By Vic Rosenthal
A German court on Thursday convicted far-right activist Ernst Zündel of incitement for denying the Holocaust, and sentenced him to the maximum five years in prison.
The 67-year-old, who was deported from Canada in 2005, was convicted on 14 counts of incitement for years of anti-Semitic activities, including denying the Holocaust, a crime in Germany, in documents and on the Internet. — Jerusalem Post
What can one say about a man who wrote a book called The Hitler We Loved and Why?
Possibly that he’s religious, in some sense. What is faith if not an obsessive insistence on maintaining a belief against all reason and logic, and doing one’s best to promulgate it in every possible way?
There are differences, of course, between the Church of Antisemitism and other religious faiths. For example, most organized belief systems generally recognized as religions do not consider bringing harm to a particular group of people a primary goal, and many (but not all) of them actually preach tolerance.
Zündel’s point of view, actually, seems to be a kind of devil worship (where Hitler is the closest thing most secular people have to a devil). Zündel, creative and intelligent, is also unquestionably evil.
Evil is an unfashionable concept these days, but it’s easy to understand it and impossible to deny its reality once you look at people like Zündel. One doesn’t have to be a religious person oneself to see this. And although as an American I place great value on freedom of speech (and of course Zündel’s actions would not be a crime here in the US), I certainly am pleased to see him punished by the Germans, who, like many Jews, learned something about the reality of evil from the war.
I’m convinced that evil is real, objective and not simply a way to characterize ‘the other side’. Creatures like Zündel and Arafat are proof of that.
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