Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

She ordered Töben to remove the material and to apologise in writing
to Jeremy Jones of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, for having
published material inciting hatred.
Jones said last week that neither order had been acted upon and the
Jewish community was pursuing the matter in the Federal Court, which
had the legal power to enforce its decisions.
Töben who will apply to postpone the May 10 hearing in Sydney
because he says he will be away lecturing in Iran, says he has no
intention of stopping what he was doing.
‘I just have to laugh when I see this,’ he said in Adelaide last week.
A similar case, also involving Holocaust revisionism, is due before the
Federal Court this week involving a Tasmanian woman, Olga Scully,
who has published anti-Semitic literature but not on the Internet. Her
case will provide a precedent in terms of the court’s attitude but without
the implications for website publication.
Töben’s stand has won the support of the national Internet free-speech
group, Electronic Frontiers of Australia, which has not ruled out making
a submission to the court in his defence.
Before the HREOC decision was handed down in October last year,
EFA wrote to it, arguing that to shut Töben’s website down would not
solve the problem, only make it worse.
‘Trying to censor this kind of information is counterproductive because
it will end up in the information being distributed even more widely all
round the world because these people will be seen to be martyrs,’
executive director Irene Graham says.
Graham said the EFA also thought it inappropriate to try to censor
information of that type because people ought to be able to make up
their own mind. She said the Adelaide Institute site, while objectionable,
did not directly threaten violence against anyone else.
‘You are better off leaving them buried in the dark reaches of the
Internet,’ she said. ‘Sure, people are going to find this stuff but to try to
ban it is futile, it’s counterproductive and it just won’t work.’
EFA said it had made clear it supported Töben’s right to free speech but
not the content. ‘EFA does not support racist speech and the vilification
of the Jewish population or anything else,’ she said. ‘The problem with
the HREOC decision is that it does not provide any indication at all of
what specifically he said that is illegal.’
EFA had concerns about such decisions ‘because they don’t take into
account the technology of the Internet and the worldwide nature of the
Internet,’ Graham said.
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