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Jim Keegstra, who has died aged 80, was a Holocaust denying high school teacher, mechanic, and mayor of Eckville, Alta., whose prosecution for the wilful promotion of hatred went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, where the controversial law was upheld as a fair limit on free speech.

He died June 2, and his funeral was last Friday in Red Deer, where he worked for many years as the custodian of an apartment building. The cause was an enlarged heart after a prolonged illness, according to his son, Darren Keegstra.

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Fixated on the anti-Semitic forgery, the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, Mr. Keegstra denigrated Jews to his students in the 1980s.

“I got onto this through the scripture,” he told the journalist Robert Mason Lee in 1985. “Here was a people who denied everything about Christ, yet they were called the chosen people. That is a contradiction.”

His case was part of a landmark trio of hate crime cases the Supreme Court of Canada decided in 1990, in each case upholding the law being challenged. Mr. Keegstra’s case, along with the Ontario case of Don Andrews and Robert Smith, ended with a split 4-3 ruling against him.