browntown...you mean brownshirts!
First we have Brownshirts posting David Duke (KKK)site. Now he's moved on to the Adelaide Institute.....
Yes, good one....Keep it up.........
Incidentaly Toben the rabid anti semitic f*uckup ( I say that because he is simply nuts as well) lost.....Irving, Toben, Duke......all from the same mould.
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/stories/s22493.htm
Transcript 20/04/99 Australian historian faces German jail over Holocaust views
Now to the case of the Australian revisionist historian whose arrest in Germany has become an international test case for freedom of speech on the Internet.
Dr Fredrick Toben, who is the director of a group called the Adelaide Institute has been charged under a German law which prohibits defaming the memory of the dead.
German authorities allege Dr Toben has questioned the scale of the Holocaust and dismissed accounts detailing the use of gas chambers in Nazi concentration camps.
If found guilty he faces five years in jail.
Mike Sexton reports on a case with implications beyond German borders.
DAVID BROCKSCHMIDT: Truth is always inconvenient and one of our jobs is to divide the historical facts of history from the hysterical facts of war propaganda.
DANNY BEN-MOSHE: Holocaust denial is about the rehabilitation of Naziism. It pursues a political agenda. It's a racist agenda. For Australia, it means a white supremacist agenda.
MIKE SEXTON: Until a few weeks ago Fredrick Toben was an amateur historian who was little known in Australia, let alone elsewhere.
But his arrest in Germany has turned him into an international martyr for free speech and has raised questions about the future of cyberspace.
FREDERICK TOBEN (ADELAIDE INSTITUTE VIDEO): Here at Oswiecim Railway Station until at least 1943 most persons destined for the Auschwitz concentration camp made their first stop.
MIKE SEXTON: This documentary is one of the works produced by Fredrick Toben as director of the Adelaide Institute.
Born in Germany, he came to Australia as a child and has a philosophy doctorate from Stuttgart University.
After years as a high school English teacher, Dr Toben turned his passion for history into an organisation based at his home called the Adelaide Institute.
DAVID BROCKSCHMIDT: We have been always accused, and still are accused, as being holocaust deniers.
Now that is absolutely ridiculous. We are not.
Denying the Nazi Jewish Holocaust, like denying the Bolshevik Jewish Holocaust or the Maoist Holocaust or any Holocaust is like saying the earth is flat and the moon is made from green cheese. Of course we don't.
MIKE SEXTON: The institute boasts 250 members across Australia and is drawn to contentious views of history.
DAVID BROCKSCHMIDT: The Adelaide Institute was founded about five years ago and the major reason for it was to find out about truth in history, especially dealing with the Nazi Jewish Holocaust, the homicidal gas chambers and with the Bolshevik Jewish Holocaust between 1917 and 1953 until Stalin died.
MIKE SEXTON: Dr Toben, seen here during a visit to the former concentration camp at Auschwitz in 1997, believes there isn't proof that millions of Jews were executed in gas chambers.
FREDERICK TOBEN (ADELAIDE INSTITUTE VIDEO): This second door you can see is supposed to be gas tight. That is the problem.
DANNY BEN-MOSHE: Fredrick Toben is not a historian, he's not a scientist, he's not an engineer. Let's say I studied science at school and I decided, "You know what? I want to be a scientist.
"I'm going to establish the Melbourne Institute for Scientific Research," I would put on an Internet site and I would say, "You know, the world isn't round, it's flat."
Would people take me seriously? Would they even consider my issues? Would they give me the time of day?
Of course they wouldn't. The same should apply to Fredrick Toben.
MIKE SEXTON: Although the group has produced videos and papers, its main publicity vehicle is its web site.
The Adelaide Institute has twice faced the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission charged with breaching the Federal racial vilification laws.
But it was when Dr Toben again travelled to Europe to research that his situation got worse. On his return to Germany, he was interviewed by a prosecutor.
They'd met before and discussed the views of the Adelaide Institute but this meeting was different.
DAVID BROCKSCHMIDT: One of the state security officers was sitting in there in the dark without identifying himself.
Within the conversation, he got up and said, "Dr Toben, you're under arrest. You've violated the criminal code of the German law."
And he was taken away and thrown into jail.
MIKE SEXTON: Frederick Toben has been arrested under German law that makes it illegal to question the Holocaust, a charge known as defaming the memory of the dead.
If found guilty, he faces five years in jail. David Brockschmidt accuses German authorities of entrapment. However, it's clear from this 1998 lecture that Dr Toben is well aware of German law.
FREDERICK TOBEN (ADELAIDE INSTITUTE VIDEO): It's a massive allegation which cannot be questioned in Germany and other European countries because laws have been enacted which prevent such an exercise.
KIM HEITMAN: It's not beyond the realms of possibility that this is partly a publicity exercise.
However, he has generated an important principle, and that's that if a person publishes on the Internet in Australia, should they have to answer to another government for it?
MIKE SEXTON: Kim Heitman is a Perth-based lawyer who chairs Electronic Frontiers Australia.
He says Dr Toben's case illustrates his concerns about governments trying to censor the Internet.
KIM HEITMAN: People should be free to express opinions, even if they're unconventional opinions or even if they're plainly wrong.
The beauty of the Internet is that everybody can be a publisher of their own opinion.
So in conventional media it's very difficult for somebody who disagrees with an opinion to have an equal right of reply and redress, whereas on the Internet this is simple and easy.
MIKE SEXTON: It's a view shared by John Bennett of the Australian Civil Liberties Union.
He sympathises with Dr Toben's views on the Holocaust and believes the principle is so important, he's prepared to fly to Germany to defend him.
JOHN BENNETT: I think it's a very important free speech issue. I think people should be able to express their views in relation to history.
After all, history has been constantly revised.
The official figures for Auschwitz have been reduced from 4 million to just over 1 million and that sort of revision would not be possible if we didn't have freedom of speech.
MIKE SEXTON: Opponents of the Adelaide Institute believe the defence of free speech is overriding a wider issue.
DANNY BEN-MOSHE: My organisation has profiled almost 100 Australian hate sites.
Clearly, if we recognise, the Government recognises - and I think this is a bipartisan view - that we have to deal with the problem of, for example, pornography on the Internet, then we have to deal with the problems of other forms of prejudice and dangers on the Internet, and racism is clearly one of them.
DAVID BROCKSCHMIDT: We have a right to know, we have a right to research and we have a right to publish that so everyone has a chance here to see what the archives really hold and I think establishment, governments and political and religious organisations fear this very much.
