Keen censors in Australia

We read:

"The Australian Human Rights Commission has threatened legal action against a widely read but controversial US-based website over an article that encourages racial hatred against Aborigines. But online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia said that trying to stamp out the deplorable content would only create the "Streisand" effect, whereby an attempt to censor online content only brings more attention to it.

In a letter to Joseph Evers, the owner of Encyclopedia Dramatica (ED) - a more shocking version of Wikipedia that contains racist and other offensive articles dubbed as "satire" - the commission said it had received 20 complaints from Aborigines over the "Aboriginal" page on the site.

The same page was in the news in January when, in a rare move, Google Australia agreed to remove links to the article from its search engine following legal action from Aboriginal man Steve Hodder-Watt.

On the Australian Communication and Media Authority's blacklist of "refused classification" websites, which was leaked in March last year, encyclopediadramatica.com was included. This means the entire site will most likely be blocked under the government's forthcoming internet filtering plan.

The commission argued in its letter, the first page of which was published by Evers on his website, that the article on Aborigines constituted racial hatred and was in breach of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975.

A disclaimer at the top of the article, which is too vulgar to repeat here, says it was "not racist at all" because it was written by "Australian aborigines who are satirizing racists in Australia in the same way that Sacha Baron Cohen, a jew, uses the character Borat to satirize anti-semetism [sic]". A separate article on the site about Australia says the country is "comprised entirely of the still imprisoned distant relatives of Britain's worst criminals (tax dodging sheep f*****) and other detritus and a haven for aspiring international terrorists".

The page is illustrated with a picture of Josef Fritzl draped in an Australian flag. Fritzl was sentenced to life in prison for raping his daughter and for imprisoning her and their children over a 24-year period.

Evers had argued in an email to the commission that, because his site was hosted in the US, it was covered by the country's free speech regulations and not subject to Australian laws.

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