June 23, 2002 (Sunday)
Key West (Florida)

I ARRIVE back from a twenty-four hour, 800-mile round trip to Orlando and back, to speak in a bookshop there. Afterwards, the owner defends Israel's criminal actions with a verve that I find unnerving, but allows me to respond to him at length. After all, we are alone in the privacy of his sitting room. He argues that the United States will be entitled to "nuke" every single Muslim nation in the Middle East if they don't fall into line. Of course, some of the nuke-stuff might drift down upon that sooty little country in their midst, a region for which he finds much sympathy, but then that was one of the problems of the 1944 Morgenthau Plan too: how to erase Germany without blighting the rest of surrounding Europe at the same time.

I get back down to Key West at four p.m.

Sam and the gang arrive in their house around 6:45 pm. Sam is the Atlanta lawyer who owns the property. He has betimes come under attack, e.g. in The Sunday Times, in London for having defended Klansmen in years past. His face goes into his flat, twisted grin, and he says that sure he did (laymen often don't, or choose not to, understand that lawyers have something of a duty to take on cases, even those they find repugnant). He also acted for a hundred Blacks free, for every Klansmen who hired him to defend him.

Of course, in D W Griffith's classic early movie Birth of a Nation the Klan were actually the heroes who galloped onto the screen in the same gallant manner that the U.S. Cavalry would arrive in the nick of time in later Hollywood movies, portraying the way the Americans, ahem, finally solved the Indian problem.

IN Sam's party coming down to Key West from Atlanta is Paul Fromm and a Canadian lady who chain-smokes. I inquire politely if she is a French Canadian (I noticed when I was up that way that most French Canadians smoked, which might seems to presage an early voluntary solution of the French-Canadian problem too).

We all chat for a while about mutual acquaintances. The talk turns to Ernst Zündel, now more mute and living in effect in asylum in Tennessee, having sold off his house in Carlton Street, Toronto, quite lucratively and married well. I remark that he had based his career on the policy of Vorwärts über Leichen ("forwards, over corpses!"), a strategy which was always rather unfortunate for the corpses concerned.

I ask Fromm in jest if he had any problems entering the United States (he is a mild-mannered White ex schoolteacher, quiet spoken, bespectacled, and moderate.) None at all, he says, the U.S. airport security had reserved their attentions for crippled octogenarian ladies and their doting husbands, forcing them out of their wheelchairs and frisking them while allowing dusky Middle Eastern gentlemen to stroll amiably past unhampered.

In England, a few days ago (May 20), he continues, it was different. Arriving at Heathrow, he was taken out of the line -- at first he assumed it was just random, that he was the millionth passenger that month or something. But no, he was taken to a special sealed cage, his briefcase prised from his clutch and opened, every single item minutely scrutinised.

"This photo," (snarl) "who is that, Mr Fromm?" "That is Doug Christie, a Canadian barrister." "And this?" "That's Barbara Kulaszka, his Ontario attorney."

All evidently highly suspicious, because Fromm was then formally shown and asked to sign a document headed "UK ANTI-TERRORISM ACT" -- an innovation of that nice Mr Tony Blair and his merry men. I forgot to ask Fromm if the interrogator was one of the Pakistanis who seem disproportionately numerous on Heathrow's Immigration-officer staff (and of whom mention was made in the Lipstadt trial).

The Anti-Terrorism Act document warned him of imprisonment, should he make a false statement, and added that he would have a right to see a lawyer should he now demand it.

But free speech was not evidently what the document was designed to protect, because the officer then grilled Fromm for an hour about whether he had any plans to speak in the U.K.? He had none -- he was going to the High Court to sit in on the final stage, as we thought at that time, of the vindictive petition brought by Penguin Books Ltd and their six-billion pound multinational parent, the Pearson Group, against me.

So, as many have already suspected, the new anti-terrorism laws are just being used as a device by the Left in the U.K., as in other countries, to clamp down on free speech. Unable to stop this mild-mannered Canadian, the officers finally allowed him in.

In England, the lunatics have hijacked the asylum, without having owned a boxcutter between them.

 

 

Previous Radical's Diary

Canadian Association for Free Expression: B.C. Attorney General sought to quash Doug Collins' appeal | Fromm: Hollinger Should Back Collins' Appeal of B.C.'s Hate Law | CAFE submission to Federal Court in Zündel case | Bernie Farber (Canadian Jewish Congress) on Fromm