According to the New South Wales Supreme Court in Australia, notorious “historian” Fredrick Toben wanted to use a defamation case against The Australian newspaper as a platform to argue that the Holocaust never happened, and to air his antisemitic views. The court dismissed his legal action as an abuse of process.
The Australian reports: “Justice McCallum found that Dr Toben’s own evidence under cross-examination persuaded her he had not the least interest in vindicating his reputation against imputations that he fabricated history about the Holocaust, was a Holocaust denier and was an antisemite with a racist anti-Jewish agenda who had been jailed in Germany and Australia.”
The judge said: “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.”
Justice McCallum said that Toben appeared to deny he held any views on the Holocaust and was “merely a philosopher” interested in “philosophical discourse”. She rejected this as “cynical and disingenuous”.
“It is a transparent rhetorical device in which Dr Toben’s own anti-Semitic views are deliberately attributed to a straw man … so as to enable Dr Toben to record views he plainly espouses on a pretended lawful basis,” she said.
She noted that as recently as last December he had published material on his website questioning the history of the Holocaust.
Source: The Australian