Antisemitic, Holocaust-denying James Keegstra dies

From CBC News:

James ‘Jim’ Keegstra, a prominent Canadian holocaust denier and former high school teacher in Eckville, Alta., is dead at the age of 80, CBC News learned late Thursday night.

Keegstra made international headlines in 1983 when he was accused of teaching students that the history of the Holocaust was fraudulent, and that a Jewish conspiracy was responsible for many of the world’s problems.

It was alleged that Keegstra had been teaching his anti-Semitic views to his social studies class for 14 years before a parent complained to the local school board about his lessons.

In January 1984, Keegstra was stripped of his teaching certificate and charged with “wilfully promoting hatred against an identifiable group” under the Criminal Code of Canada.

At the time, no one had been successfully convicted under Canada’s hate propaganda laws enacted in 1970.

Keegstra was represented at trial by attorney Doug Christie, a political activist originally from B.C., who would go on to defend some of Canada’s most high-profile Holocaust deniers.

Keegstra was convicted at his original trial and fined $5,000. His lawyers appealed the decision, arguing that the law was unconstitutional and that it violated provisions on freedom of expression in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

After multiple trials and appeals the case eventually reached the Supreme Court of Canada, who in 1990 and again in 1996 upheld Keegstra’s conviction in a landmark ruling that found that the Criminal Code section on public incitement of hatred did infringe on Charter rights, but that infringement was justified.

Keegstra received a one-year suspended sentence, one year of probation, and community service.

Here are details from the 1990 Supreme Court proceedings, listed as the facts of the case:

Mr. Keegstra, a secondary school teacher in Eckville, a small town in Alberta, was convicted of unlawfully promoting hatred under s. 319(2). The evidence established that he had systematically denigrated Jews and Judaism in his classes. He described Jews by such epithets as "revolutionists", "treacherous", "imposters", "communists", "secret", "sneaky", "manipulative", and "deceptive". He taught that the Jewish people are "barbaric", "subversive", "sadistic", "materialistic", "money-loving" and "power hungry". He maintained that anyone Jewish must be evil and that anyone evil must be Jewish. Not only did he maintain these things; he advised the students that they must accept his views as true unless they were able to contradict them. Moreover, he expected his students to regurgitate these notions in essays and examinations. If they did so, they received good marks. If they did not, their marks were poor.

Naturally, Iran's PressTV offers a eulogy of sorts saying that Keegstra was a patriot who was unfairly attacked by those evil Jews. Upset over the story about his death in Sun News, the writer says:

While masquerading as defenders of liberty, the kosher talking heads of Sun News are little more than gatekeepers tasked with shifting the blame for the loss of civil liberties in Canada away from its true architects: the organized Jewish-Zionist community.

I love how antisemites defend antisemites by engaging in antisemitism - which Iran, of course, strenuously denies engaging in.