Beauty Queen Lady Michele Renouf Backs Holocaust Denier
Charles Miranda in London
FORMER beauty queen and Sydney socialite Lady Michele Renouf is the secret force behind a campaign to free an Australian teacher facing jail in Germany for being a Holocaust denier.
Gerald Frederick Toben was arrested at his seat on a plane at Heathrow Airport two weeks ago by British police on a request from German authorities.
He is charged with inciting racism and xenophobia through posting on the internet alleged anti-Semitic and or revisionist views, denying there was a mass murder of Jews during World War II.
He was to represent himself in court for an extradition hearing to send him to Germany from Britain, where he was in transit enroute to Dubai, but Lady Renouf has stepped in and assembled a legal team to not only get him out of British detention but challenge the validity of European warrants that can see people arrested in one country at the behest of another.
Lady Renouf, briefly married to millionaire financier Sir Frank "The Bank" Renouf, said it was a matter of principal her friend Dr Toben got the best help and the Germans not be allowed to curtail freedom of speech.
She said she was not a revisionist and something "bad" did happen to the Jews during the war, but on principal she supported people like Dr Toben and renowned Holocaust denier David Irving for the sake of freedom of expression.
Revisionism, she said, was not an ideology but a historical method. The 61-year-old former model and Miss Newcastle 1968 said people might not like what Dr Toben stood for but it was his and others' right to freely express themselves.
"My interest is in making sure we don't have laws that we say we don't accept and yet we allow to come in to the back door," she said yesterday.
Dr Toben's solicitor Kevin Lowry-Mullins said his client was in good cheer and health and was stoic in the face of potentially being extradited and serving up to five years in a German prison.
www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,24484456-5001021,00.html