Showing posts with label Freedom of the press. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Freedom of the press. Show all posts

Thursday, March 14, 2013

A Life of Sacrifice and Idealism

By Michael Hoffman
www.revisionisthistory.org

Douglas Christie

Though it could have been from an assassin's bullet or a terrorist's bomb so virulent and persistent were the threats against him, Catholic attorney Douglas "Doug" Christie, Canada's premier defender of the damned, the marginalized and the downtrodden, has died at the age of 66 from cancer, which he had been batling for approximately two years. He worked virtually up to the time of his death. He is survived by his magnificent wife, Keltie, who shared in his battle for freedom, and two lovely children who are pursuing law and engineering careers, respectively.

Christie stood up for mostly indigent Canadian "thought criminals" who were victims of censorship and prosecution directed by a government-backed, misnamed "Human Rights" cabal which seeks to protect Judaism, Zionism and Holocaustianity from the same kind of scrutiny and skepticism which every other religion and ideology faces in the marketplace of ideas.

If the criminal and civil prosecution of heretical speech and press had been suffered by Zionists and rabbis  in Canada, the New York Times and Fox News would have been stuffed to the gills with regular reports and alarms. Instead, the whole sorry Orwellian ordeal of Canada's independent thinkers has been largely flushed down the memory hole by the U.S. corporate media, which are content to stigmatize and dismiss the dissidents Doug defended, as "anti-semites" and "Holocaust deniers," the better to deny their humanity in the name of human rights.

For truth seekers and lovers of liberty, the loss of Doug Christie is an incalculable one. His life of sacrifice and idealism is a shining paradigm. May he rest in peace. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family. Their address is: Christie Family, Box 101, 255 Menzies Street,Victoria, BC V8V 2G6 Canada

Here below we reprint a tribute we published in 2011, when we first learned of his illness.

Battling Barrister: Canada’s Doug Christie
By Michael Hoffman | July 21, 2011
http://revisionistreview.blogspot.com/2011/07/great-holocaust-trial-defense-attorney.html

According to his wife, Keltie writing in her June, 2011 Friends of Freedom newsletter, 65-year-old Canadian Attorney Douglas Christie, the fearless barrister who so ably defended Ernst Zundel in two historic thought crime trials in Toronto in 1985 and 1988, has “prostate cancer of an aggressive grade that has already spread locally outside the prostate.”

Doug is one of the finest men and purest souls it has been my privilege to know. He went far beyond being Ernst’s attorney. He became his friend and a defender of the German people as a whole. In the course of the two trials he had to absorb thousands of facts, hundreds of books and dozens of maps, models and diagrams in order to defend Ernst to the best of his ability. He spent hours in court and then hours at night and on weekends studying with the Zundel defense team, led by Dr. Robert Faurisson of France. A lesser man would have been broken by the stress and the media libel. Doug relished the challenge and stepped into history’s spotlight chasing destiny.

With the brilliant and thorough organization so typical of Mr. Zundel, Doug’s daily after-court briefings in the basement of Zundelhaus were preserved on video. I have included highlights of those briefings in my documentary film, “The Great Holocaust Trial,” (not to be confused with the book of the same name).

After the Zundel trials, Doug continued his career as “the Clarence Darrow of Canada,” although he stands head-and-shoulders above Darrow, who in some respects was an opportunist (Darrow’s finest hour was his defense of Bill Heywood and the IWW in Idaho in 1907; his nadir was the 1924 Leopold-Loeb case).

Mr. Christie went on to represent dissidents, the marginal and the nearly defenseless. Among his most spectacular victories was the 1990 acquittal of Hungarian-Canadian restauranteur Imre Finta, who had been arrested on trumped-up war crimes’ charges. This was a huge setback for the same “Never Forgive” gang that on July 20, 2011, under color of law, desecrated the grave of Rudolf Hess in Germany (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14232768). Talmudic vengeance knows no bounds! Doug was ably assisted in the Finta case by the equally courageous attorney Barbara Kulaszka.

Christie defended newspaperman Doug Collins, a heroic British-Canadian soldier who escaped ten times from German POW camps in World War II. Mr. Collins testified for and wrote columns on behalf of Mr. Zundel. Those columns led to his prosecution. Christie has also defended high school history teacher Paul Fromm, English anti-Talmud campaigner Lady Jane Birdwood, Internet activist Bernard Klatt, Marc Lemire, and dozens of other indigent and media-libeled victims of the new inquisition.

The Zionist lobby has had Mr. Christie in its sights for more than a quarter-century, but his record for probity was so impeccable they could find no pretext by which they could disbar or financially cripple him until 2007, when they were able to exploit a minor procedural technicality related to a law pertaining to “subpoena for documents.” The Law Society of masonic Canada ruled that this most honorable of all Canadian lawyers, in “improperly” processing the documents had been “dishonorable.” He was fined $20,000. He could not be disbarred on that basis alone however, and he continued his law practice.

Doug has given his life to the nearly thankless task of fighting for the free speech rights of everyone from Native Canadian David Ahenakew to a coterie of Christians, Germans, East Europeans, revisionists, skeptics and individualists who refused to be commissared. He has continued to press for justice in the case of Jeff Hughes, a confused and possibly mentally ill unarmed skinhead who was shot to death in 2009 by Canada’s “Mounties” for no discernible reason other than his politics. A case like this does nothing to burnish Christie’s career or fill his wallet. At the risk of sounding maudlin, Doug did it out of love for the memory of this young man who he met once and only briefly at the George Orwell Awards Dinner, which he and his wife host annually in British Columbia. Doug Christie is a traditional Catholic who cares more about living the Gospel than talking about it. The cause of justice for Jeff Hughes is but one example of his Christ-like conduct.

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Friday, November 27, 2009

Court hears appeal for two men imprisoned for distributing Hoffman's "Holohoax" satire

In Britain, in Leeds Crown Court, on July 10, 2009, Simon Sheppard received a sentence of 4 years and 10 months and Stephen Whittle two years and four months. Mr. Sheppard's sentence comprised 12 months concurrent on three counts relating to distribution of Tales of the Holohoax, a satirical comic book by Michael Hoffman.

On July 14 the Court of Appeal gave leave to appeal against conviction on all the Internet counts, but refused leave to appeal with respect to the hard copy counts. The full appeal before three British judges commenced on November 26, 2009 at the Law Courts, Strand, London, and runs through Nov. 27.

An appeal will also be made to the European Court of Human Rights over the decision by the Leeds Appeal Court judge not to review the notorious decision in Reg. v. Birdwood when Judge Pownall's decision that "the truth is no defense" - was upheld.

Friends of freedom of the press can can write the imprisoned men as follows:

Simon Sheppard, A8042AA, Wing B3-25, HMP Leeds, 2 Gloucester Terrace, Stanningley Road, Leeds, LS12 2TJ, United Kingdom.

Stephen Whittle, A8041AA, Everthorpe Prison, Beck Road, Everthorpe, Brough, East Yorkshire, HU15 1RB, United Kingdom.

Michael Hoffman comments

Several years ago I decided to withdraw Tales of the Holohoax from circulation because it was being pirated without the inclusion of my explanatory essay on satire, which had been published at the end of the comic, and because the comic book itself had become a source of misunderstanding concerning the nature of my scholarship.

Mr. Sheppard did not abide by my request to halt his copying of Tales of the Holohoax. He even sent it to a British synagogue, which was very foolish. Nevertheless, I have considerable sympathy for the plight of these two free press activists, and great respect for Mr. Sheppard’s refusal to “repent.”

Meanwhile, Kurt Westergaard, the artist who drew the most inflammatory of the anti-Muslim cartoons in Denmark is today a wealthy, free man. According to the Huffington Post of April 8, 2009:

“Prints of the Danish cartoon depicting Islam's Prophet Mohammed as a suicide bomber in 2005...will now be sold by the Denmark Free Press Society for $250 each. One thousand copies are to be printed and sold, with each having a designated number and signature by the artist, Kurt Westergaard...The image won Westergaard international fame....he has never apologized or expressed regret for the drawings...(or) for being a ‘free artist’...he enjoys the backing of free speech and free press advocates around the globe in this regard. A notable example of one such advocate...is NATO Secretary General and Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who defended the drawings in 2006”

Prison for those who distribute a satire of wildly exaggerated "Holocaust" fairy tales, and $250,000, international fame, and accolades from the media and the Secretary General of NATO to the author of anti-Mohammed satire.

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