But who will protect us from the Internet?

Luke McIllveen (who, his profile reminds us, “enjoys country music, rugby league, cooking and exposing the hidden agendas of radical Islam. Dislikes: AFL, transit police, blokes with ponytails”) writes in the Daily Telegraph:

PEDDLERS of books and DVDs promoting jihadist causes and calling for the destruction of Western civilisation have been put on notice – the Federal Government will not tolerate them any longer.

Of course, it might seem almost reasonable to some people. After all, it’s only “jihadist calls for the destruction of Western civlisation” that are being banned. However, let’s try a quick thought experiment. Replace “jihadist causes” with “democratic causes” and “Western civilisation” with “Communism”. Read the sentence again and it doesn’t seem quite so appealing, does it?

Stripped to its essence, it therefore becomes:

PEDDLERS of books and DVDs promoting bad causes and calling for the destruction of good structures have been put on notice – the Federal Government will not tolerate them any longer.

The government can’t ban causes, it can only ever ban (or try to ban) the ideas that support, promote or underpin those causes and, even then, it can only attempt to ban the expression of those ideas rather than the ideas themselves. That’s the problem with ideas: they can always find refuge from an unsympathetic world in people’s minds.

Previously, the Classification Act empowered authorities to confiscate material that incited violence – but the new law is far broader. The mere suggestion of support for a terrorist act is now grounds for confiscation.

The existing powers already allowed the government to ensure the offending books were not being sold or made available, through libraries, to the many impressionable young minds who fill our nation’s universities and seats of learning. Why must they go further to outlaw even, as McIllveen puts it, the “mere suggestion of support”?

In any case, it’s all rather pointless because all of these offending books — and more — are freely accessible on the internet. There is absolutely nothing that the government can do to stop someone registering a blog anonymously and then posting ‘extreme commentary’ such as the following:

Imam Village Idiot, Imam Painter and Imam Gypsy call on our jihadi brothers and sisters to unite jihadfully under a banner of jihad to wage jihad against the infidels who have occupied our lands, slaughtered our gypsies, and drunk all our paint. We warn the infidelic infidels that the jihad will not stop until the aboriginal/Australian occupation is ended and Australia is returned to the Makassan fishermen who discovered it and are its rightful rulers.

Anyway, the article continues:

While Mr Ruddock is coming down hard on books and DVDs, the new laws appear to ignore the elephant in the room – the internet.

No Government has yet worked out how to crack the sharing of information and online recruitment campaigns by terrorist groups using the web.

No government? China seems to have had a pretty good shot at controlling the sharing of information on the internet. Maybe the Federal Government’s censors should humble themselves and sit at the feet of the Chinese to learn how they have managed to deal with the “problem”.

However, sadly even the great firewalls and instruments of national censorship have been circumvented by people who just don’t share the apparent confidence of some Australians that the state always knows best. That’s the trouble with the Internet. And people. And ideas.