Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

freedom breaks out with much rejoicing – and the Holocaust believers will be
gnashing their teeth because they fear free minds.
Freedom of speech and Holocaust denial
Melanie Phillips, Daily Mail, 6 October 2008
Later this week, a London magistrates’ court will hear a bail application in
an extradition case which should be ringing alarm bells.
A German-born Australian citizen, Fredrick Toben, was arrested as he
passed through Heathrow by British police acting under an EU arrest
warrant issued by the German authorities.
The Germans have accused him of publishing antisemitic Holocaustdenial
material on his Australian website.
There is no doubt that the views expressed by Toben, a notorious falsifier
of history who was previously sentenced to nine months’ jail in Germany
for breaching its Holocaust- denial law, are vile. He says, for example, that
there is no proof that Hitler systematically exterminated the Jews and that
Auschwitz was merely a ‘transit camp’.
As a Jew, I am acutely alive to the vicious potential of denying the Nazis’
attempted extermination of the world’s Jews. Such lies are used to whip up
hatred against the Jewish people by effectively accusing them of fabricating
claims of genocide.
There is no question that this not only denies the historical evidence of
Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’, but also subjects Jews round the world to further
hatred and persecution. Holocaust-denial is, indeed, a modern form of
Jew-hatred.
But, through gritted teeth, I have to say that I am totally against the
extradition of this man and appalled at the political and legal
developments that have brought these moves about.
There are two fundamental issues at stake here. First is the threat to the
principle of freedom of speech. Second is the erosion of Britain’s power
to uphold its own historic commitment to that principle.
Freedom of speech is a bedrock of our society. Sure, it’s not absolute; but
we limit it only in the most rare of circumstances where it poses a direct
threat to individuals, such as inciting or encouraging people to violence.
For similar reasons, we also outlaw incitement to racial hatred. But we
draw a distinction, for example, between inciting hatred of people for what
they inescapably are, which we rightly treat as a crime, and inciting hatred
of their views, which we see as part of the cut and thrust of a liberal
democratic society. That’s why there was such uproar over the new crime
of incitement to religious hatred.
It’s because of this respect for debate that this country has never
criminalised Holocaust-denial. Odious as it is, it is an interpretation of
history — and one which in any event defies easy categorisation.
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