Established in 1994, the Adelaide Institute was formed from the former Truth Mission that was established in 1994 by Dr. Gerald Fredrick Töben. The Adelaide Institute is a Holocaust denial group in Australia and is considered to be anti-Semitic by the Australian government's human rights commission.[1] and international human rights groups. The group also advocates AIDS denialism.[2]
Contents |
Supporters of the Institute have in the past been active in organisations such as Australians For Free Speech, which held a rally in 1994. The Institute has also been implicated in distributing Holocaust denialist material through mainstream and alternative publications. Letters to the editor and talk radio appear to be the favourite means of disseminating the worldview of the Institute. Prior to the opening of the film Schindler's List in Adelaide, members of the institute distributed Holocaust denial pamphlets on the street and through the mail, apparently targeting those of Jewish background. Additionally, members of the Institute sent materials denying to the Holocaust to prominent Australian newspapers masquerading as objective movie reviews, some of which reached publication.
The Institute's stated goal is exposing "the Holocaust myth". The activity of the Institute seems to have declined since its initial burst of activity in the middle 1990s. The Institute does however still maintain a website on which statements on various issues are regularly posted.
The Adelaide Institute website triggered the arrest of Fredrick Töben in Germany in April 1999.[3] Töben was sentenced to 7 months in prison, but had already served seven months during trial, and was released upon payment of a $5000 bond-Kaution.
The Institute's website drew the attention of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) in 2000 after HREOC found that the Adelaide Institute had breached section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act by publishing material on the website, the consequences of which were "vilificatory, bullying, insulting and offensive" to the Jewish population; HREOC ordered Töben to close the site and apologise to the people he had offended but because rulings of the HREOC are not enforceable at law, the case was then brought before the Federal Court of Australia, which ordered in 2002 that certain material be removed from the Adelaide Institute web site.
The Order of the Federal Court of Australia was that the Adelaide Institute should remove from its website any material which conveys one or any of the following imputations:
Electronic Frontiers Australia spoke out against the ruling, taking the view that "when encountering racist or hateful speech, the best remedy to be applied is generally more speech, not enforced silence."[4] One of the reasons mentioned is that suppressing such content results in perception that the speaker must have something important to say, and "massively increased interest in what would otherwise be marginal ideas."
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||