Anti-illegal activist backs deported immigrant
By Peter Reuell / News Staff Writer
Friday, February 20, 2004

     Joe Rizoli, who co-founded the Concerned Citizens and Friends of Illegal Immigration Law Enforcement with fellow Framingham resident Jeff Buck, last year signed an Internet petition in support of Ernst Zundel, who is fighting his deportation from Canada.

     In an interview with The Daily News this week, Rizoli made no secret of his signing the petition, and said he was "proud" of having done so.

     "That's his opinion," he said, when pressed on Zundel's contention that the Holocaust, in which millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and others were killed in Hitler's death camps, never happened. "He has differences of opinion about the Holocaust.

     "This guy's in jail for the wrong reasons. I would protect anybody that's in jail for the wrong reasons. He shouldn't be in jail," Rizoli said.

     Authorities in at least two nations don't see it that way, though.

     Though born in Germany, Zündel emigrated to Canada in 1958 to escape the draft, according to a biography compiled by the Anti-Defamation League, a national organization that monitors hate groups.

     By the mid-1990s, Zündel had gone high-tech, lending his name to the "Zundelsite," an online database of Holocaust denial literature maintained from the U.S. by Ingrid Rimland.

     In February 2001, Rimland and Zündel married and moved to Tennessee. Two years later, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service arrested Ernst Zündel for immigration violations.

     Under U.S. policy, Zündel was deported to his country of origin, Canada, where he remains in custody as Canadian officials try to determine whether to deport him back to Germany.

     Zündel, however, has vehemently fought deportation, knowing he would likely face up to five years in a German prison for Holocaust denial, which is a crime in that country.

     Rizoli and his brother Jim, however, claim their support for Zundel is based on the conditions he faces in prison.

     "We think he has a right to say what he wants," Jim Rizoli said. "What's happened to him is a disgrace."

     Joe Rizoli this week said he first heard of Zündel's plight in a "ZGram" -- an e-mail message sent to subscribers by Rimland.

     According to a ZGram sent to The Daily News by Rizoli, Zündel is kept in solitary confinement, without access to pens and pencils, a chair or pillows, or the paper clips, PostIt notes and highlighters he needs to sort through piles of legal documents.

     "All I'm saying is what happened to this guy is an atrocious violation of civil rights," Joe Rizoli said.

     Rizoli also said he believes Zündel is being held not because of his alleged immigration violations, but because of his questioning of the Holocaust.

     "He's just getting flak from people who want to put him in jail, and keep him in jail," he said, comparing efforts to silence Zündel to worries over anti-Jewish bias in the Mel Gibson-produced film "The Passion."

     Gibson's film has drawn criticism from Jewish groups, who say it portrays Jews as responsible for the death of Jesus Christ.

     "He's a revisionist," Rizoli said, of Zündel. "He has an opinion, let him have an opinion.