Fed: I won t apologise for stating truth holocaust denier

AAP General News (Australia)
04-05-2001
Fed: I won t apologise for stating truth holocaust denier

CANBERRA, April 5 AAP - Holocaust denier Frederick Tobin said today he would apologise
to Australian Jews if he had been tactless or crude, but not for stating the truth.

The Australian Jewish community has launched Federal Court action against Mr Tobin,
who is from Adelaide.

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry is seeking to have a Human Rights and Equal
Opportunities Commission (HREOC) order against him enforced.

The commission last October ordered Mr Tobin to apologise to the Executive Council's
national vice-president Jeremy Jones and to remove Holocaust revision material from his
Adelaide Institute website.

But Mr Tobin has complied with neither order and the Jewish community is now seeking
costs as well.

Mr Tobin, who has been convicted and jailed in Germany for defaming the memory of the
dead, said he would not back down.

"No, I can't do that because I consider the Human Rights Commission's findings to be
immoral and of no legal effect," he told ABC radio.

"It is not a matter of asking whether I have caused hurt, because I can throw that
back at the (Jewish) community and say that, with my German background, they're hurting
me by continuing to assert that Germans systematically exterminated European Jewry in
homicidal gas chambers.

"I found out that the gas chambers never existed."

Asked if it was worth antagonising the whole Jewish community in Australia just to
make a point, he replied:

"If I hurt someone in what I write and say and because of tactlessness or crudeness,
then I apologise, but not if it's a factual statement.

"Truth will be my defence because if you take away my freedom to think and to speak,
then you take away my humanity."

AAP dep/

KEYWORD: TOBIN DAYLEAD

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