Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

Chapter 1
A MEDIA FIELD DAY
Enough to make you gag, but …
On 22 September 2002, five days after Justice Catherine Branson of the
Federal Court of Australia orders me to remove material from Adelaide
Institute’s website, it is author and controversial broadcaster Terry Lane,
who defends my right to be wrong:
French writer Michel Houellebecq has been on trial in Paris this past
week, charged with insulting Muslims by calling Islam a ‘stupid religion’.
M. Houellebecq has been ordered to apologise or face a sentence of up to
a year in prison.
And Adelaide historical revisionist Dr Frederick Toben was ordered by
the Federal Court on Tuesday to remove from his website all claims that
there were no gas chambers at German concentration camps and also any
suggestion that Israel uses the ‘myth’ of mass extermination of the Jews to
win sympathy and stifle criticism.
Houellebecq expresses an opinion, and how the spiritual heirs of Voltaire
think they can stamp out an opinion by imprisoning the person who holds
it beggars belief. Toben asserts a fact, and that is a different matter.
Assertions of fact can be tested and the argument can be won by the party
with the more convincing evidence. Toben should not be censored, he
should be debated.
It is not surprising that some people think that the extraordinary steps
taken to silence Toben suggest there is something someone would rather
we did not know about. An e-mail came from a reader this week in
response to my defence of Dr Toben’s right to be wrong: ‘Thank you for
speaking out against the curb. I agree with you. However, what I seek is
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