28 February 2008 Hearing

Notice of Motion for 28 February 2008 FCA Hearing 

    Amended Notice of Motion for 28 February 2008 Hearing

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Written Submission for 28 February 2008 FCA Hearing

The following statement by Dr Fredrick Töben is submitted for clarification purposes to His Honour, Justice M Moore, presiding judge at the Federal Court of Australia hearing of 28 February 2008. A copy has been sent to the Applicant’s solicitor, Mr Steven Lewis.

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1. Introduction

1.1 If one follows the argument presented by the Applicant, Mr Jeremy Jones since he initiated action against me in 1996, it seems that I am intentionally contravening a court order, that I am criminally motivated in my publishing enterprise on the Internet and that I need to be severely punished and imprisoned. This assumption gave rise to Jeremy Jones requesting on 5 December 2006 that the court have me arrested and imprisoned – what an impertinence!

1.2 Such impertinence also aims to use as a proxy the Australian court system so that any legal consequences flowing my way can then be published world-wide in the Jewish press, et al, as having been authored by me because I have not obeyed Australian law. This is the old trick of blaming the victim of legal persecution because the claim will be that like any other Australian citizen Dr Töben is duty-bound to follow the law. Such interpretation of legal persecution enables the perpetrator to deflect attention from the fact that this whole matter is specifically a Jewish matter of vengeance against those who refuse to believe, without first asking basic questions of fact, in the Jewish Holocaust-Shoah.

1.3 A brief review of the development of this current action will illustrate that I have attempted to stay within the limits of the law when publishing material on Adelaide Institute’s Internet website.

1.4 This present action began on 5 December 2006, i.e. four years after the Federal Court of Australia-FCA Court Order was made on 17 September 2002. Throughout this time until I was informed of the 5 December 2006 legal action I was under the impression that I was safely negotiating my way through the Court Order.

1.5 A similar embryonic episode to the current court action occurred in 2004 when on 5 March 2004 The Australian Jewish News ran an item headed: ‘Is Toben at it again?’ Therein the Applicant, Jeremy Jones, indicated that some of the material on Adelaide Institute’s website may have been in breach of the Court Order. This was a few weeks before the planned April 2004 Sacramento Revisionist Conference, a conference that ultimately failed when the Deutsche Turnverein club in Sacramento, California, yielded to Jewish pressure and cancelled the venue.

1.6 The article, below, quotes then ‘foreign minister’ of Australian Jewry, Mr Jeremy Jones, thus:

“We are considering all options. There is material on the website which merits serious investigation.” Jeremy Jones, President, Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

For more see Annexure 1 below.

1.7 Around 27 November 2006 a process server attempted to serve legal papers on me at my Adelaide home but I had left early for Iran and thereby escaped the machinations set up by Jeremy Jones.

1.8 It is clear that the initiated legal action set down for 5 December 2006 aimed to prevent me from attending the 11-12 December 2006 Teheran Holocaust Conference. I say this because of my unjustified temporary detention at Melbourne Airport on 13 November 2006 about half an hour before my overseas flight was to depart.

1.9 This current legal action is thus an abuse of legal process. But not only.

2. This is a political matter – Applicant Jeremy Jones, as former President of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry - ECAJ, was then regarded as the foreign minister of Australia’s Jewish Community, and he and his pressure group for a long time have been ruthlessly persecuting those who refuse to bend to their pressure, those who refuse to believe in their version of the Jewish Holocaust-Shoah.

2.1 Jeremy Jones’ hounding and defaming of Mr John Bennett – see Amended Notice of Motion, Annexure 3.

2.2 Jewish intimidation/blackmail of public figures as exemplified by Alan Goldberg, QC, now Justice of the Federal Court of Australia, writing to former SA Minister of Education, Mrs Joyce Steele – see ANM, Annexure 2.

2.3 Currently – Mr Anthony Grigor-Scott before the FCA.

2.4 A few years ago, Mrs Olga Scully, who declared herself bankrupt before the FCA $130,000 court costs was awarded against her.

3. Abuse of legal process – the aim of any action beginning before the HREOC is to settle disputes, to clarify the problems and not to eliminate/destroy an individual’s livelihood. When in 1996 Jeremy Jones lodged his complaint with the HREOC in refused to conciliate and gleefully rushed into the legal system thereby revealing his intention to get the matter legally resolved. At the time a HREOC member stated to me that this is all politics.

3.1 With the 5 December 2007 action the Applicant sought imprisonment, and now threatens court-ordered financial ruin.

3.2 This is using the FCA as a proxy. The Applicant – as is his usual practice of deflecting from his seeking the legendary pound of flesh – will claim he had nothing to do with the legal persecution/financial ruin/imprisonment because it is between the court and Töben – and Töben, it will be claimed, has not obeyed Australian Law. It is because of this deception by Jeremy Jones that the material complained of should be subjected to a hearing in open court.

3.3 By criminalizing me Jeremy Jones has run true to form by doing what he began in 1996 – he will not discuss but he will gossip and defame me in the media, then persecute me because he knows full well that I lack the financial means to silence him by activating a defamation  writ against him, as was the practice of Australia’s richest man, the late Kerry Packer,  whenever anyone defamed him. That a Revisionist also shies away from taking legal action against anyone is taken for granted because legal battles can only hinder free expression and not solve historical disagreements of interpretation. Where historical events are legally protected and dissenters are ruthlessly criminalized, as in matters Holocaust-Shoah in Austria, France and Germany, and the Armenian Holocaust in Turkey, then research is non-existent because the subject matter becomes a state-defended ideology.

3.4 Jeremy Jones also feigns innocence, hurt feelings and plays the victim to the full in order to have his way in any battle-of-the-wills situation. He knows full well that he is defending a gigantic hoax, a massive lie that is perverting our understanding of world events, i.e. that an open debate about this Holocaust-Shoah topic would bring crashing down the numerous lies, for example, that Germans ‘gassed’ Jews during World War Two, and that Germans had an ‘extermination program’. What motivates Jeremy Jones to set into legal concrete such lies within Australia’s legal system is beyond my comprehension because I shy away from attributing to him being ignorant of the true facts that are covered up by those lies. Jones is clearly following the overseas pattern of legal persecution used on Revisionist scholars. To date no-one has shown or drawn a homicidal gas chamber.

3.5 The latest book about gassings at Auschwitz appeared in December 2007 in German by Italian Revisionist, Carlo Mattogno: Auschwitz: Die Erste Vergasung. Gerüchte und Wirklichkeit – Auschwitz: The First Gassing. Rumour or Reality. CHP. ISBN: 978-0-9557 162-1-8. See Annexure 2 below. Therein renowned Auschwitz scholar, Italian Carlo Mattogno, clearly sets out how the genesis of the Auschwitz gassing story began in October 1941 as part of a general horror propaganda campaign against Germany. In 1946 the Polish judge, Jan Sehn, gave it legal status when he attempted to synchronise the various contradictory eye witness stories, adding numbers killed and method of gassing – but still without any definitive dating. Then in 1959 the propagandist at the Auschwitz Museum, Danuta Czech, used Sehn’s material and added an arbitrary date, and thus the ‘the first human gassing’ story had become ‘history’. Mattogno delves into this process and reveals how the gassing story lie originated. We saw similar mental patterns emerge after the 9/11 tragedy when the US government developed the official conspiracy theory, which attempted to suggest that a group of Arabic terrorists perpetrated the acts of flying planes into buildings that then defied well-known laws of physics to implode into a heap of rubble. To me the Pentagon plane crash is the most amusing and absurd claim because the Pentagon lawn was left untouched, unscratched and totally without damage. I want some of that lawn for my dried up lawn in Adelaide because if it can withstand such an accident without damage, it would survive anything.

4. The Consent Orders – should be declared invalid because of deception/ legal ambush.

4.1 I received an email copy of the draft consent Orders at 7pm and signed the Consent Orders at the Adelaide FCA the next day around 9am. Compare this with the recent Australian Government Apology to the Stolen Generation – it took a week to formulate the apology offered to Australian Aboriginals.

4.2 I had no input into the formulation of the Consent Order – and relied on my barrister’s advice.

4.3 My barrister failed to alert me to the fact that one item marked for deletion on Adelaide Institute’s Internet website was a link to an item on another website. It was never the subject of the apology, and so I did not delete it – and now seek clarification from the FCA.

4.4 The Apology was directed at one item only under ‘C’ of the 17 September 2002 FCA Orders – and then it was for containing some crude expressions, which I have no problem with in deleting. My barrister knew that I would never apologise for publishing material that I consider to be factual/truthful.

4.5 Material that I publish reflects and canvases a broad world view of contentious issues, on matters historical and current affairs.

4.6 I have no problems when individuals advise me they find material on our website offensive and that they wish it to be removed – it happens at irregular intervals when individuals raise an issue with me.

However, Jeremy Jones refused to discuss matters with me – and from the beginning has pressed hard for legal action. When he lodged the initial complaint in 1996 before the HREOC, he refused to attend any conciliation meeting.

4.7 I have deleted all the material mentioned in the Consent Orders bar the link from our website.

4.8 The Applicant, Jeremy Jones, has spared no costs at initiating legal persecution against me. It clearly follows a similar pattern initiated world-wide against those who refuse to believe in the Jewish Holocaust-Shoah, for example H-G Kögel, Horst Mahler, Sylvia Stolz and Udo Valendy in Germany; Ernst Zündel in Canada/USA/Germany; Germar Rudolf in USA/Germany; Wolfgang Fröhlich in Austria; Gerd Honsik in Spain/Austria; Robert Faurisson, Vincent Renouard and Georges Theil in France; Siegfried Verbeke in Belgium/Holland/Germany; Jürgen Graf in Switzerland, and many more.

5. A matter of Injustice - the subject matter has never been aired in open court. The Applicant has never had to prove his hurt feelings by presenting to court a medical certificate indicating how some of the material on Adelaide Institute’s website has caused him psychological damage.

5.1 I have participated in public meetings in Australia and overseas where the subject matter of the Holocaust-Shoah has been discussed in open forum – see submitted DVDs:

5.11 Teheran Conference December 2006; 

5.12 Inverell Forum March 2007

5.13 Forty Days Days in Teheran

5.2 I seek the court’s guidance as to what I am permitted to write and talk about – see enclosed newsletters submitted as Annexures of the various Affidavits submitted since January 2007.

5.3 The article, ‘Too much Holocaust’, marked Annexure 2 below, illustrates how one-sided the current Holocaust-Shoah discourse meanders about without questioning its basic premise and defining its terms because it is assumed that ‘the Holocaust-Shoah happened’!

Revisionists, like all scientific researchers, critically investigate all assumptions/premises on which an argument has been erected. That is what moral and intellectual integrity is all about.

In his book, Auschwitz: The First Gassing, Carlo Mattogno’s research clearly reveals that the gassing story is built on a lie and not on facts.

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6. Annexures

Annexure 1 – A. Friday, March 5, 2004

B. 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.

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Annexure 2 – Too much Holocaust, February 18, 2008

The New York Review of Books for February 14 2008 carries an article of more than 4,000 words by Tony Judt, adapted from a lecture he gave in Bremen last year on being awarded the Hannah Arendt prize. Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem is a work that no serious student of the fate of European Jewry under the Nazis can bypass, and it is therefore entirely appropriate that Judt should centre these reflections of his - 'The "Problem of Evil" in Postwar Europe' - on the ways in which the Shoah or Holocaust (I use the two expressions interchangeably) is remembered and written about today. The general tenor of what he has to say on the subject is regrettable, however. Because Tony Judt's is a name that is respected in the academic world and beyond, I take the space I need here to subject his essay to critical scrutiny.

After a period of relative inattention in the years following the Second World War, the Shoah was increasingly taken up from some time after the 1960s, Judt says, until it became a universal reference point - in films, television, books, specialist studies, memoirs, school curricula. So it remains today. Now that it is so generally emphasized, is everything all right? Judt's immediate answer is that he isn't sure. But by the time he has spelled out the sources of his uncertainty, the burden of the argument has become clear and it is that he thinks that things are not all right. He goes through five difficulties he has with the amount of attention now given to the Holocaust. In what follows I summarize these, recording at the same time the difficulties I have with his difficulties.

1. Judt's first difficulty arises from the fact that the way the so-called Final Solution is remembered in Western Europe is not in harmony with the memories of the Second World War in Eastern Europe. Why - he reports people asking there - the sensitivity to the mass murder of the Jews? What was so distinctive about it? What about the non-Jewish victims? And the victims, also, of Stalinism? That these other victims, whether of Nazism or Stalinism, are worth every bit of historical and memorial attention they get, and if this is not enough, then more attention still, is not a point I would dispute. But beyond that, I'm puzzled why this East European perspective should pose any difficulty for Tony Judt. For the question why people should be so sensitive about the destruction of European Jewry is not a good one, and the irritation behind it is not an impulse worthy of respect. These are responses based either on ignorance or on something worse than ignorance and which Judt himself has identified a few paragraphs earlier in his piece in talking of 'the powerful incentive [there was] in many places to forget what had happened, to draw a veil over the worst horrors'. These places include Eastern Europe for the obvious reason that there were East Europeans who colluded with the persecution of the Jews, with expropriation of Jewish property, deportation and all the rest of it.

Why so much attention should be aroused by the mass murder of any very large number of people - in this case millions, but the same would apply were it 'only' tens of thousands - is not the kind of question that should be indulged. It is hard to imagine Judt or any other morally serious person asking, for example, why people should be so focused on what happened in Rwanda in 1994 when there have been victims aplenty in other parts of Africa; or on what is happening in Darfur now, when the people of Zimbabwe or the Congo are also suffering. To draw attention to these other victims and to say that there isn't enough of it, where there isn't, is perfectly proper. To ask why people should be so sensitive to what happened in Rwanda or is happening in Darfur, or to ask what is so very distinctive about the killing in one or other of those two places, would be morally obtuse. Killing of this magnitude doesn't have to be distinctive to justify anyone's attention; it just has to be what it is - the mass murder of human beings.

So it is hard to fathom why Tony Judt, or we West Europeans, should consider that we have a difficulty here. That some East Europeans have a different view from many West Europeans isn't a compelling reason for thinking so. The difficulty is rather theirs who frown upon the impulse of others to remember a major historical crime. Let us defer, therefore, coming to any conclusive judgement about the meaning of Tony Judt's first difficulty.

2. His second difficulty is a historiographical one: now that 'we are encouraged to think about those sufferings [i.e. of the Jews] all the time', there is a danger that historians, reading the perspective of the present back into the past, may inflate the place the Holocaust actually had at the time in the meanings, the preoccupations, the experiences, of those who lived through the war. But if we think like this, think that the Second World War was about the Holocaust, we will not teach 'good history', Judt says. He's right. Again, however, I don't see that this is a difficulty of general scope, rather than just a necessary concern in the training of historians and history teachers. It is practically a law of nature that in any widely populated field of human endeavour there will be mediocre and indifferent productions alongside the examples of excellence or merely competence. Where novelists are many, some novels will be poor; where poetry abounds, some of it will not serve to decorate everyone's day. Just so, if there is much written, spoken and taught about the tragedy of European Jewry and its place in the war that was its backdrop, then some of that will be of better quality and some of it of worse; there will be examples of poor history. So what? The better can be relied on to make its way in the world and outlast the not so good. Judt himself allows that in 'moral terms' (his emphasis) it is proper that the central issue of the war should now be Auschwitz. If on this account we get some poor history, that is simply an inevitable product of the moral focus that is a proper one according to Judt himself. Unless, that is, he thinks that, its moral centrality notwithstanding, there is just too much attention being given to the Shoah today. But we need a reason, in that case, for thinking that this much attention is too much. And we don't yet have it. Could it be that Judt's difficulties are not themselves reasons supporting that conclusion but are rather inferences from the preconception that this much attention is too much attention - so that what Judt's essay gives us are not parts adding up to a reasoned whole, but instead an originary meaning essential to the whole and which bathes the individual parts in its illumination?

3. Judt's third difficulty has to do with the word 'evil'. I quote him at length on this:

Modern secular society has long been uncomfortable with the idea of "evil." We prefer more rationalistic and legal definitions of good and bad, right and wrong, crime and punishment. But in recent years the word has crept slowly back into moral and even political discourse... However, now that the concept of "evil" has reentered our public language we don't know what to do with it. We have become confused.

On the one hand the Nazi extermination of the Jews is presented as a singular crime, an evil never matched before or since, an example and a warning: "Nie Wieder! Never again!" But on the other hand we invoke that same ("unique") evil today for many different and far from unique purposes. In recent years politicians, historians, and journalists have used the term "evil" to describe mass murder and genocidal outcomes everywhere: from Cambodia to Rwanda, from Turkey to Serbia, from Bosnia to Chechnya, from the Congo to Sudan. Hitler himself is frequently conjured up to denote the "evil" nature and intentions of modern dictators: we are told there are "Hitlers" everywhere, from North Korea to Iraq, from Syria to Iran. And we are all familiar with President George W. Bush's "axis of evil," a self-serving abuse of the term which has contributed greatly to the cynicism it now elicits.

Moreover, if Hitler, Auschwitz, and the genocide of the Jews incarnated a unique evil, why are we constantly warned that they and their like could happen anywhere, or are about to happen again?

Given Judt's concern about our becoming confused, he couldn't have given better evidence of it than the number of his own confusions collected in these paragraphs.

First, while the Holocaust doubtless plays its part in generating references to human evil, I don't think anyone could plausibly maintain that there is a shortage of alternative sources. From other mass atrocities of historical notoriety, through smaller-scale acts of political murder and torture, to ghastly individual crimes in the private sphere, the word 'evil' has plenty to keep it on the lips of humankind. Why the Holocaust should be lumbered with special responsibility here isn't clear. The idea, just to entertain it for a moment, that if the Holocaust hadn't happened modern conversation would be freer of the idea of evil is merely quaint.

Second, look at the list of items that Judt compiles to show the profligacy with which public discussion has recourse to the word 'evil'. This list includes: Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Chechnya, the Congo, Sudan, Saddam's Iraq and North Korea. God Almighty (if I may allow myself an imprecation sustained by the beliefs of others). To speak the word 'evil' in any of these cases doesn't seem the least bit exorbitant. Of course, if that word exhausts your verbal or intellectual tool-kit, you won't have much of an understanding of any of the events or political patterns that stand behind these names. But why it should be a difficulty or a worry to anyone that, for example, genocide is spoken of as evil, or an evil, is entirely mysterious.

It may be noted, in passing, while we're on the subject of naming evils, that one name that has got in on the act here is that of George W. Bush. Talk about a universal reference: rather like the Holocaust for evil, Bush's name has today become the embodiment of much badness for Western liberal intellectuals, so it is perhaps no surprise that he is now attached to showing the difficulties that can arise from... remembering the destruction of the European Jews.

Third, Judt sees it as problematic that the Holocaust should be considered by some as both a unique evil and a repeatable one. He is aware that the claim that the Holocaust is unique is controversial, because he has earlier gestured towards the view that there is an answer to the question why the Shoah is distinctive, without saying what that answer is. I have for my own part argued (here at length, and here more briefly) that there may indeed be a morally significant sense in which the Holocaust was unique, but that if it is, this is not because of any particularity of Jewish victimhood or suffering; it is rather to do with the nature of the Nazi crime. However that may be, the problem Judt makes of the idea of Holocaust singularity is only testimony to his own confusion. An event can be at once unprecedented, and therefore unique to date, and repeatable. Even apart from this, one can perfectly well believe both that the genocide against the Jews had some morally singular features and that it stands as a warning for the future - this not because of its singularity, but just as a genocide, i.e., because of what it shares with other genocides. That, I venture to suggest, is what the vast majority of those who emphasize the Shoah as a warning do in fact believe.

Fourth, as an additional sign of the omnipresence in contemporary usage of the idea of evil, Judt goes on to say, immediately after the passage I have quoted above:

Every time someone smears anti-Semitic graffiti on a synagogue wall in France we are warned that "the unique evil" is with us once more, that it is 1938 all over again. We are losing the capacity to distinguish between the normal sins and follies of mankind - stupidity, prejudice, opportunism, demagogy, and fanaticism - and genuine evil.

I shall come back to the theme of anti-Semitism shortly. But this verges on argument by clowning. Anti-Semitic incidents are to be taken seriously where they occur for a simple reason: anti-Semitism is a form of racist prejudice and racism is a serious matter, a poison in the body politic, in the places where it is secreted or reveals itself. But there is also a specific history of the form of racism that is anti-Semitism, a history the final fruit of which was Auschwitz and Treblinka. There may be some amongst those who invoke these horrors who really do think that it is always 1938, or 1942. But most of them don't think so - no more than people who remind us of the history of lynching in the US think that drawing the noose as a racist symbol in 2007 actually throws the country back to the 1890s when 'a black person was lynched almost every other day'. These are potent historical reminders of what racism has produced and they have their place in moral and political argument. They are not meant to equate anti-Semitic graffiti with the gas chambers except in the minds of a few know-nothings.

4. Much the same may be said about Judt's fourth difficulty - a concern he has about 'tunnel vision' or, as he also puts this, 'invest[ing] all our emotional and moral energies into just one problem'. What problem is that? Why, anti-Semitism. Judt writes:

[A]nti-Semitism, like terrorism, is not the only evil in the world and must not be an excuse to ignore other crimes and other suffering. The danger of abstracting "terrorism" or anti-Semitism from their contexts - of setting them upon a pedestal as the greatest threat to Western civilization, or democracy, or "our way of life," and targeting their exponents for an indefinite war - is that we shall overlook the many other challenges of the age.

I leave aside terrorism; that is not my topic here. But the suspicion I voiced earlier about Judt's not working from (good) reasons to a conclusion, but rather from a founding preconception towards confecting some (bad) reasons, is really confirmed by these remarkable statements. I don't know what audience or set of interlocutors he has imagined for himself, but if there are people who believe that anti-Semitism is the only evil in the world and the greatest threat to Western civilization, I doubt there would have been many of them listening to his lecture on Hannah Arendt, I doubt there are many (relatively speaking) in the world at large, and a man of Judt's intellectual capacities and reputation could do with addressing himself to listeners of a higher calibre than he has fashioned with this fourth difficulty of his.

5. Judt's final difficulty, as it had to be in view of what has gone before, is the relation of the Holocaust to arguments about Israel and the Palestinians.

It has several components, some of which have already been foreshadowed in what has gone before. (a) Judt deplores the way the Holocaust is invoked to deflect criticism of Israel by the suggestion that such criticism is a stimulus to anti-Semitism or just is anti-Semitism without further ado. (b) In fact, the reverse is true, he says: it is the taboo on criticism of Israel and a too intense focus on the Holocaust that are stimulants to cynicism and anti-Semitism. (c) Relative to other minority groups in the US and Europe, the Jews are not especially stigmatized, threatened or excluded; they are successful, and prominent in many spheres. (d) The Holocaust may 'lose its universal resonance' if it is too closely attached to the defence of a single country; as things are, if you ask outside the West, ask amongst Africans and Asians, what lessons there are from the Shoah, the responses 'are not very reassuring'.

What is striking about these arguments of Judt's is their unqualified, their completely one-sided, character. It is true that the Jewish tragedy in Europe is sometimes misused to justify or excuse Israeli policies that should not be defended. But to say this without noting that there is also anti-Semitic hostility to Israel, in the Arab world and in the West, some of it perfectly overt and some of it more discreet, is to pretend that anti-Semitism is a smaller problem than it is. To lament such misuses of the Holocaust without mentioning the misuses in the opposite direction that equate Israel with the spirit and the methods of the Nazis is to see with only one eye. The same goes for writing as if the most serious sources of anti-Semitism might be arguments used by defenders of Israel or an over-emphasis on the Shoah. Really? This is a centuries-old hatred, and yet here we find ourselves in a situation where it is defence of the Jewish state and memory of the genocide against the Jews that are the stimulants of anti-Semitism; these, at any rate, are Tony Judt's sources of choice.

Judt does not see fit even to notice what many others have perceived as a real trend during the last decade, a resurgence of anti-Semitism. But attacks on Jews have been on the increase in many countries. To take only the example of Britain, you might think it was of some significance that the Jewish community is 'forced to provide a permanent system of guards and surveillance for its schools, religious centres, and communal institutions'.

And then Judt reprises, with his fifth difficulty, the theme already announced with the first of them: namely, that outside of the West awareness of the Holocaust and responses to the question of what lessons should be drawn from it would not reassure us. And this is our difficulty, not theirs. Why? Can you imagine something similar transposed on to another major ethnic experience of suffering? Being told that because, say, in Sweden or Ukraine, there wasn't much of an awareness of, or there was a cynical disregard for, the experience of New World slavery, this suggested we shouldn't go on making too much of the victims of that terrible institution and the trade in human beings that went with it? I don't think so.

A few words now in conclusion. Is there too much about the Holocaust - too much writing, too much memorializing, too much reference? The whole weight of what Judt has to say pushes towards the conclusion that there is, though without his providing, as I have tried to show, a single compelling argument for this. But my own answer to the question is: no, there is not too much. I offer a moral and a political argument in support of that answer.

Morally - humanly - if you were to spend an hour of every day during a lifetime remembering, learning, lamenting, teaching what was done to the victims of the Nazi genocide you could not encompass all the cruelty and all the pain of those years. We do better to take note of Primo Levi's poem 'Shema':

Consider that this has been:

I commend these words to you.

Engrave them on your hearts

When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,

When you go to bed, when you rise.

Repeat them to your children.

This is true not because of what happened to those Jews, but because of what happened to those people; and it is therefore likewise true, exactly true, for the other millions of victims of other genocides - in Turkey, in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in Darfur, wherever.

As I have argued before, there is not too much attention given to the Holocaust or any other genocide, there is too little. Think only of the energy and attention that is being given, in the US and globally, to the American presidential election; or think of a major sporting event like the football World Cup; and then think how it might be, politically, if there were a planetary consciousness, a world-wide human rights movement, so cognizant of the worst crimes of the past, not turned away from them towards easier preoccupations, that people marched and agitated in their tens and hundreds of thousands whenever there was a genocide in process or threatening, demanded that the governments of the world and the institutions of world governance would treat these situations as urgent. Can Tony Judt, or anyone, be confident that this would not make the world a better place?

But Judt has all these difficulties with Holocaust remembrance, and he has them by way of honouring Hannah Arendt - Hannah Arendt who suggested the possibility that 'mankind in its entirety... might have been grievously hurt and endangered' by the crime of exterminating whole ethnic groups. It is hard to imagine a more unworthy tribute to her.  http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2008/02/too-much-holoca.html    

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Annexure 3 – Fredrick Töben’s brief review of Carlo Mattogno’s December 2007 book, Auschwitz: Die Erste Vergasung. Gerüchte und Wirklichkeit –translated from the original Italian 1992 edition – Auschwitz: La Prima gasazione - by Henry Gardner with Günter Deckert.  ISBN: 979-0-9557 162-1-8. Castle Hill Publishers, PO Box 118, GB-Hastings TN34 3 ZQ, United Kingdom. www.ety.com/HRP. Distribution Australia/Asia: Peace Books, PO Box 3300, Norwood – 5067, Australia.

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Renowned Italian Revisionist, Carlo Mattogno, is the world’s expert on the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. His detailed analysis of physical and documentary evidence enables him to answer with a definitive ‘NO!’ anyone who asserts gassings occurred at Auschwitz. His detailed knowledge enables him, literally, to state what size of screws were used on doors, etc.

Mattogno’s 1992 published results have been re-published and updated in a German edition by Castle Hill Publishers in Great Britain where, unlike in Germany, such publishing venture is still legal.

FORM – The 146-page paperback contains notes on primary sources, a detailed bibliography but no index. A number of typographical errors could have been avoided by closer proof-reading, especially by eliminating the number of wrongly hyphenated words. Also, it would have helped the German reader to visualize Mattogno’s argument had the photo appendix of the 2005 English edition been included. A reference in the Introduction states Mattogno is reflecting on 12 years since the Italian edition was published, but that should have been 15 years, which is corrected at the end of Mattogno’s Introduction dated ‘Rome, July 2007’.

CONTENT - In the first sentence of the Introduction the author states that although new material facts have emerged since the publishing of the 1992 Italian version there is no need to revise the conclusions then made. Mattogno also comments on the fact that mainstream historians have totally neglected the genesis of the gassing story:

‘The consequences of this strange inactivity on the part of official historiography is that the bibliography on this topic is, as yet, practically non-existent. Up until 1992, only a single article had been dedicated to this subject…’.

Mattogno then comments on how Jean Claude Pressac in 1993 arbitrarily changes the commencement dates and the duration of the gassings:

‘Here, I must point out another error of J-C Pressac, which will deliver the coup de grace to his explanation: it is not true that block 11 was unheated in December 1941. In fact, a heating device had been installed in this building by the end of May 1941.’

In the 1995 five-volume anthology, Auschwitz 1940-1945. Fundamental problems of the history of the camp, the director of the Auschwitz Museum, Dr Franciszek Piper,  in his article ‘Gas chambers and crematoria’, he devotes four pages to the first gassings.  

The publication of the 1995 Auschwitz Death Books did not contribute anything to the first gassing genesis.

According to Mattogno the first gassings are treated with incredible superficiality by Robert Jan van Pelt in his The Case for Auschwitz. Evidence from the Irving Trial. Indiana University Press, 2002.

The main source of information about the first gassing is still Danuta Czech’s 1959 published German edition, Kalendarium der Ereignisse im Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The second edition, published in 1989, adds new details that often contradict what appeared in the 1959 edition, and are based on the material produced by Polish investigative Judge Jan Sehn in 1946.

In magnificent academic style, and to the annoyance to the Holocaust-Shoah believers, Carlo Mattogno demolishes any argument about homicidal gassings at Auschwitz. The Chapter headings give an overview how it is done:

1.    Genesis and significance of the first Gassing

2.    The Stage of the First Gassing: Block 11

3.    The Source of the First Gassing

4.    Critical and Comparative Source Analysis

5.    Sources not speaking of the First Gassing

6.    Conclusion

An English edition of Mattogno’s book has been available since September 2005:  Auschwitz: The First gassing. Rumour and Reality. Volume 20 in the HOLOCAUST Handbooks Series – ISBN: 1-59148-025-6, and Volume 5 in the Auschwitz Studies Set – ISBN: 1-59148-012-4.

If we add to the above considerations the fact that in 1996 Robert-Jan van Pelt admitted in his Auschwitz: From 1270 to the Present, there were no homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz Stammlager, then add to that Fritjof Meyer’s documented claim of 2002 that there were no gassings at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but that such gassings occurred in outlying farmhouses, then it is evidently irrational to believe in the Auschwitz homicidal gassing story. Also, there ought to be open research where Revisionists, such as Carlo Mattogno, are free to conduct their research instead of being legally persecuted.

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Annexure 4 – Solzhenitsyn breaks last Taboo of the Revolution

Nobel laureate under fire for new book on the role of Jews in Soviet-era repression

Nick Paton Walsh, Moscow, The Guardian, Saturday January 25 2003

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jan/25/russia.books

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who first exposed the horrors of the Stalinist gulag, is now attempting to tackle one of the most sensitive topics of his writing career - the role of the Jews in the Bolshevik revolution and Soviet purges.

In his latest book Solzhenitsyn, 84, deals with one of the last taboos of the communist revolution: that Jews were as much perpetrators of the repression as its victims.

Two Hundred Years Together - a reference to the 1772 partial annexation of Poland and Russia which greatly increased the Russian Jewish population - contains three chapters discussing the Jewish role in the revolutionary genocide and secret police purges of Soviet Russia.

But Jewish leaders and some historians have reacted furiously to the book, and questioned Solzhenitsyn's motives in writing it, accusing him of factual inaccuracies and of fanning the flames of anti-semitism in Russia.

Solzhenitsyn argues that some Jewish satire of the revolutionary period "consciously or unconsciously descends on the Russians" as being behind the genocide. But he states that all the nation's ethnic groups must share the blame, and that people shy away from speaking the truth about the Jewish experience.

In one remark which infuriated Russian Jews, he wrote: "If I would care to generalise, and to say that the life of the Jews in the camps was especially hard, I could, and would not face reproach for an unjust national generalisation. But in the camps where I was kept, it was different. The Jews whose experience I saw - their life was softer than that of others."

Yet he added: "But it is impossible to find the answer to the eternal question: who is to be blamed, who led us to our death? To explain the actions of the Kiev cheka [secret police] only by the fact that two thirds were Jews, is certainly incorrect."

Solzhenitsyn, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, spent much of his life in Soviet prison camps, enduring persecution when he wrote about his experiences. He is currently in frail health, but in an interview given last month he said that Russia must come to terms with the Stalinist and revolutionary genocides - and that its Jewish population should be as offended at their own role in the purges as they are at the Soviet power that also persecuted them.

"My book was directed to empathise with the thoughts, feelings and the psychology of the Jews - their spiritual component," he said. "I have never made general conclusions about a people. I will always differentiate between layers of Jews. One layer rushed headfirst to the revolution. Another, to the contrary, was trying to stand back. The Jewish subject for a long time was considered prohibited. Zhabotinsky [a Jewish writer] once said that the best service our Russian friends give to us is never to speak aloud about us."

But Solzhenitsyn's book has caused controversy in Russia, where one Jewish leader said it was "not of any merit. This is a mistake, but even geniuses make mistakes," said Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the Russian Jewish Congress. "Richard Wagner did not like the Jews, but was a great composer. Dostoyevsky was a great Russian writer, but had a very sceptical attitude towards the Jews. "This is not a book about how the Jews and Russians lived together for 200 years, but one about how they lived apart after finding themselves on the same territory. This book is a weak one professionally. Factually, it is so bad as to be beyond criticism. As literature, it is not of any merit."

But DM Thomas, one of Solzhenitsyn's biographers, said that he did not think the book was fuelled by anti-semitism. "I would not doubt his sincerity. He says that he firmly supports the state of Israel. In his fiction and factual writing there are Jewish characters that he writes about who are bright, decent, anti-Stalinist people."

Professor Robert Service of Oxford University, an expert on 20th century Russian history, said that from what he had read about the book, Solzhenitsyn was "absolutely right".

Researching a book on Lenin, Prof Service came across details of how Trotsky, who was of Jewish origin, asked the politburo in 1919 to ensure that Jews were enrolled in the Red army. Trotsky said that Jews were disproportionately represented in the Soviet civil bureaucracy, including the cheka.

"Trotsky's idea was that the spread of anti-semitism was [partly down to] objections about their entrance into the civil service. There is something in this; that they were not just passive spectators of the revolution. They were part-victims and part-perpetrators. "It is not a question that anyone can write about without a huge amount of bravery, and [it] needs doing in Russia because the Jews are quite often written about by fanatics. Mr Solzhenitsyn's book seems much more measured than that."

Yet others failed to see the need for Solzhenitsyn's pursuit of this particular subject at present. Vassili Berezhkov, a retired KGB colonel and historian of the secret services and the NKVD (the precursor of the KGB), said: "The question of ethnicity did not have any importance either in the revolution or the story of the NKVD.

This was a social revolution and those who served in the NKVD and cheka were serving ideas of social change. "If Solzhenitsyn writes that there were many Jews in the NKVD, it will increase the passions of anti-semitism, which has deep roots in Russian history. I think it is better not to discuss such a question now."  

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Annexure 5 – Jewish Lawsuit against US for NOT bombing tracks to Auschwitz!

Title: Hungarian Jews called to register for class action
Author: Anna Byström
Date: 2008.02.13. 08:00
                                                    Link: http://www.budapestsun.com/cikk.php?id=27879   

Hungarian Jews called to register for class action

Peter Wolz, who describes himself as an attorney for Jewish survivors of Auschwitz and their heirs, is appealing for Hungarian victims of the death camps and their heirs to contacts him over a possible class action.