farmdoc's blog post number 169

The Holocaust was one of the most horrific events of the 20th century, and probably the most abhorrent mass crime ever perpetrated against humanity. The evidence is overwhelming. Nevertheless there’s a tiny group of Holocaust deniers. They suffer from ‘diagnosis bias’, i.e. blindness to all evidence that contradicts an initial assessment of someone or something. One of them is 64-year-old German-born Australian Gerald Fredrick Toben, who last Wednesday was arrested (for continuing to publish anti-semitic material on his Adelaide Institute website) at Heathrow Airport and remanded in custody facing extradition to Germany and a possible 5-year jail term. Toben established the Adelaide Institute in 1994 to spread his Holocaust denial theories. In 1999 he spent seven months in a German prison for inciting racism. In 2002 in Australia he was ordered to cease his activities. In 2006 at a Holocaust denial conference in Tehran convened by Iranian President Ahmadinejad, he gave a speech calling for evidence of the Nazi gas chambers. Last week Toben told a Westminster Court he was a ‘victim of legal persecution…I can’t run anywhere…the world is my prison’. Better the world your prison than Auschwitz, Dr Toben. You can indeed run. And you will. As a man without a conscience and a soul, you’ll run for the rest of your pathetic life. Unless you’re in prison – where you should be, freedom of speech notwithstanding.