Good moral advice for the purée of heart.

PS: Apparently someone recently tried to resurrect Topham’s site, by the way, and it’s up but insecure and it’s been hit with an avalanche of advertising spam about Rolex watches, of all things.

And Atzmon? He chortled about having a new career as brilliant expert witness for the defense in antisemitism cases. Then Topham was convicted. And then Atzmon started going on alt-right podcasts like Henrik Palmgren’s “Red Ice” and giving invited talks to Holocaust denial orgs like the IHR.

His repeated violations of the conditions of probation landed him in court again. He spent the rest of his life battling various forms of probation conditions. He died at age 77 on March 23, 2024, according to fellow Canadian (and fellow Holocaust denier) Monika Schaefer.

Anyway, Topham got what you get when you've got Atzmon in your corner: unanimously convicted. He was ordered as probationary condition to remove the hate speech from his website and given a suspended sentence. He didn't.

He was asked the “six million” question in court, by my count on reading the transcripts, four separate times and he dodged it four separate ways. It's a question he decided he simply can't afford to answer, and he's spent the last two decades running away from it.

But the faux confusion is all for show. He's just calculated that he can't come out in public as a Holocaust denier without re-demolishing the rubble of his demolished career.

When challenged for a direct response to a direct question about where *he* stands, Atzmon falls into a kabuki mime that says "oh these questions are SO DIFFICULT, I couldn't POSSIBLY ansewr them, but isn't David Irving just WONDERFUL?"

Atzmon in court did what he does with Holocaust denial -- lionized the deniers, derided those who oppose Holocaust denial, and dodged at all costs any question about where *he* personally stands on questions like "did the Nazis kill six million Jews?" or "were there gas chambers at Auschwitz?"

This is at the point where Atzmon's career was already in a death spiral. He had been outed (by his own book) as, not the firebrand anti-Zionist he pretended to be, but a hard-core antisemite who wrapped his antisemitism in lefty vocabulary.

To double down on the strategy, they made their other catastrophic mistake. They brought in as an expert witness for the defense ... Gilad Atzmon.

That is, Topham's lawyer didn't argue "my client has the right to say truly nutty racist things" but "my client is an honest reporter onto something big about the international Jewish conspiracy."

Why did Topham lose his court case in 2015? He made two cataclysmic mistakes. One was to base his legal strategy, not wholly on questions of freedom of speech, but on defending what he'd posted about Jews as defendably true.

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

In 2012 he was arrested and charged with crimes under Canada's hate propaganda laws. The case eventually went to trial, and he was found guilty of, as the CBC put it, communicating online statements that wilfully promoted hatred against Jewish people.

He was a self-described peacenik lefty of the "publishes 'Mein Kampf' and 'Protocols' and Holocaust denial on his website" category. That is, a fulminating bigot but wrapped in left vocabulary.

Arthur Topham lived in Quesnel, BC, a town of slightly under ten thousand. Google Maps puts it at about a six hour drive north of the US border. He also ran an antisemitic website called "The Radical Press." It was ostensibly lefty, but its "anti-Zionism" was of the antisemitic sort.

And don’t forget his blessing Holocaust denial as wrong but morally innocent.