Monday, December 11, 2006

The Australian: "Holocaust impossible, says Aussie in Tehran"

This has good coverage of Toben's participation:
FREDERICK Toben - the retired Adelaide high school teacher who denies the Holocaust took place - has dismissed as "mere puffery" historical evidence proving mass killings of Jews by the Nazis' deadly Zyklon-B gas during a speech in Tehran last night.

In his presentation, obtained by The Australian and denounced as obscene anti-Semitism by Jewish leaders, Dr Toben called "claims made by 'Holocaust' believers" about the mass gassings and burnings a "physical impossibility". Dr Toben is an amateur historian who set up the Adelaide Institute in 1994 to pursue his cause. He spent seven months in a German prison in 1999 for inciting racism.

He is a keynote speaker at a two-day conference in Iran, at the invitation of the Iranian Government, which has drawn speakers from around the world including David Duke, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and French professor Robert Faurisson, who denies the existence of Nazi gas chambers.

Khaled Kasab Mahameed, a Palestinian lawyer invited to the conference, had hoped to challenge its Holocaust deniers but was denied a visa by Iranian authorities. No reason was given, but Mr Mahameed claims it may have been because he holds an Israeli passport or because he has proclaimed his belief that the Holocaust did happen.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said the conference aimed "not to deny or to prove the Holocaust" but to provide an opportunity for European researchers to give their views. However, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly questioned the truth of the Holocaust, at one time describing it as a "myth" and casting doubt on the scale of the killings.

In his opening remarks, Dr Toben thanked the Iranian people for "having brought forth a leadership that is fearless of Jewish pressure, a leadership that courageously sets out to clarify fundamental human values lost in most of the Western 'democratic and free world"'.

He then called evidence of the Nazi 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."

Dr Toben has taken his own model of the Auschwitz concentration camp to illustrate his claims. [...]
(Hat Tip: Lucianne.com)

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