If life wasn't full of enough irony as it is, Ernst Zundel has presented us all with a new one.

Ernst Zundel - the portly, Holocaust-denying hate propagandist who fouled Canada's air for more than 40 years, before fleeing to the United States in 2001 - is back in Canada, sitting in a detention cell in southern Ontario. And he is claiming refugee status.

That's right: refugee status. Zundel fears being extradited to his native Germany, where an arrest warrant awaits him, for his willingness to defame Jewish dead, among other things. And therein lays the irony: a hateful little man who loudly mocked and derided Canada's refugee claimant system for decades, now seeking to avail himself of the very protections it affords. If the consequences were not so serious, the case would very nearly be comical.

And Ernst Zundel is, if nothing else, a serious problem. He immigrated to Canada in 1958, at the age of 19, to escape military service in West Germany. He earned a living, at first, as a commercial artist and photo retoucher. And then, in 1978, the media revealed that, under his middle names - Christoph Friedrich - Zundel had established himself as Canada's leading Holocaust-denying propagandist.

Out of his fortified home in Toronto, he wrote and published screeds with titles like The Hitler We Loved and Why. He published anti-Semitic tracts authored by others, such as The Hoax of the Twentieth Century and The Six Million Swindle. Most of all, he propagated hate. A representative sampling of his views is found in the January 1977 of something called White Power Report: "The Jews give us, their White hosts, wars, depressions, inflation, unemployment, energy shortages, higher and higher taxes and air piracy," wrote Zundel. "Like sheep, they expect us to go down the road with them - all the way to the kosher slaughterhouse."

I have interviewed Zundel more than once, and have even debated him. In one such encounter, he was forthright about who he was. "Are you a National Socialist?" I asked him. He replied that he was. "Nazi is the short form for National Socialist, Mr. Zundel. Is that what you are? A Nazi?" The answer: "Yes." He was not ashamed of it.

Successive Canadian governments were equally clear about their desire to rid themselves of the Nazi named Ernst Zundel. But he had legally obtained landed immigrant status, and permanent residency, long before his neo-Nazi proselytizing became widely known. Through the sales of countless anti-Semitic and white supremacist publications around the globe, he was able to retain lawyers to confound many of the subsequent legal attempts to rein him in.

In 1994, that changed. In that year, Zundel made a mistake: he applied for Canadian citizenship. By doing so, he unwittingly set in motion a process that enabled officials - including the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) - to start determining whether he could be denied citizenship on the grounds that he was a threat to national security. To many, there was no doubt he was - he had funded violent neo-Nazi groups in Europe, and he had used his web Zundelsite to propagate hatred around the globe.

Zundel fought hard, flooding the courts with motions and appeals, but he saw the writing on the wall. In December 2000, the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear any more of his increasingly-arcane legal arguments in the case. A few weeks later, Zundel fled to the United States - where, in a letter issued by one of his lawyers, he renounced his permanent residency status. There, he devoted himself to his Zundelsite, defying a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal order to remove hateful material.

Those hoping that we had seen the last of Ernst Zundel were to be disappointed. Earlier this month, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agents arrested him at his home outside Knoxville, Tennessee. Zundel had overstayed his visitor's visa, and the Americans - understandably - wanted him to leave. Minutes after being handed over to Canadian immigration authorities near Fort Erie, Ontario, Zundel claimed refugee status.

There can be no doubt that Zundel has outwitted the system before. But this time, I believe he will fail. Germany is a strong ally of Canada, and democratic nation with some of the toughest anti-hate laws in the world. It is offensive to accept, even for a moment, that Germany is capable of the sorts of human rights abuses from which legitimate refugees flee.

So as he sits in his jail cell in Southern Ontario, Ernst Zundel can now contemplate a pair of ironies: the man whose Holocaust-denying web site refers to the refugee system as "a racket," now seeking to save his hide by taking advantage of it. The man who professes to love Germany so much, desperate to avoid being sent back there.

Let's finally do to this hateful little Holocaust denier what should have been done long, long ago: when it comes time to debate what he now seeks, let's deny him.