Holocaust denial is a good example of how that process works. Making speech a crime drives it underground. And then from time to time it surfaces. But the validity of the idea never gets tested. All that happens is that without examination of the historical record, the speaker or idea is labelled and treated as being criminal.

The right wing Jewish Lobby never deals with the issue of truth, satisfied with a prosecution and with ridiculing the speaker. The speaker becomes a victim of "liberal democracy" and his/her prosecution shows that democracy often does not live up to being very liberal.

The Lobby has a symbiotic relationship with Holocaust deniers. The Lobby and the speaker need each other. The speaker gives the Lobby oxygen to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust and creates the image of the Lobby being forever vigilant and effective in dealing with its own potential persecution. The speaker needs the Lobby to create widespread publicity he/she would not otherwise enjoy and his/her prosection confirms his/her secondary thesis that Holocaust denial is suppressed as a matter of policy in Western democracies.

For anyone who has studied even a little bit of the history of WWII and the persecution of European Jewry, Holocaust deniers are intellectual crazies. To prosecute them as if their ideas have merit only gives them the halo of the wrongly persecuted minority.

It is ironic that the tools of the Inquisition with its aim of suppressing Spanish Jewry should today be used,

albeit in a milder form, by Australian Jewry.

The memory of the Jewish Holocaust is an important Israeli cultural industry, amplified by right wing disaporan Jewry in Australia, the United States and in Europe. Hollywood's movie industry, heavily populated with successful "liberal" Jews churns out either a Holocaust movie every couple of years or finds a way to give an award to a movie with a Holocaust theme, no matter how undeserved it might be. Polanski's Directorial Academy Award for "The Pianist" is a good example. "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" is only a current example of the plethora of movies with such a background. Thomas Keneally has made a mint out of the Industry—- even writing a play about how he found out about the famous "list" and getting it up on the boards in a theatre in Washington DC that only produces plays with Jewish themes.

The Industry has developed a well understood censorial by product where anyone who thinks of criticizing it, doesn't do it, exercising self restraint or self-censorship. Antony, as a prominent Australian Jew, is to be congratulated for not capitulating to this well understood stricture in the Australian Jewish community.

Of course, when the Industry is attacked head on, as Professor Finklesteint did in his book "The Holocaust Industry", then one of the chieftains of the Industry, and otherwise prominent civil libertarian, Alan Dershowitz, swings into action and mounts a national campaign to deny the author tenure at a Catholic University in the US.

"The speaker or writer of wrong ideas must be punished" has become the catch cry of modern right wing Jewry. It manifests itself not only in the prosecution of Toben, but also in the almost daily murder, harassment and prosecution of Israelis peacefully protesting against government policies towards Palestinians.

It is useful to have a discussion of the extent of killing that went on in the German camps and what the machinery and mentality was that created those killing camps. Not only to re-discover the truth, but also to learn and compare what happen then to what is happening today— in Iraq, in Guantanamo and in the large prison camp of Gaza.

One comment on Antony's piece refers to the Jewish populations in Germany. What the commentator does not do is to include in the total Jews killed the millions of Jews from eastern Europe: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Russia,etc. Why the Jewish Lobby never wants to engage in a discussion of the actual amount escapes me.

The genocides of Armenia, Cambodia, Ruanda, Serbia and mass deaths and killings in WWII in Russia and Eastern Europe do not get ventilated in the same way as the Jewish Holocaust. That is largely because there are no lobbies comparable to the Jewish Holocaust Lobby.

The Lobby's organizing ability is formidable: Museums in Sydney and Melbourne, in Washington DC, Berlin — all either devoted to Holocaust remembrance or with a major emphasis on it. In Australia with a Jewish population of only about 100,000 it is a real testament to the Lobby's organizing ability. Especially when one looks around the country and finds no such comparable museum commemorates the mass murder and killings of the continent's original inhabitants, the Aboriginals.

The persecution of Toben is wrong. It is counteproductive and all good civil libertarians who might disagree with Toben and not share his belief as a Holocaust denier should nevertheless, defend his right to say it. To not speack out is to tolerate the suppression of free speech, and if one day they come for you because you didn't speak out, don't be surprised. You had it coming.

The illegal occupation of Palestine is a present day reality and it costs lives, Palestinian and Israeli. The human cost of Israeli apartheid is enormous as I am reminded every time I am delayed at a checkpoint and shouted at rudely by a teenage soldier who has been subjected to de-humanising military training.

Even by Michael Brill. It's an absurd proposition that some jews want more jews to have been killed than did when people like me think it is a poke in the eye to both Hitler and Stalin that they didn't die.

What sort of ridiculous, twisted victimhood is that? MacDonogh didn't just make up the numbers, they are in the official census.

James Bacque proves from census and other records that between 9 and 13.7 million German civilians were killed, starved to death and raped and brutalised under the Morgenthau plan and when I talk about it I am again labelled anti-semitic though how pointing out that twice as many German civilians were murdered by the allies than jews by Germans makes me anti-jewish is beyond my imagination.

Jews were less than 8% of the entire mass murder in WW11 yet they are the only group who continue to pester the world from compensation while continuing to murder, maim and steal from Palestinians while pretending that Israel was set up to help jews escape nazi persecution in Europe.

IN 1948? And in all the years since?

I don't think so.

But my views are censored even my New Matilda.

It is ignorant and stupid to assume the only view of jewish history is the zionist view.