Judge tosses Holocaust denier’s defamation case against newspaper

Frederik Toben sought damages over 2013 article in ‘The Australian.’

By SAM SOKOL
A judge in a courtroom hearing (photo credit: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/FLICKR)
A judge in a courtroom hearing
(photo credit: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/FLICKR)
An Australian Holocaust denier’s defamation lawsuit against a local newspaper was dismissed on Monday, amidst judicial accusations that he had engaged in “a cynical misuse” of the courts system in order to air his controversial views.
The suit, brought by Dr. Fredrick Toben, sought damages from The Australian over a 2013 article which described him as a “Holocaust denier.” The German- born historian and founder of the Adelaide Institute had previously been jailed in Germany for Holocaust denial in the late 1990s. He has also railed against – what he calls – “Holocaust racketeers... corpse peddlers and the Shoah business merchants.”
He recently wrote on his website, “The Zionist lobby in this country is malicious, implacable, mendacious and dangerous” and has caused him a “great deal of lost sleep.”
“What’s more, once the expression ‘anti-Semite’ hits the air, or heaven forefend, the sacred formula ‘six million’ is uttered, then I know from bitter experience that there is not one manager or editor in the country who will defend an underling. We are thrown to the jackals.”
Justice Lucy McCallum, of the New South Wales Supreme Court, who ruled on the case, said: “On the strength of his own writings, it is difficult to conclude otherwise than that Dr. Toben has a clear agenda to create a public forum for disputation of the history of the Holocaust and for the expression of anti-Semitic views.”
According to McCallum, Toben has not sufficiently proved that he sought to repudiate charges of the anti-Semitism in the article in question but, rather, that he sought to use a trial as a method of garnering publicity for his ideas.
“The defendants have established to my satisfaction that Dr. Toben seeks by these proceedings to manipulate the process of the court to create a forum in which to assert the very views by the attribution with which he claims to have been defamed,” she further asserted.
Earlier this month, an 87-year-old German grandmother was sentenced to a 10-month prison term for Holocaust denial for stating that it had not been sufficiently proven that Auschwitz was a death camp.