SYDNEY, Australia (JTA) — A notorious Australian Holocaust revisionist has been found guilty of criminal contempt for continuing to publish offensive material about Jews.
Fredrick Toben, 64, of the Adelaide Institute in South Australia, was convicted on 24 of 28 counts of “deliberate and calculated disobedience” of a 2002 Federal Court order to stop publishing material denying the Holocaust, doubting the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and vilifying Jews.
In the Federal Court in Adelaide on Thursday, Justice Bruce Lander found in favor of Jeremy Jones, a former president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, who launched the legal action in 2006 after Toben had continued to publish anti-Semitic material.
Toben’s "conduct shows he does not accept that the freedom of speech citizens of this country enjoy does not include the freedom to publish material calculated to offend, insult or humiliate or intimidate people because of their race, color or national or ethnic origin,” Justice Lander told the court. “It is conduct that amounts to criminal contempt.”
But Toben said outside the court: “If you believe in something and you want to have that freedom to express your opinions then you should be prepared for sacrifices.”
Earlier this week he told The Australian newspaper that if he was found guilty and was fined, he would refuse to pay the fine. “That means I will have to go in [to jail],” he said.
Toben was jailed for two months last year in London while German prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to extradite him on a European Union warrant. In 1999, he spent seven months in prison in Germany, his birthplace, for inciting racism. In 2006 he spoke at a Holocaust denial conference in Tehran attended by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
A hearing on Toben’s penalty will take place on April 28.
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