Gerald Toben arrested on EU warrant at Heathrow for alleged anti-Semitism, Holocaust revisionism.
By JONNY PAUL, JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT IN LONDONAuschwitz 224.88 courtes(photo credit: Courtesy)
An Australian teacher and Holocaust denier is scheduled to appear in a London court on Friday after being arrested by British police on Holocaust denial related charges after arriving on an inbound flight at Heathrow Airport in London on Wednesday.
German-born Gerald Frederick Toben, who lives in Adelaide, will appear at City of Westminster Magistrates' Court in central London on Friday afternoon on extradition charges and with "instigation to race hatred, insult and reviling the memory of the dead," a court clerk told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.
Toben was en route from the US to Dubai when he was seized by British police. When police boarded the plane Toben changed seats to avoid detection. The Metropolitan Police said its Extradition Unit detained him under an European Union arrest warrant issued by the German authorities.
The warrant, issued in 2004, alleges that from 2002 he had carried out "worldwide internet publication" of material that was "anti-Semitic and/or [of a] revisionist nature; deliberately contrary to historical truth. Said publications deny, approve or play down above all the mass murder of the Jews, planned and implemented by the national socialist rulers. The defender is committing the act in Australia, Germany and in other countries."
Appearing in Westminster Magistrates' Court on Wednesday, he objected to the terms of the warrant, saying he had been slandered for his views.
"This is an abuse of process. This is a legal ambush. It's not British law, where the individual still has freedoms," he told the court.
He also pleaded with the judge to not extradite him to Germany. "I beg you to let me leave the country, to kick me out, I promise never to return," he pleaded.
Objecting to bail, the court said that Toben could face up to five years in prison for the offence and was likely to abscond if freed from the court.
Representing the District Court of Mannheim in Germany, lawyer Tina Whybrow said that Toben was accused of "computer-related crime and racism and xenophobia."
"This is a serious offence: The penalty for this offence is up to five years imprisonment," she said.
In 1999 Toben was sentenced to seven months in a German prison for inciting racial hatred, and he was also sentenced to 11 months in Austria on Holocaust denial charges.
He is already awaiting the outcome of a court case in southern Australia
where his privately funded Adelaide Institute is accused of publishing anti-Semitic material and Holocaust denial.
In September 2002, the Federal Court of Australia ordered the removal of material from Toben's web site that questioned whether millions of Jews were killed by the Nazis. Toben also said on the site that it was unlikely that there had been gas chambers at Auschwitz concentration camp.
At the time, Justice Catherine Branson ruled that the material posted on his Web site was likely to "offend, humiliate and intimidate" Australia's Jewish community and ordered him to cease his activities.
But he continued, stating on the website, "If you wish to begin to doubt the Holocaust-Shoah narrative, you must be prepared for personal sacrifice, must be prepared for marriage and family break-up, loss of career and going to prison."
Toben spoke at the gathering of Holocaust deniers in Teheran, organized by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in December 2006. In his speech he called for evidence of the gas chambers, "the products of a feverish, pathological mind, filled with pure hatred, mostly directed against Germans and anything German... the product of an appalling state of ignorance of natural and chemical processes."
In a 2005 interview with Iranian state television he said, "The Holocaust equals a lie. Therefore Israel is built on a lie."
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