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Letter to the Editor of Mennonite Life Editors
Mennonite Life
North Newton, Kansas
Dear editors:
Jim Juhnke in the latest issue of Mennonite Life
has added to the uncharitable and, in some respects inaccurate, portrayal of
Ingrid Rimland Zundel and her work that has characterized Juhnke's work and that
of other Mennonite reviewers since Rimland's conversion to historical
revisionism in the 1990's.
First, it is not correct for Juhnke to say that
Ingrid's husband, Ernst Zundel, was "extradited" to Germany. Instead, he
was deported illegally from the United States and subjected to a show trial in
Canada, at the conclusion of which he was also deported from Canada,
branded a racist and threat to Canada's national
security. Extradition happens to criminals, and Ernst Zundel was
never charged with a crime. Subordination of historical accuracy to story
line is something Juhnke would have us believe that only Ingrid Rimland engages
in.
Moreover, although at the time of his political
kidnapping from his Tennessee home Zundel was seeking (and eligible for) lawful
permanent resident status in the United States based on his marriage to a
U.S. citizen (Ingrid Rimland), he has never sought U.S. citizenship,
something that Juhnke says he was "denied." Maybe to Juhnke the
difference between citizenship and lawful permanent residence is a trifling
matter, but for thousands of immigrants it is not.
Also, I have never provided Ernst Zundel with a
"legal defense." I never got the chance to do so. Ernst Zundel,
unlike most aliens charged with being in the U.S. illegally, was never charged
in the U.S. and never got to see an immigration judge but was
instead hustled across the northern border and dumped unceremoniously in the
same country from which he had legally entered the United States in the year
2000. Ernst Zundel, despite his marriage to a U.S. citizen, never got his
day in court in the U.S., nor did he ever get to see the secret "national
security" evidence thrown against him in Canada, where he had Canadian
attorneys "defending" him. As a lawyer, I can only imagine how
utterly impossible it would be to defend against secret witnesses with
unknown motives and integrity.
I do now represent Ingrid and Ernst in a legal
action they filed against the United States and its agents. The courts are
playing hot potato with the case. The U.S. Court of Appeals has already
sent the case back to the District Court Judge in Knoxville once because of
error in his court, and a second appeal of further Knoxville error is
pending.
Though Juhnke has included in his review a
gratuitous remark about my efforts to bring this story to the attention of
Mennonites, Juhnke has either willfully ignored the reasons for my own efforts
or considers them unimportant. Ernst Zundel, like our Anabaptist
forebears, is a pacifist who is in prison because he has made unpopular truth
claims. Even if you hate his claims and what he stands for -- which
is exactly the kind of hate our forebears faced for daring to challenge the
status quo -- that is the undeniable reality.
His case thus has important implications for free speech and the stifling
of dissent, for the way history is written and used as a club, and for the
extension of due process of law and civil liberties to even the most reviled
among us--all of which are core Anabaptist issues. Fear of being
labeled antisemitic should not deter us in these
recognitions.
Further,
one can
only hope that when Juhnke refers without comment to the "crime of denying the
Holocaust" he is not endorsing the criminalization of speech or political
conviction or historical dissent, like Germany has done with respect to this
single issue. Already Franklin Littell, a well known Reformation scholar
and a member of the advisory board of the Mennonite Quarterly Review, has fallen
into this trap, saying, "You can't discuss the truth of the
holocaust. That is a distortion of the concept of free speech. The
United States should emulate Germany, which outlaws such exercises" (quote
obtained from Reporter's Notebook news service, New York).
Littell's willingness to submit historical inquiry to political
orthodoxy is outrageous, but it may help to explain the
vapid history-writing that Mennonites themselves have produced.
The timing of Juhnke's review could not be more
curious. Rimland's book The Demon Doctor was copyrighted in 1988, 17
years before the review appeared. Although it is perhaps to be implied,
the review was obviously written now in an attempt to discredit either Ingrid
Rimland or me or both of us, after I had alerted members of the corporation of
Mennonite Weekly Review, Inc. about the Zundel story and about MWR's failure to
cover it. Juhnke has not disclosed his membership on the board of the MWR
corporation or his receipt of my mailing to corporation
members.
It is perhaps no coincidence that James Schrag,
general secretary of MCUSA and brother to Robert Schrag, MWR publisher,
invoked the name of Juhnke during an intense conversation that I had with the
general secretary at the just-completed Charlotte 2005 MCUSA
convention. Schrag and his associate Ron Byler sought alternatively to
intimidate and belittle me as they insisted that I not distribute flyers
announcing a presentation at Charlotte by Ingrid Zundel (more details about that
encounter).
Whatever the politics, however, both the story told
by Ingrid Rimland in
The Demon Doctor
about her search for Josef Mengele, and
the story she told at Charlotte 2005 culminating in her conversion to historical
revisionism, are compelling stories that Mennonites have every reason to be
interested in, and one can only hope that discerning Mennonites will
ultimately prefer raw history to
raw hysteria.
Bruce Leichty
Law Offices of Bruce Leichty
Bruce Leichty may be contacted at .
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