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Fredrick Toben’s 40th day in custody: why no outcry?

Despite the long-running open controversy in Britain over the government’s 42-day preventive detention scheme for suspected terrorists, that country quite obviously has no need of a new Act of Parliament to detain a person indefinitely without charge (something that has always been considered most un-British, denounced as a feature of “foreigner-style” justice). It’s enough for that person to be a historical revisionist or, as the media call Australian citizen Fredrick Toben, a “suspected Holocaust denier”.

His German arrest warrant may have been thrown out of court on October 29, but he has been kept in his cell (for want of a cash deposit of £100,000), with the media saying nothing at all and no outcry coming from any quarter. Strange? Hardly, for as one of his “defenders” puts it, Toben himself is, after all, an odious (sic) individual. If people in the public eye – including a prominent politician and some journalists – are willing enough to discuss the principle of applying the European arrest warrant in certain circumstances, there is in practice nearly no one to take the trouble to speak out against the more than month-long detention without charge of an odious individual (an avowed Holocaust denier: they don’t come any worse than that; terrorists and paedophiles pale in comparison for odiousness).

It boils down to this: with very close to 100% of the population firmly persuaded that a “Holocaust denier” can only be odious, Toben, arrested on October 1st and held, still today, by virtue of an invalid warrant (it’s a British judge, not I, who has called it so), will just have to sit out the appeal/counter appeal process in a prison cell, and no one will get very worked up about it.

That might not be the case if those Englishmen in the know and with the means (David Irving and his clique of lawyers etc.) had brought revisionism (“denial” in mediaspeak) and its solid, sober argumentation out into public, as the law in Britain still allows. They’ve instead preferred to dabble in drivel, for the most part talking in harmony with the media. Too bad for Toben whose case, all told, is that of just another odious criminal.

G. Nichols