How Australian and British attempts at censorship conflated Islam and Deviance | Richard Pennell

Summary: To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books | Richard Pennell This study centres on two case studies 1. The 2005-06 attempt by the Australian government to ban eight books and a film on Islamicist themes. After the Literature Classification Board did not prohibit them, the Attorney-general appealed to the Classification Review Board. This banned two books by a Palestinian jihadist theoretician, Abdullah Azzam, unanimously rejected banning five more and the film and split over (but did not ban) one by an Egyptian jihadist that motivated President Sadat’s assassins in 1981. The Board’s reasoning, outlined in its determinations, show that it framed its arguments in the context offences to general standards of morality, decency and propriety of ‘reasonable adults’ in publications dealing with sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, violence etc or those that ‘instructed’ in matters of crime or violence. It found that mostly these books did not remotely offend majority standards, although the Attorney General, and one Sydney newspaper, presented them as attacks on ““Western civilisation.” The books were assessed according to rules drawn up primarily to deal with sexually explicit material which conflated in the rhetoric of politicians and a histrionic press, two themes: the sexually and politically deviant. 2. The treatment by the British tabloid, The Sun of Omar Bakri Mohammed, a jihadist shaykh in a radical London mosque, whom mainstream press and political comment accused of both defrauding the welfare system and high treason. In October 2008 The Sun revealed his daughter was a pole-dancer, that her breast enhancements had been bought from her father’s welfare payments, and that she was a sexual predator. Thus a political radical was linked to soft-porn sex.