From The Oz:

Holocaust denier launches public appeal for cash
By Richard Sproull
February 07, 2007

HOLOCAUST revisionist Frederick Toben will launch a public appeal so he can defend a Federal Court action alleging his Adelaide Institute website raises doubts the Holocaust occurred.

Dr Toben, a retired high school teacher, said while he had financial backing from supporters, his legal defence would be expensive but he would not defend himself in court.

“It’s beyond me to defend myself,” Dr Toben said. British author David Irving defended himself when he attempted to challenge charges of Holocaust denial in Austria. Irving was jailed for nine months.

Dr Toben, who set up the Adelaide Institute in 1994 to pursue his cause, spent seven months in a German prison in 1999 for inciting racism.

Jeremy Jones - the former president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry - has asked the Federal Court to jail Dr Toben for breaching four-year-old court orders because his website suggests “it is unlikely there were homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz”.

Mr Jones’s legal suit also alleges the website imputes that Jews who were offended by Holocaust denial or challenged Dr Toben’s theories were “of limited intelligence”.

It also claims that some Jews “for improper purposes, including financial gain, have exaggerated the number of Jews killed during World War II and the circumstances in which they were killed”.

Melbourne solicitor David Perkins is understood to have told Dr Toben he will represent him in the Federal Court action, which commenced in Sydney yesterday. The Australian could not contact Mr Perkins yesterday to confirm his involvement.

Dr Toben said the civil action was an attempt to rein in the freedom of speech. “It really bites deeply into free expression,” he said.

Dr Toben returned last month from Iran where he was a speaker at a conference on the Holocaust - at the invitation of the Iranian Government - where he dismissed as “mere puffery” historical evidence proving mass killings of Jews by the Nazis’ deadly Zyklon-B gas.

Dr Toben met Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.