|
|
|
Toben fights to retain offensive website
Aviva Bard
Australian Jewish New, 30 May 2003
AUSTRALIAN Holocaust denier, Dr Fredrick Toben, was in court last week attempting to overturn a Federal Court decision forcing him to remove offensive content from his Adelaide Institute website.
Last September, Dr Toben was ordered to remove the offensive material from his website within seven days. [Töben asks: Why is it not acknowledged that within the seven day period after the 17 September 2002 FCA judgment was handed down, I did more than comply with the Order: I deleted the contents of Adelaide Institute's website?]
But Dr Toben's lawyers are arguing that the prohibitions against racial hatred in the Racial Discrimination Act contravene the Australian Constitution.
Appealing before three Federal Court judges, Dr Toben's lawyers claimed that the court's interpretation of the law was erroneous and that he was entitled to publish the material in the public interest.
Commonwealth Solicitor-General David Bennett QC argued in favour of the court's interpretation of the legislation in the case brought against Dr Toben by Executive Council of Australian Jewry president Jeremy Jones and represented by NSW Jewish Board of Deputies president Stephen Rothman SC.
Toben's website is replete with anti-Jewish material, including the following:
"The past couple of decades have seen a rise of German hatred, mainly owing to Australia's Zionists not letting Hitler's ghost rest. These haters need Hitler as a convenient scapegoat for their own failed policies. With the troubles caused by the Israeli state in the Middle East, there also is a proportionate rise of 'Holocaust' propaganda so that Israel can continue to justify the horrendous crimes it perpetrates against the Palestinians.
This raising of the war propaganda story, what the Germans are allegedly [sic] to have done to European Jewry in homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz, is designed to weld the Australian public together in support of Israel.
The culmination of that propaganda push came to fruition with Australia joining that immoral, no-match, Anglo-American-Zionist attack on Iraq."
Regarding his current court appeal, Dr Toben writes: "This appeal in the FCA [Federal Court of Australia] is a test case that will define our free-speech parameters, and by implication will signal how strong Jewish-Zionist influence is in Australia's judiciary where the current battle rages between common law versus talmudic law…".
A decision is expected within the next six weeks.
