sent to jail for making an ebook.

[mr friendly guy]

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4197704 ... vl=theDrum

In 2003, a man made an ebook. It was not a complex task.

Belal Khazaal downloaded some articles from the internet, excerpted his favourite bits, threw them all together, and wrote a 155 word introduction. In those brief comments, he prayed the ebook "would be of benefit to everyone working to support" Islam.

Khazaal called the book Provision in the Rules of Jihad. He uploaded it to a website that is either (depending on whose expert witnesses you prefer) a repository of texts on Islamic philosophy, or a repository of texts on Islamic philosophy including some written by terrorists.

For his efforts, Australian courts sentenced Khazaal to 12 years in prison. Late last week, the High Court affirmed Khazaal's conviction.

Described like that, Khazaal's actions are comically banal and his punishment bizarrely disproportionate.

Does that comic banality disappear if we add that according to the Australian law his ebook had "an obvious and direct connection with assistance" for terrorism? This form of written work was made illegal in 2002.

Or that one chapter was titled "Reasons for assassination"? It included recommended targets ("diplomats, ambassadors" and "holders of key positions" in "atheistic countries" like Australia) and recommended techniques ("wireless detonation, letter bombing, booby trapping", "cake throwing" and "hitting with a hammer").

Yes, "hitting with a hammer".

Even with these extra details, Khazaal's editing job doesn't come across as a great threat to the Commonwealth. He took things he found on the internet and packaged them up as his own.

Khazaal complains and apologises throughout his short introduction, saying the ebook would be better if he had more time, if he was fully settled in his residence (sure it would be, Belal). No question, his professed beliefs about violent jihad are distasteful and hateful. But more than anything, he comes across as a bit pathetic.

The courts may have been correct to say that compiling this ebook constituted an offence under the Commonwealth's Criminal Code. That does not mean these offences are good law.

Between September 11, 2001 and September 11, 2011 the federal government passed 54 new pieces of anti-terror law. The legislative output was extraordinary.

As George Williams notes, during the Howard years, the government was passing one new anti-terror law every 6.7 weeks. As soon as one bill was through the Parliament, it was onto the next.

Another commentator has called this "hyper-legislation". By volume and impact, the new Australian anti-terror laws greatly exceeded those passed in the United Kingdom, Canada and even the United States.

The 2002 changes to the Criminal Code are, in fact, some of the more benign changes made in that decade of frenzied activity. More aggressive reforms in 2005 even reintroduced the long-dormant concept of sedition. (To its credit, the Rudd government relaxed those sedition laws in 2010.)

Yet that decade of hyper-activity has damaged our legal system. The boundaries between legal and illegal activity have dangerously faded.

And with all that new law, it has still taken nine years of police work, anti-terror intelligence, and legal argument to get to the Khazaal High Court decision last week. Are we safer? Khazaal's source material is still online.

In a long and important paper from 2005, the American constitutional scholar Eugene Volokh asked whether "crime-facilitating" speech should be considered free speech. That category includes everything from the Anarchist Cookbook, which describes in detail how to make drugs and bombs, to a lookout yelling "run!" when police arrive to arrest his criminal friend.

Volokh concluded that much crime-facilitating speech is "dual-use". Speech which can facilitate crime can also inform non-criminals about risks, about issues of public importance (such as the vulnerability of key Australians to hammers), or even just entertain.

A government should not ban speech that has a lawful and valuable use simply because it may also be used by criminals. Volokh argued that to the extent crime-facilitating speech has such value, it should be considered to be within the bounds of free speech.

Khazaal's ebook would fall easily within those bounds. Does Islamic theology demand violent jihad, and against whom? Khazaal has published his view. Know your enemy.

And it's hard to say there has been any great, compelling harm caused by his compilation. Words are cheap. The Anarchist Cookbook provides more technical detail than Khazaal offered, and is free to read across the internet.

Belal Khazaal may be a bad guy. He may deserve to be in prison. Australian courts decided he could not be regarded as "a person of good character" at sentencing because of convictions in Lebanon for donating to alleged terrorist organisations.

But if he deserves to be in prison in Australia, he deserves to be there for a greater crime than making an ebook.

This comment I am reposting here just shows the double standard between right wing retards crying out free speech when its their fanboys making racist remarks against Aborigines, but expect them to keep quiet when its a Muslim saying Jihad is cool.

This would seem to be an issue best left to those right-wing jihadis going into battle with swords raised in defence of Andrew Bolt. I seem to recall some rather fascinating linguistic contortions uttered in defence of "free speech", so I'm sure they'll rally to Belal's defence with the same sweeping rhetoric and logic they used with their own hero. Over to you, warriors...

[Thanas]

Man, it is funny that my school library had a book titled "how to commit a coup d'etat", which neatly outlined how to prevent a coup or make a coup yourself, including who to assassinate etc.

I guess our librarian was secretly a jihadi terrorist too.

[Grumman]

This comment I am reposting here just shows the double standard between right wing retards crying out free speech when its their fanboys making racist remarks against Aborigines, but expect them to keep quiet when its a Muslim saying Jihad is cool.

This would seem to be an issue best left to those right-wing jihadis going into battle with swords raised in defence of Andrew Bolt. I seem to recall some rather fascinating linguistic contortions uttered in defence of "free speech", so I'm sure they'll rally to Belal's defence with the same sweeping rhetoric and logic they used with their own hero. Over to you, warriors...

Does Andrew Bolt advocate murdering indigenous Australians? If not, there is no double standard. It's like deciding Holocaust denial should be legal, but calling for all Jews to be killed should not.

[Stark]

A wiki article tells people that arguably one of the best ways to fight an insurgency is a sudden bout of indiscriminate mass-murder. Should we find out who made that edit and jail them, while ignoring the works cited?

[mr friendly guy]

@ Grunman - That might actually be an argument, if they actually did advocate that there should be limitations on free speech, and the dispute is where to draw the line. Too bad they just shout its suppression of free speech, period. They make no distinction between the standard you are advocating.

Edit - its also ridiculous to say he is advocating murder, based on the description given in the article. As Stark and Thanas has pointed out, saying that in a conflict one side will kill members of the other side is a no brainer, and to go from that to saying they advocate murder is a stretch. Now if he said a specific person, you might have a better point.

[Grumman]

@ Grunman - That might actually be an argument, if they actually did advocate that there should be limitations on free speech, and the dispute is where to draw the line. Too bad they just shout its suppression of free speech, period. They make no distinction between the standard you are advocating.

Well yes, because people don't typically speak in legalese. Hence why people talk about Freedom Of Speech, and not Freedom of Speech Unless You're Shouting "Fire" In A Crowded Theatre, Inciting Someone To Commit A Crime, Making False Claims About Your Product, Distributing Child Pornography, Making False Statements To A Federal Official, Etc, Etc.

[Lonestar]

Man, it is funny that my school library had a book titled "how to commit a coup d'etat", which neatly outlined how to prevent a coup or make a coup yourself, including who to assassinate etc.

I guess our librarian was secretly a jihadi terrorist too.

In our school library that was called "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress ".

[mr friendly guy]

Well yes, because people don't typically speak in legalese. Hence why people talk about Freedom Of Speech, and not Freedom of Speech Unless You're Shouting "Fire" In A Crowded Theatre, Inciting Someone To Commit A Crime, Making False Claims About Your Product, Distributing Child Pornography, Making False Statements To A Federal Official, Etc, Etc.

Then its their obligation to clarify what they meant no? Rather than expect us to mind read and interpret them to mean freedom of speech unless <insert situation here>. In any of these cases that have previously come up I have stated up front I think there should be limits to freedom of speech so there is less ambiguity in my position. In case you are wondering, the guy a few of us debated when Andrew Bolt's case came up, HMS conqueror did hold the view that freedom of speech equals ability to say anything about him even if untrue, and it would be ok under this interpretation.

So one, people do exist who interpret freedom of speech to mean pretty much say anything, and I don't see why I should assume they officially argue for an exception when they have not stated it.

But in the case of Bolt, a judge found that his statements violated Australia's Racial Discrimination Act, which counts as one of these exceptions, and the judge disbelieved him when Bolt said he didn't incite racial hatred.

[K. A. Pital]

Are Che Guevara's Guerrilla Warfare and Carlos Marighella's Short Manual of the Urban Guerilla banned in Australia? Would one actually be arrested for writing such a book?

[Thanas]

I hope not as that would effectively cut off a pretty large piece of modern military history.

[Irbis]

Man, it is funny that my school library had a book titled "how to commit a coup d'etat", which neatly outlined how to prevent a coup or make a coup yourself, including who to assassinate etc.

Going by that line of thinking... I bet you can find Mein Kampf, Zweites Buch or Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts in library in Germany, too. Does that mean if I were to write and publish something similar in, say, Berlin today I won't meet with any consequences?

[someone_else]

Are Che Guevara's Guerrilla Warfare and Carlos Marighella's Short Manual of the Urban Guerilla banned in Australia? Would one actually be arrested for writing such a book?

I think the law is there only to be enforced on dirty evil terrorist brown muslims. While it could theoretically be enforced on other groups, I think it's far less likely to.

[Thanas]

Man, it is funny that my school library had a book titled "how to commit a coup d'etat", which neatly outlined how to prevent a coup or make a coup yourself, including who to assassinate etc.

Going by that line of thinking... I bet you can find Mein Kampf, Zweites Buch or Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts in library in Germany, too. Does that mean if I were to write and publish something similar in, say, Berlin today I won't meet with any consequences?

Why should you be meeting any consequences?

[Irbis]

Why should you be meeting any consequences?

Going by articles I read on the topic about Germany: because 'promoting hatred or war, racism, religious and national hate, works opposed to the free and democratic basic order' are illegal in Germany and, as in this case, are punishable by jail.

*shrug* Anyway, while I'm very liberal when it comes to freedom of speech, especially for private or scientific reasons, religious/racist hate speech is one area I'm willing to make an exception and won't shed a tear after brainless calls to jihad the author of wasn't even clever enough to mask as study or fiction. If only because people capable of writing such things are often less than a few steps from committing them.

To the opening of article saying poor guy only 'downloaded some articles from the internet, excerpted his favourite bits, threw them all together, and wrote a 155 word introduction' - gee, Breivik did exactly the same thing before his island trip, and if someone thrown him into jail then world would have been better place.

[Zixinus]

To the opening of article saying poor guy only 'downloaded some articles from the internet, excerpted his favourite bits, threw them all together, and wrote a 155 word introduction' - gee, Breivik did exactly the same thing before his island trip, and if someone thrown him into jail then world would have been better place.

I know I am poking a wasp's nest here, but: how do we know that this guy would be another Breivik as opposed to just another, usual idiot who only happens to be an idiot in a minority around which a lot of fear-spinning is going on? And should we really put every idiot with internet access into prison for 12 years?

[Thanas]

Going by articles I read on the topic about Germany: because 'promoting hatred or war, racism, religious and national hate, works opposed to the free and democratic basic order' are illegal in Germany and, as in this case, are punishable by jail.

I fail to see how books about guerilla tactics are automatically opposed to the free and democratic basic order. We have researchers working on that, how could they be able to do research if they are unable to publish?

To the opening of article saying poor guy only 'downloaded some articles from the internet, excerpted his favourite bits, threw them all together, and wrote a 155 word introduction' - gee, Breivik did exactly the same thing before his island trip, and if someone thrown him into jail then world would have been better place.

And if Hitler had been drowned as an infant the world would also have been better, ergo mass drownings of all children born in 1989.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Between September 11, 2001 and September 11, 2011 the federal government passed 54 new pieces of anti-terror law.

Eh?

[Grumman]

Between September 11, 2001 and September 11, 2011 the federal government passed 54 new pieces of anti-terror law.

Eh?

That's 2001 and 2011: ten years.