brought to you by the usual suspects ( ADL)

Date: November 16, 2008

Australia To End Internet Freedom

Will the US be next?

Reference Link of report:

http://nordwave.net/Great_Britain/category/freedom-of-speech/

Australia will now join China in blocking free access to the internet. Responding to decades of pressure from the Anti-Defamation League, the Australian government has announced it will ban all “illegal” internet content produced in or entering Australia. Under ADL-orchestrated Australian hate laws, it has already been unlawful to hold up homosexuals, Jews and Muslims to “humiliation or intimidation” in the public forum, including the internet. Incoming material on the internet, however, has remained largely unregulated.

The government, projecting a comprehensive internet filter, originally assured internet users that they could legally receive banned content by contacting their providers and circumventing such restrictions. Now the government says they can’t. All illegal content, which should include everything from pornography to political and religious speech violating Australia’s hate laws, will be forbidden. It will be illegal to create or receive communication which the government disapproves.

Actually, according to Colin Jacobs of Electronic Frontiers Australia, the National Internet Filter would have little effect on such illegal internet content as child pornography since it would not cover file-sharing networks. We may conclude that politically incorrect speech would probably bear the brunt of censorship. (See, “< http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24568137-2862,00.html>Australia to implement mandatory internet censorship”)

Meanwhile, ADL and its European arm INACH, the International Network Against Cyber Hate, tirelessly work to find legal resources and technology capable of ending criticism of homosexuality, Jews and Israel on the internet. ADL admits this is difficult through conventional legal or technological means.

But it’s not difficult when ADL can persuade governments to ban “hate speech” outright!

Is America Next?

How could America, ostensibly protected by the First Amendment, also lose free speech on the internet?

For starters, Congress could pass ADL’s federal hate crimes bill, the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, this winter. In 1971, Canada enacted ADL’s very similar federal hate law. Soon, it was extended to criminalize “hate speech” originating on Canadian websites. Sec. 13.1 of Canada’s human rights statute outlaws even such internet speech as is “likely” to cause embarrassment to federally protected groups.

If the Obama/ADL hate bill is passed, internet “homophobic hate speech” in evangelical media, as well as in pulpits, will become illegal. 1 The hate bill is ostensibly directed only against violent hate crimes in the States. However, a federal hate bill will quickly overflow such limits, as prosecutors and judges broaden it to protection of the “hurt feelings” of sodomites.

Hate crime laws, whether state, federal, or international, are already showing an alarming tendency to overreach existing legal definitions and restraints. Hate gestapos indict, letting the tedious court system catch up with them, perhaps years later. The main objective of current hate law strategy is to press the limits, seeing how much can be gotten away with. Prosecutors hope to shape public opinion, frighten opponents and set legal precedents that will provide steppingstones to even greater assaults on freedom.