Subject: News Item Victoria Times Colonist Saturday Mar.30/96
Page B2
By Jeff Bell Times Colonist Staff
(head shot of Botting, 1 column wide)
Caption: Gary Botting Feels MIsused
Headline:
LAWYER THREATENS ZUNDEL LAWSUIT
Victoria Lawyer Gary Botting struck back Friday to disentangle himself
from an unwanted association on the internet’s world wide web with
Holocaust-denier Ernst Zundel.
Speaking at the Jewish Community Centre, Botting said that Zundel is
unfairly using a taped interview he made in 1986 as part of a program “to
try to legitimize Holocaust -denial, and therefore anti-Semitism and
therefore racism.
The tape was made willingly, Botting said. But he described it as an
attempt to restate some of the principles of free speech he had espoused in
testimony at Zundel’s first trial.
Zundel was charged in 1983 with knowingly spreading false news about the
Holocaust. He was convicted in 1988 but was acquitted four years later after
the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the law.
Botting said he had been asked by Zundel’s lawyer, Doug Christie, to
testify at the trial as an expert in the area of censorship. At the time,
Botting, who subsequently articled under Christie, was a professor of
English and Journalism at an Alberta college.
” I really object 10 years later to having this come up and being
presented as it is with Zundel’s symbol on an internet site.”
Botting said that video copies of the interview are being offered for
sale through the internet site, and if the practice isn’t stopped he will
pursue legal action against Zundel.
He and others mentioned on the Zundel site are victims of a common
tactic of “people who engage in an anti-semitic agenda”, he said.
They try to bring in “people who are innocent and decent human beings
coming from a neutral perspective”. Then they start playing a “numbers game”
with the Holocaust by trying to downplay the number of Jews that were
killed, Botting said.
Botting said his view is that Jews in the 20th century ” have more than
anybody else suffered not just indignity and deprivation, but murder upon
murder upon murder times millions.”
He was joined at the Community Centre by Alan Dutton of The Canadian
Anti-Racism Education and Research Society and Al Stein of the newly-formed
Vancouver Island branch of the B’nai Brith Society.
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