Copley Cable Suspends Neo-Nazi Apologist’s Series : Television: ‘Another Voice of Freedom’ suggests humane treatment of Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust. Paragon still airing show.

An Orange County cable-TV company has pulled a series of programs produced by a neo-Nazi apologist who claims the Holocaust was a hoax, but another local cable system will continue to broadcast them.

Complaints from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Jewish human rights organization, prompted Copley Colony Cablevision to drop “Another Voice of Freedom,” which suggests that Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust were treated humanely, fed well, given jobs, even allowed to exercise daily in swimming pools.

“I decided we should wait” before broadcasting any more episodes until the company’s legal department and a supervisor can review the program, said Julian Egcasenza, public access coordinator for Copley, which serves Cypress and La Palma.

But officials with Paragon Cable System will continue to broadcast the show.

“Can we pull a program just because we don’t like it? No,” said Gaston Castellanos, who oversees Paragon’s public-access programming. Paragon Cable System, which serves Garden Grove, Huntington Beach, Westminster, Fountain Valley, Los Alamitos and other areas, has received no complaints about the program, Castellanos said.

Canadian Ernest Zundel is bringing the show to Southern California, where at least a dozen cable-TV companies have shown or are scheduled to show his low-budget series of 50 half-hour programs.

The Wiesenthal Center sent letters this week to many cable-TV companies, imploring them to reconsider their broadcast of the shows.

The German-born Zundel, 56, said from his home in Toronto: “You mean in America, the last bastion of free speech, the censors are hard at work again? Don’t they ever sleep?”

The Wiesenthal Center has been dogging Zundel for two years, from Canada to the United States, where it has helped get his TV series yanked from two satellites and a few broadcast TV and radio stations.

The center is most concerned now by the timing of Zundel’s efforts in the Southland. Worldwide ceremonies begin the week of April 24 to commemorate Yom Hashoah, the annual memorial for victims of the Holocaust, the mass slaughter of European civilians and especially Jews by the Nazis during World War II.

“I have no doubt there will be demonstrations in front of one or more of the cable facilities by the (Holocaust) survivors,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, who said he can’t understand why someone living in Canada has the right to broadcast whatever he wants in the United States. “To have that kind of insensitivity directed at them, and partially paid for by them as consumers in the community, cannot be ignored.”

The Wiesenthal Center is equally troubled by Zundel’s newsletter that goes to 41 countries, and his weekly short-wave radio program. Zundel contends his “Voice of Freedom” episodes have played or are now playing in 40 locations throughout the United States.

Zundel said he has “been waging battles to have Germans rehabilitated on public airwaves since I came from Germany to Canada in 1958.”

Despite its controversial views, the “Voice of Freedom” episodes are presented in a low-key and matter-of-fact fashion to avoid the kind of reaction white-supremacist Tom Metzger received several years ago when his public-access shows were pulled by some cable-TV companies that were afraid they would incite violence.

FCC guidelines and Paragon cable’s “standard operating procedures” prohibit it from pulling a public-access program unless the show is libelous, obscene, of poor technical quality, contains political advertising or is intended to defraud viewers, said Castellanos, who also is cable production supervisor for Garden Grove.

He said that Paragon has not been contacted by the Wiesenthal Center, but that “we certainly would like to talk to the center. If they have a problem with this, we are certainly willing to discuss it with them.”