John Demjanjuk: What does the Guardian judge offensive?

This is the letter that offended the ideals of good journalism at the Guardian

"What kind of justice is it that proscribes the normally accepted right of the accused to challenge the assumption that a crime had, in fact, occurred? Normally the prosecution is obliged to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the crime of murder had taken place. This is not the case in the trial of Demjanjuk. The court will, without proof, arbitrarily accept that the crime took place. Being stripped of his most powerful defence, the accused is reduced to pleading mistaken identity or that he had nothing to do with an unproved murder."

John Mortl

***

The Guardian issued this fearless statement explaining its principled stand:

"We published a letter by John Mortl in the Guardian of 3 December [page 37, and guardian.co.uk] relating to the case of John Demjanjuk, who is accused of assisting in the murder of 27,900 people in Poland. Unfortunately, we misread the letter. The underlying meaning, we now realise, implied Holocaust denial. As soon as we realised our mistake, we removed the letter from the website. It should never have been published and we apologise unreservedly that it was."

The State, the University, the Press. It's a hard row to hoe.

John Demjanjuk, a Not-So-Funny Farce About the Last Nazi

ESQUIRE 15 October 2009

Funny thing is, he was never a Nazi, nor Ivan the Terrible, nor even German. So why now is he standing trial in Munich as accessory to 27,900 Nazi murders? Is this one last blow struck for justice for the Holocaust? Or is it a farce?

By Scott Raab

[John Demjanjuk, who] was stripped of citizenship and shipped to Israel to face his accusers — brought to justice onstage in a concert hall converted into a courtroom for a yearlong trial broadcast on Israeli television and radio, meant to remind the younger Jews never to forget the evil done to them — and heard the survivors, in simultaneous translation, identify him across all the years and miles as the Ukrainian savage so bloodthirsty, so unforgettably depraved — with a whip or a sword or a drill, it was his pleasure to maim Jews only a few moments away from being gassed — that inmates called him Ivan Grozny: Ivan the Terrible.

[….]

Demjanjuk didn't hang, of course. After five years alone on death row in Israel's Ayalon prison — where Adolf Eichmann, too, had sat, the desk jockey who saw to it that the trains groaning with doomed Jews ran on time, and who was strung up in 1962; Eichmann and Demjanjuk are the only men Israel has ever tried for the Nazi genocidal crimes — Demjanjuk presented evidence on appeal that another man, one Ivan Marchenko, was Ivan the Terrible, and that Israel was about to hang the wrong Ukrainian.

Funny thing: The Israeli Supreme Court decided to let Ivan Demjanjuk walk.