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Toben to sponsor Holocaust denial conference
Jacqui Gal, Australian Jewish News, March 19, 2004
The Adelaide Institute is sponsoring a conference of Holocaust deniers, revisionists and self-styled "activists" in Sacramento, California, next month.
The so-called "Major revisionist conference" has a scheduled list of speakers which includes Dr Fredrick Toben, who heads the Adelaide Institute; Lady Michelle (sic) Renouf, a former Miss New Zealand (sic); German Horst Mahler; Institute for Historical Review director Mark Weber; and Canadian Association for Free Expression director Paul Fromm, according to the conference website.
Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Jeremy Jones told AJN:
"It's a matter of showing with whom the Adelaide Institute is willing to associate. The fact that any Australian would associate themselves with a gallery of individuals attempting to distort history is abominable."
Dr Toben, who was ordered by the Federal Court last July to remove any material which denies the Holocaust from his Adelaide Institute website, has again come under scrutiny by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies and Executive Council of Australian Jewry over the contents of his website.
To be held at an undisclosed location for "security reasons", the conference is dedicated to Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel, who is currently incarcerated in Canada, and "all the victims of Zionist terror, as well as freedom of speech" by organiser Walter F Mueller, according to the website.
Vienna-born Mueller publishes a revisionist newspaper under the innocuous title Community News. It has included articles headed "Lies of the century - life in Buchenwald camp" and "How Zionist Jews got America into World War I".
Israeli conspiracy theorist Barry Chamish was also due to address the symposium, but reportedly withdrew due to pressure from American political commentator Daniel Pipes.
The European American Culture Council of Sacramento is hosting the two-day event. The conference will receive financial assistance from the revisionist Institute for Historical Review.
Nova 100 FM's Holocaust 'dilemma' breached code
Alana Rosenbaum, AJN, March 19, 2004
The Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA) has found Nova 100 FM breached the commercial code of practice's standards of decency when it aired a game last year asking listeners to imagine they were ordered off a train at Auschwitz and forced to choose between saving their mother or child from the gas chambers.
Nova 100 FM was bombarded with complaints on April 2 last year after it posed the dilemma as part of a competition in which entrants stood to win $1000.
The station withdrew the competition and issued an apology within hours of it going to air, but Jewish Community Council of Victoria president Michael Lipschutz complained to the ABA after Nova ignored a request to publish a further apology in the AJN to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Ten months after the competition went to air, the ABA found that Nova had breached the commercial radio code of practice.
"The view is that the dilemma posed was offensive not only to the Jewish community in Melbourne, but to the audience of the licensee's service" the 15-page report concluded.
"The ABA acknowledges the right of people to discuss tragic events of both current or historical significance. However, these sorts of discussions should be conducted in a sensitive and appropriate context. In this particular case, the placement of the discussion was neither appropriate nor sensitive."
But the media watchdog proposed no further action against Nova, noting that the radio station issued an apology on the day the competition went to air, and during the breakfast show the following day.
Lipschutz told the AJN:
"The decision demonstrated that the stance we took was correct. it was not sufficient for Nova to make what I regard as a half-hearted apology. They offended the community and went beyond the pale of decency".
The offending question was posed as part of the station's regular "Double Dilemma" competition, which invited listeners to take on ethical quandaries.
Comic
art of a Holocaust tale IN 1992 artist
Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer Prize for his masterful Holocaust book
Maus, which achieved worldwide acclaim for tackling the Holocaust
through comic art.
It also covers the
tortured relationship between Vladek and his cartoonist son who tries to
come to terms with his father's terrifying experience.
The sequel continues
the minor arguments between father and son, highlighting life's everyday
disappointments, which are set against a backdrop of history.
Jewish Museum of
Australia director Dr Helen Light said it took three years to bring the
Spiegelman exhibition to Melbourne.
The artist is expected
to come to Melbourne before the exhibition finishes in July, but ill
health has delayed his travel plans.
"This exhibition
presents a rare opportunity to see the creative process behind a
monumental achievement," said Dr Light, adding that Spiegelman's
books are important works of art.
[ Töben's
comment: No wonder it's an achievement because competition from
Revisionists has legally been prevented. Hence the achievement is that
of a monopolist, not that of a creative spirit because any dissention,
and any free exchange of creative impulses has been legally
stifled!]
"Multi-layered,
profoundly complex, challenging, truthful, painfully confronting and
poignant, these works deal with the most difficult themes in the medium
of the comic. Spiegelman has deftly challenged the statement 'No art
after Auschwitz'.
[ Töben's
comment: What a stupid statement that is, anyway. Wasn't it that
weaseltier - weasel animal that made this up?
It reminds me of
the other one "The End of History", or any other such
nonsense claims. Latching on to such statements shows the poverty of
intellectual resourcefulness - much like the current 'war on terrorism'
and 'if you're not with us, you're against us'.
Such primitive
dialectic trick may work for a time, but it cannot lead to any kind of
creativity because such dichotomy is predatory and derivative.
It reminds me
of Australia's Jeremy Jones, the leading Zionist who needs an enemy
image for self-referential purposes. It is out of such negativity that
he derives his identity - a derivative identity that has no roots from
which it grew, except perhaps the roots of envy and hatred, and possibly
fear. Fear is the father of cruelty - and this fits Jones and his
Zionist tyrants. But all tyrants are fearful, as are terrorists, but
Freedom Fighters and Martyrs do not fear death!]
Spiegelman has taken
the comic to deal with the most serious and sacred subject. As artwork
dealing with the Holocaust, these books are groundbreaking."
[ Töben's
comment: What praise on works of art that had no rivalry, no challenge,
no adjustment to physical factuality because the Revisionist artist is
legally enchained- enslaved in a framework that stifles the creative
impulse. What shame on those who let this happen!]
In Maus,
Spiegelman [ in German = mirror man] depicts people as animals - Jews
are drawn as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs and Americans as dogs.
Dr Light said the use
of animal stereotyping enables Spiegelman to show how dangerous
stereotyping really is.
She said the museum
would use the exhibition to teach people about the dangers of
stereotyping, racism and prejudice.
"Because of the
contemporary medium of commix, the exhibition has the voice and power to
reach the young and the disaffected - audience that don't normally
consider such issues in art."
In association with
the exhibition, the museum will hold education programs for secondary
schools exploring stereotyping, racism, prejudice and cartooning.
[ Töben's
comment: And that is how our Australian school system carries the
Holocaust story into the classroom - where then German hatred is
implanted into the student at an early age. And the German government is
actually funding such enterprises through various foundations and direct
grants all over the world.]
Spiegelman was born in
Stockholm, Sweden, in 1948 and raised in Queens, New York. One of his
earliest passions was Mad magazine and its popular parody of
the "adult" world.
When Spiegelman moved
to San Francisco in 1971, he began working from autobiographical
material. In 1972-73 his three-page strip Maus, which dealt
with his parents' memories of Nazi persecution, was published in Funny
Animals magazine.
In 1977, Belier Press
published the anthology Breakdowns: From Maus to now, which
featured his art as well as his personal history.
Spiegelman's cartoons
have appeared in magazines including the New Yorker.
Spiegelman works and
lives in New York City with his wife Francoise Mouly and his children
Nadja and Dashiell.
He says he has created
a new artistic genre which he calls "comix reportage".
Spiegelman's sharp
social and political commentary has been seen in many exhibitions around
the world including the United States, France Italy, Switzerland and
Argentina. He has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.
In 2001, he began a
series of 10 large panels of post-September 11 reflections titled In
the Shadow of No Towers, which have been published in the German
weekly Die Zeit and other leading international newspapers.
[ Töben's
comment: Again, working without competition, this artist
propagates German hatred because the premise upon which his art rests
cannot be contested - cries of 'antisemite', 'Holocaust denier',
'hater', etc. would quickly ensue and a ban imposed on anyone that
challenges the Holocaust orthodoxy with a set of critical comic strips.]
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©-2004 Adelaide Institute
