Ban Them Books!

Heard over the radio today that certain Islamic bookshops in Sydney are selling extremist literature endorsing suicide bombings and attacking Western civilization as "the culture of oppression, the culture of injustice, the culture of racism". Because of this, certain parties are calling on law-enforcement agencies to take action against these bookstores - raiding them, if need be.

Let me put it this way. A typical bookstore would have at least thousands of titles. Is it the bookstore's responsibility to screen every item and make sure the contents are agreeable to everyone's sensibilities? Think Kama Sutra. Think the Holy Bible. Think Stupid White Men. Think Lady Chatterly's Lover. Think the Communist Manifesto.

Think Fight Club. "Another thing I could do, Tyler tells me, is I could drive to my boss' house some night and hook a hose up to an outdoor spigot. Hook the hose to a hand pump, and I could inject the house plumbing with a charge of industrial dye. Red or blue or green, and wait to see how my boss looks the next day. Or, I could just sit in the bushes and pump the hand pump until the plumbing was superpressurized to 110psi. This way, when someone goes to flush a toilet, the toilet tank will explode. At 150psi, if someone turns on the shower, the water pressure will blow off the shower head, strip the threads, blam, the shower head turns into a mortar shell." "To make a silencer, you just drill holes in the barrel of the gun, a lot of holes. This lets the gas escape and slows the bullet to below the speed of sound." "You take a 98-percent concentration of fuming nitric acid and add the acid to three times that amount of sulfuric acid. Do this in an ice bath. Then add glycerin drop-by-drop with an eye dropper. You have nitroglycerine. Mix the nitro with sawdust, and you have a nice plastic explosive." "The three ways to make napalm: One, you can mix equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate. Two, you can mix equal parts of gasoline and diet cola. Three, you can dissolve crumbled cat litter in gasoline until the mixture is thick." Talk about DIY urban terrorism. Should Fight Club be taken off Dymocks' and Angus & Robertson's shelves?

Let's take an ISP for example. It provides Internet connectivity. It provides hosting services. Is it responsible for pedophiles who use its chat servers to lure young victims? Is it accountable for copyrighted songs and movies passing through its network? It it liable for "offensive" materials hosted on its web servers?