; or
(b) is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.
Even before the criminal law was amended to outlaw the “[w]ilful promotion of antisemitism,” schools, universities, churches, and the media in Canada routinely stigmatize anyone who publicly dares to doubt the truth of the Holocaust Mythos. The Canadian parliament, therefore, meekly echoed Jewish historian Alon Confino who describes the Holocaust as “a foundational event that tests the limits of our humanity.” Another Jewish historian, Matthew Feldman, acknowledges that the received interpretation of “the Holocaust” as “history’s greatest crime” emanates a quintessentially religious aura. No Member of Parliament wanted to be seen “profaning” the memory of Jewish victims of “the supreme example of human inhumanity” by voting against the proposed amendments. For its part, the Trudeau government can be confident that enforcement of its postmodern anti-blasphemy law will not be impeded by the much-hyped Charter of Rights and Freedoms. For a long-time Charter sceptic such as myself, this is no surprise.
After the massive violations of a host of fundamental rights and civil liberties supposedly “guaranteed” by the Charter during the recent Covid pandemic, suppression of presumptive rights to form and publicly express controversial opinions on the history of the Third Reich is about par for the course. Is it merely coincidence that this restriction of free speech reflects the power and serves the interests of one particular, highly-visible, economically well-endowed, socially privileged, and politically powerful ethnic group? Curiously enough, at least one prominent Jewish spokesman fears that to make “condoning, denying, or downplaying the Holocaust” a criminal offence will not be good for the Jews. Nevertheless, Carolyn Yeager, an American blogger of German ancestry, has documented the widespread support for such legislation within the organized Jewish community in Canada.
When it was announced, the text of the Trudeau regime’s proposed amendment to the Criminal Code was buried in Annex 3 of the federal budget papers presented to Parliament in the spring of 2022. By the end of June, the government’s amendments had sailed through Parliament as part of a long and complex budget bill, receiving royal assent without debate on their merits (much to the relief of MPs, one suspects). The current legislation adopts the definition of the Holocaust originally proposed in a private member’s bill blatantly mirrored by the government measure; namely:
Holocaust means the planned and deliberate state-sponsored persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by the Nazis and their collaborators from 1933 to 1945
As it happens, such a definition has been repeatedly “denied” or “downplayed” by the so-called “functionalist” school of mainstream historians who portray the Holocaust as an evolving reaction by bureaucrats, military personnel, and collaborators to events during the war years rather than the product of an “intentional,” “planned” or “deliberate” scheme directed from the top down. It remains to be seen whether s. 319(3)(1)(c) will provide an adequate defence for someone publicly promoting a “functionalist” interpretation of the Holocaust. According to this provision, no-one shall be convicted if “the statements were relevant to any subject of public interest, the discussion of which was for the public benefit, and if on reasonable grounds they believed them to be true.” This defence does not, of course, prevent prosecutions in which the process is itself intended to serve as the punishment. Outside the respectable realm of decorous academic debate, however, renegade “revisionists” risk the full measure of legal retribution.
Why, then, is the foundational event of Christianity, the paschal mythos surrounding the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, less deserving of protected legal status than an officially prescribed, crypto-theocratic single-sentence story arising out of the Second World War? Is it merely coincidental that the Holocaust Mythos features a narrative arc remarkably similar to the Easter story? Although set in the twentieth-century, the Shoah is a story of undeserved Jewish suffering in the “death camps” of Eastern Europe followed by their triumphant, ethno-religious resurrection in the promised land of Israel.
In Canada from now on, anyone publicly “condoning,” “denying,” or even “downplaying” the Jewish Holocaust narrative faces the threat of two years imprisonment. This repressive measure was announced shortly after Christian pastors were charged merely for holding Easter Sunday church services in contravention of public health orders during the contrived Covid “emergency.” When contrasted with the obsequious reverence accorded to contemporary Jewish sensibilities, such blatant disrespect for age-old Christian rituals represents a remarkable challenge to the political theology of every Anglo-Protestant church.
Are the truth claims of the official Holocaust Mythos any more or less contestable than the biblical and ecclesiastical narratives concerning the historical Jesus? One often hears the claim that “the Holocaust” is the best documented “event” in human history. But when, where, and by whom have the relevant and reliable documents been subjected to free, fair, and public forensic cross-examination and opened to continuing debate between all interested parties?
How did we reach the present sorry state of affairs? The answer to that question requires a fundamental critique of contemporary Anglo-Protestant political theology and, in particular, that of the Anglican church. After all, given a literal definition of “political” as meaning “affairs of state,” any aspect of the theology professed by the Church of England is political in the sense that it is an established, state church. True, in the first half of the twentieth century, the Anglican churches in the old White dominions were not state churches, but their overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon membership by and large trusted their governments and, following their lead, accepted the declarations of war against Germany in 1914 and 1939 without significant demur.
Moreover, in Great Britain, the bishops of the Church of England were members of the House of Lords. De facto, the government of the day decided who were to be identified as enemies of the British people and punished as such. Assigning guilt for the state of war between Germany and the British Empire was a matter of state policy. In both the Versailles treaty (aka, the Diktat) imposed on Germany in 1919 and the Nuremburg trials following Germany’s defeat in WWII, the imperial and dominion governments upheld the charge that Germany alone was guilty of waging a war of aggression.
But political theology denotes more than the everyday activities of an established church complying with state policies. According to the German jurist Carl Schmitt, politics, in the deepest sense, has to do with the existential distinction between friend and enemy. Because the Church was not an autonomous ecclesiastical polity of, by, and for the English people, friends and enemies of the British state were, ipso facto, friends or enemies of the Church.
Unfortunately, neither the WASP laity nor the ecclesiastical leadership of the Church of England, either “at home” or in the dominions, have done much to defend and preserve the ethno-religious dimensions of Anglican identity. This stands in stark contrast to the well-known ethnocentrism of the Jewish people. By enshrining the Holocaust Mythos in the Criminal Code, the Canadian government has embraced a quintessentially Jewish political theology.
Dirk Moses, the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, in his well-received book on The Problems of Genocide, identifies the narrative structure of the Holocaust Mythos as “the archetypical genocide” in international law. He observes that both law and popular culture present “the image of the largely agentless and innocent—that is unpolitical—Jewish victim [as] the ‘ideal’ or ‘exemplary’ victim.” Orthodox Jews typically “emphasize…the traditional religiosity of Jewish victims” and “[t]his theological interpretation has permeated general commemoration, which thereby constitutes a political theology.” The officially-prescribed, global “memory culture” adopts that particularistic political theology whenever it associates Jews with “the archetypical and universal form of victimhood”.
There is no denying the particularistic, ethno-religious significance of the Holocaust Mythos. This was evident, for example, when a cross-party trio of Jewish MPs rose in the House of Commons to offer their fulsome support during the second-reading of Tory M.P. Kevin Waugh’s now redundant private member’s bill to criminalize “Holocaust denial” in Canada. The Trudeau regime, of course, has a broader agenda, aiming to burnish its self-proclaimed credentials as the first post-national state. The government, therefore, will probably “deny” or “downplay” the ethno-religious favouritism inherent in its decision to sanctify Jewish political theology by force of law.
Whatever the consequences of that decision in Canada however, Anglo-Protestants throughout the Anglosphere now have a rare opportunity to consider how their ethno-religious interests might be adversely affected by the criminalization of public dissent from the officially-prescribed Holocaust narrative. We should pray that the opportunity to reflect upon who “we” are, where “we” came from, and perhaps even where “we” are going will not be missed. Sadly, however, Anglo-Protestants, especially Anglicans, have embraced a liberal humanitarianism that now makes it all but impossible to distinguish between “us” and “them.”
‘I’m not sentencing you on the basis that you are anti-Semitic, I’m not sentencing you on the basis that you are a Holocaust denier,” said Westminster District judge Michael Snow, after doing exactly that.
This was Snow’s confusing message to 56-year-old Alison Chabloz, a political commentator who was dragged to court for stating that the Holocaust is an “eternal cash cow” on a podcast. She will be serving four and a half months in jail.
While Judge Snow has no legal basis for jailing a person specifically for comments critical of the Holocaust, he was able to exploit an open-ended and subjective “gross offense” law to punish Chabloz for comments questioning the Auschwitz gas chamber narrative and how the Jewish community uses the Holocaust story for political and financial gain.
The vaguely defined “gross offense” law is often exploited by political actors to suppress critics of privileged groups and powerful interests. A police officer is currently being tried in British court for the “gross offense” of sending a George Floyd joke in a private WhatsApp chat. Free speech in the United Kingdom is not a guaranteed right.
Snow’s treatment of Chabloz fits a pattern. Many believe the district judge is primarily concerned with being a thuggish proxy for the powerful rather than enforcing the law and protecting people’s rights.
One high profile example is judge Snow’s behavior while overseeing the Julian Assange case in 2019. In order to please the US Department of Justice, Snow ruled that the Australian journalist be held in custody to be tortured in solitary confinement at a high security prison.
During the trial — ostensibly over Assange jumping bail in 2012 — Snow taunted and berated the prisoner of conscience, referring to him as “laughable” and a “narcissist.” During one hearing, he demanded Assange “get over to the US” and “get on with your life.” Former ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray has referred to judge Snow as a corrupt, politically motivated “disgrace.”
The climate for open discussion and social criticism in Britain is virtually indistinguishable from third world totalitarian nations. Judge Snow and other high ranking figures in the UK know the public stigma of running kangaroo courts that imprison people based on what wealthy Jews say offends them, but in 2021, these “liberals” no longer care what the people think.
German court rejects ‘Nazi grandma’ appeal, as it rules Holocaust denial is not covered by free speech
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Haverbeck, known as
the ‘Nazi-Grandma’, insisted that the Holocaust and murder of Jews at
Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland are not “historically proven”
Credit:
Paul Zinken/AFP
German
holocaust denier Ursula Haverbeck has been sentenced to two and a half
years in prison after the country’s highest court ruled that denying the
mass murder of Jews during Nazi Germany is not covered by the right to
free speech and “threatens public peace”.
In Germany, denying the Holocaust constitutes a crime of incitement to hatred and carries a prison sentence of up to five years.
The 89-year old went to Germany’s constitutional court to appeal her
sentence, claiming that her statements fall under the country’s right to
free speech, which is protected by law.
But in their ruling, the high court judges found that the right to free speech does not protect the denial of the Holocaust.
“The dissemination of untrue and deliberately false statements of
fact can not contribute to the development of public opinion and thus do
not fall in the remits of protection for free speech”, the judges wrote
in a statement.
“The denial of the Nazi genocide goes beyond the limits of the
peacefulness of public debate and threatens public peace,” they added.
Ursula Haverbeck, in court accused of hate speech in 2017
Credit:
Bernd Thissen/AP
Haverbeck
has a long history of support for the former Nazi regime and co-founded
a now-banned right wing ‘education center’ called Collegium Humanum
with her late husband Werner Georg Haverbeck, a former Nazi party
member.
Her articles denying the Holocaust were published in right-wing magazine Stimme des Reiches (Voice of the Empire).
Haverbeck has received several convictions from a range of German
courts for her claims that the systematic mass murder of millions of
Jews and other persecuted groups during Germany’s Nazi regime did not
take place.
On one occasion she was convicted for calling the Holocaust “the biggest and longest-lasting lie in history.”
A Black Florida educator finds out that even suggesting that the holocaust story can e questioned means efforts by the holocaust lobby to inflict poverty and economic ruin on him.
YOU TUBE CENSORS THE ETHNOSTATE COMMENTARY ON FLORIDA PRINCIPAL WHO QUESTIONED THE HOLOCAUST
The new religion of holocaust is an amazing imposition of another group’s tribal history on the West. Western political elites who snear or scoff at Christianity behave like fanatics in their belief and insistence on imposing that belief on their people in the tribal history of another group. One can sneer at Christianity and face no consequences, indeed, even attract much approval. If you express disbelief in Irish tribal history — Cuculain, etc. — you won’t lose your job. However, express doubts about some accounts of what happened to Jews in WW II and unemployment, banning and ostracism quickly follow.
In the July 9 episode of THE ETHNOSTATE, commentators William Johnson, Paul Fromm and Kenn Gividen briefly discussed the story of a Negro Florida principal who told a parent who was demanding more Jewish tribal history of holocaust studies in the curriculum that not everyone believed in the Hollywood version of World War II. Specifically, Principal William Latson told a parent, ‘I can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event because I am not in a position to do so as a school district employee,’ adding that ‘not everyone believes the Holocaust happened.'” All hell broke loose. Despite the fact that the shell shocked principal went and spent several days of penance touring the Washington D.C. holocaust museum, he was reassigned.
Host producer Kenn Gividen opined that there should be no sacred cows and that all historical positions can be questioned or debated.
You Tube, enforcing the new religion of holocaust, swiftly deleted even this tiny whiff of heresy.
Norman Lowell, the firebrand right-winger, Imperium Europa leader and MEP candidate who famously referred to himself as a “racialist, not a racist”, has explained his views on the Holocaust after comparing the World War Two concentration camp Auschwitz to the ‘Disneyland of Poland’.
When asked by Lovin Malta whether he denied the Holocaust happened, he said: “How can one deny something that never happened? …This whole hoax is the biggest lie since the Virgin Mary.”
Disneyland comments begin at around 6:28 in the above video
“The Holocaust never happened,” Norman Lowell continued. “Only some 70,000 Jews died in Auschwitz according to the Russian figures and backed by the Red Cross who had free access to the camps. These casualties died of typhus, dysentery and starvation since the allies had bombed all the rail-tracks leading to the camps – so the Germans just couldn’t feed them.”
The Holocaust refers to the systematic genocide committed by Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler that murdered around six million European Jews between 1941 and 1945.
The Auschwitz concentration camp, which was built in conquered Poland, is considered an especially egregious example of the horrors of Nazi Germany, with over a million people exterminated within its prison walls through forced labour, starvation, infectious diseases, murder, or being forced into a gas chamber.
SELECTION OF HUNGARIAN JEWS IN AUSCHWITZ, 1944
Lowell continued to say that the Jewish population in Europe increased following WW2
“Moreover, the Jewish population within the whole of Europe, including the unoccupied territories, stood at four million Jews, according to the Jewish Almanac in 1947,” he said. “The Jewish population actually increased by 1947! How can a population that suffered six million dead increase in just two years? This whole hoax is the biggest lie since the Virgin Mary.”
As of this week, Norman Lowell’s Imperium Europa is sitting as the third most popular political party, ahead of Partit Demokrtiku and Alternattiva Demokratika, in this month’s MEP elections.
Martin Cauchi Inglott, a PD candidate and former Commander of the AFM’s Maritime Squadron, has called out Lowell’s comments on Auschwitz
“One would have thought Lowell could not stoop any lower, but now he mocks Auschwitz Concentration Camp, calling it Poland’s Disneyland, and the holocaust a bunch of lies,” Cauchi Inglott said.
“Auschwitz remains a living pain to decent people,” he said. “More than six million dead deserve better. Lest we become complacent thinking it cannot happen again. Lowell minced my words precisely because I wanted to send a clear message that our children need to be educated about where far right politics can lead mankind.”
The following letter from Ursula Haverbeck, unfortunately, reached me only today. However, I do not wish to keep it from the public. A contribution to this case has already been made here [in German].
Frau Ursula Haverbeck
From Prison
July 31, 2018
Yours and My Truth
An article about me [Ursula Haverbeck] was published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung under the title ‘Hitlerliebe’ (Hitler Love) on July 21/22, 2018 by a historian, teaching newer and more recent history partly in Jena, partly in Israel. [admin: The Professor is a Jew.]
Professor Norbert Frei begins with the sentence:
“Ursula was 16 years old when Hitler committed suicide.”
He should have written:
“Ursula was 16 years old” when… the war, that was already drawing to an end, caught up with the people who had so far been largely spared in the East. After the total expulsion order, thousands of banished Germans set out to save themselves before the borders of the Bolshevik Red Army. That was the end of childhood and a very happy youth.
Prussians, Pomeranians, Silesians, Sudeten Germans and many other ethnic German groups could never return again to their old ancestral homeland, something that many still expected decades after the war, due to international law.
It was a bitter-cold January in 1945, the roads were frozen with ice. Often narrowly squeezed into three lanes, [German] troops headed east, and the farm buggies headed west, and in between them there were repeated transports of wounded. For the displaced Germans on the carriages, there was only one goal, despite the approaching gunfire, to get to Breslau and across the bridges of the river Oder as soon as possible, before they would be blown up.”
That would have said more about the reality of a sixteen-year-old girl’s life in East Germany in 1945.
Of course, a historian is also free to imagine a young person from the Nazi era at his own discretion. However, this usually says more about the mental condition of him than about the person described.
With the currency reform of 1948, a hard and serious cut into life began, especially for the homeless and unemployed expellees in foreign surroundings, where the inhabitants were already overwhelmed by the hundreds of thousands of people bombed out of their homes. All living space was already occupied well into the 1950s.
In England and Sweden they were looking for cleaning ladies for the hospitals and in positions of domestic help. I became a guest worker in Sweden from 1949 to 1953, from where I could support my parents.
The former “BDM” girl [Frau Haverbeck was designated by Prof. Frei to be a Hitler Youth Girl] – to which I never belonged; I had stayed with the 10-14 year olds as a young girls’ leader – was neither stubborn, nor angry, nor unhappy, as Norbert Frei claims I, his study object, was. I had a particularly happy time in Sweden. We met once a week in a German-Swedish working group for more than two years to study Rudolf Steiner’s ‘Philosophy of Freedom’. We read it in German and alternately lectured and discussed it in Swedish. There I heard of Baruch de Spinoza. Three of his sentences became my guide posts:
From the ethics: “Deus sive natura, ‘the unity and wholeness of God – nature.
“Man is man’s joy” as a replacement for the old Roman quote “man is man’s wolf.”
And from the theological-political treatise: “The true goal of all politics is freedom.”
The philosopher, who was a close friend of the Dutch politician Jan de Witt, recognized this as the basic maxim for the new political design after the collapse of the Spanish foreign rule, already shortly after the Thirty Year War at that time. It was to also point the way ahead for our departure. Freedom, please, not ego-liberalism!
The ‘Holocaust’ did not exist yet, and not in Sweden nor in Scotland in 1957 either, where I was able to study for a year thanks to a scholarship.
Tales of horror at Auschwitz did not attract further attention under the terror of the bombs and the misery of the displaced people, that was still omnipresent. Furthermore, there was also a large number of opposing statements about Auschwitz by contemporary witnesses, from personal experience. What was truth – what was a lie?
And not to forget, we knew who had already ‘declared’ war on us in March of 1933, and who it was that six months later declared the ‘Holy War’ against the most “bloodthirsty, evil people in the world, the Germans.” That wasn’t a new tune. Our fathers had already heard it in World War One.
“Denying the Holocaust is not an opinion, but a crime,” concludes Norbert Frei. For us, ‘The Holocaust’ was a Hollywood feature film from the USA. So this word first came into our consciousness in 1979. It was an enormous production, in four episodes in succession, with scientific introduction, panel discussion and tearful reports by Auschwitz survivors.
Auschwitz, the Holocaust and the six million gassings were one and the same. From now on it was regarded as the singular guilt of the Germans, that was not atonable for all eternity.
All refutations from available documents and scientific views were indexed, forbidden, destroyed. It was punishable to cite them in agreement, whether submitted by Jews, French, Americans or Germans.
Those born after 1960-1965 no longer had an opportunity to compare the information. For them, the Holocaust became an incontrovertible fact. And even today, every criticism, every question that is difficult to answer is punished with prohibitions and prison sentences. May I remind you of the trials against Ernst Zündel and the chemist Germar Rudolf in Mannheim.
The Institut für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ) [Institute of Contemporary History] managed the feat of publishing the Standort- und Kommandanturbefehle Auschwitz 1940-45 ohne IfZ Bemerkungen-530S in 2000, [commander’s orders at Auschwitz] and still withheld them at the same time from the public. In none of the more than 30 lawsuits [I have attended], have I ever heard them mentioned. (2001 – 2015).
Norbert Frei is made “speechless” by the “brazenness” of Ursula Haverbeck. This is simply explained by the fact that she knows not only the time after the Holocaust film, but also the 35 years before it, as well as a number of the critics involved, personally. [The accusations] have been reviewed retrospectively.
“The real goal of politics is freedom.” But how do you get freedom? This we find in John’s Gospel:
