Arbeit macht frei: - Fredrick Töben

prompted by the arrest in Germany of one of that city’s more notable and
less noteworthy residents, Fredrick Toben.
Toben’s Adelaide Institute has an astonishingly high profile in the dark
galaxy of international antisemitism, having found the Internet a useful
megaphone for the broadcast of anti-Jewish defamations, insults,
caricatures and libels.
Since the time of his arrest, many words have been spoken and uttered
concerning Toben, his Institute and what lies ahead of him. From much
of what we have read, seen and heard in Australia since his arrest, it
appears his record is not so well-known to a number of working journalists
in Australia.
Depending on your perspective, I am either fortunate or unfortunate
enough to be a Complainant in a case against Toben and his private
‘Institute’, currently awaiting a decision by the Human Rights and Equal
Opportunity Commission, under the Racial Hatred Act. The elected
representative organisation of the Australian Jewish community, the
Executive Council of Australian Jewry, submitted the complaint three
years ago, concerning a range of antisemitic matter on the Adelaide
Institute website, which supplements Toben’s printed newsletters, which
were earlier entitled ‘Truth Mission’. During the long three years of legal
processes, many pieces of paper have been exchanged and much time
expended, unlike the German situation where laws are in place which
recognise the seriousness of Nazi apologia to that society.
The Adelaide Institute is not an association of historians or scholars or
even, by any rational description, a ‘think tank’. It is simply and totally a
private vehicle through which Toben gains a letterhead under which to
publish and re-print a wide-ranging collection of anti-Jewish slurs. For all
intents and purposes, and by his own admission, Toben is personally
responsible for all and any acts of the Institute.
Despite some of the more wide-eyed reportage, Fredrick Toben does not
describe himself as an expert or authority in any area of history. To the
contrary, he has written: ‘I am not a historian and I have massive
knowledge gaps and so I approach the ‘holocaust’ topic from my field
which is philosophy.’
The only real ‘philosophy’ discernible on the Adelaide Institute website is
a philosophy of antisemitism. Although Toben and his apologists claim
that they are mis-identified as Holocaust deniers, in a number of places on
the site Toben and others assert ‘No Holocaust!’, on the basis of one or
other allegation they make concerning the accepted historical record. The
context of the Holocaust denial is not history but the charge of Jewish
conspiracy and other unethical, immoral and criminal Jewish behaviour,
including responsibility for the outrages of the Bolshevik tyrannies.
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