Toben sues for being called a Holocaust denier
FREDRICK Toben claims the Holocaust is a lie – yet he has launched defamation proceedings against federal Greens leader Senator Christine Milne, The Australian editor Clive Mathieson and journalist Christian Kerr for, among other things, calling him a Holocaust denier.
FREDRICK Toben claims the Holocaust is a lie – yet he has launched defamation proceedings against federal Greens leader Senator Christine Milne, The Australian editor Clive Mathieson and journalist Christian Kerr for, among other things, calling him a Holocaust denier.
The action is in response to a June 21 article in The Australian headlined “Split in Greens over Holocaust denier Fredrick Toben”, published after Toben was invited and then disinvited from a pro-Palestinian fundraiser by NSW Greens MP David Shoebridge.
Senator Milne confirmed to The AJN that she had received Toben’s Statement of Claim.
“I am organising a legal team and will defend the claim,” she said.
Kerr also confirmed that The Australian had been notified of the action.
Among the defamatory imputations in Toben’s Statement of Claim are that “the Plaintiff fabricated history”, “the Plaintiff is a Holocaust denier” and “the Plaintiff is an anti-Semite” and “has a racist Jewish agenda”.
“The Plaintiff has been greatly injured in his character, credit, business, personal and professional reputation and has been brought into public hatred, ridicule and contempt,” it says.
Yet, in the Adelaide Institute Newsletter No. 605 February 2012 Toben wrote: “The most comprehensively developed recent historical lie – the Holocaust-Shoah lie, which states that during World War Two Germans systematically exterminated European Jewry in homicidal gas chambers – still stands because it is set in legal concrete and it serves well those individuals who see Germans as a threat to their economic existence.”
In October 2000, a Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission found that material contained on Toben’s website “consistently presents Jews as a group of people who are engaged in a manipulation of the truth or an attempt to conceal or pervert the truth in order to obtain political, economic and other power”.
The matter is currently listed for the Supreme Court of NSW for July 29, 2013.
The Australian editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell did not answer The AJN’s calls.
GARETH NARUNSKY
Holocaust denier Fredrick Toben.
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