If I could just leave aside bitter attacks on this website and return to the topic for a moment...

I am amazed how persistently opponents of this law and the decision simply ignore the serious imputations raised by the case. In this thread already we've seen calls for producing the Koranic verses that the pastors quoted.

This misses the point spectacularly. No one's complaining about quoting verses of the Koran. Seems to me though, that people really are complaining about being branded rapists, terrorists, torturers and killers. That's not a religios comment - or a quote from the Koran. That's a statement about what Muslims will do as a matter of sociology.

Geomat, given your apparnet opposition to any restriction on free speech whatsoever, perhaps you would like to start an anti-defamation-law campaign. I hear some members of the Jewish community are taking action against One Nation for racial discrimination - perhaps you would like to speak out against that too. This is really the same thing, only the smears seem to be more serious to me. I can't imagine anyone getting this upset if it the statements were about Jews being rapists. We'd probably support their legal action and rightly so.

Perhaps you'd also like to name one country on Earth, or indeed one society in human history, that has ever functioned without some kind of restriction on free speech. To seek refuge in the concept of the information age is to ignore the very real social consequences of unreasonable hate speech that persist even today. The same kind of social consequences that lie at the heart of all laws that proscribe certain modes of speech.

You are missing the point Jasper. I want to see the WORDS OF THE VERSES FROM THE QURAN WHICH WERE READ OUT. WHAT WAS IN THEM WHICH STARTED THIS RUMPUS? ARE THE CONTENTS TOO AGRESSIVE TO PUBLISH? IN THAT CASE MAYBE THE PUBLISHERS OF THE QURAN AND OTHER LITERATURE QUOTED SHOULD ALSO HAVE BEEN PROSECUTED! WE MUST HAVE THIS INFORMATION SO WE CAN INFORMATIVELY JUDGE THIS MATTER.

How do you conclude that the words from the verses of the Koran started the rumpus? Who do you conclude that these verses are the main issue?

That doesn't seem to be the case from the judgement.

Why do you keep falling back to the verses of the Koran? That really had very little to do with it. Calling all Muslims terrorists and rapists probably did though!

You're making straw men, or perhaps, distracting us with red herrings.

If you want to judge this matter informatively, then start engaging with the real vilification in this case. Stop hiding behind the idea that the verses quoted from the Koran have anything are anything more than tangential to the complaint.

Jasper, if you can't see that the sequence of events STARTED with the verses, you are the straw man wearing the red herrings. You are being deliberately obtuse, and doing an excellent job of it!

Slighty interesting that the person who wrote this article is a member of the ICV (Islamic Council of Victoria) and as such has a vested interest in having the case go in their favour.

Certainly no bias in this one (tongue in cheek).

This is a response to Geomat above who appears to think he has been "censored". His articles were rejected by us on the basis that they didn't reach our criteria of quality. There is only so much material that we can publish, so we have to choose. George may see this as censorship. If it is, it is a necessary part of publishing.

This site has a tiered approach to information. Our highest quality tier is the journal, On Line Opinion. We also have an email discussion list (OnLineOpinions), a blog aggregator (The Domain), and now these comment boxes. Various quality sieves are applied to each. The Domain is sieved according to the writers. We can't monitor every site, so we provide links to sites that publish consistently high quality commentary.

The comment boxes and OnLineOpinions are monitored for any breach of the law, or flaming. Apart from that any comment is allowed.

Anyone can read George's articles on his own site, and he is quite at liberty to mention them in posts to these boxes or the email discussion list. We're just not going to publish the two articles he mentions in On Line Opinion. They don't demonstrate a sufficient grasp of the subject matter, nor do they make points that others haven't made better. That doesn't mean we won't publish something of his in the future.

I can't answer for the editorial standards of the organisations who published George, but if he continues writing he will find that various organisations apply differing criteria. There is certainly no conspiracy at this site to suppress dissenting voices, as anyone who reads the journal will know. In fact, I'm not really sure what constitutes a dissenting voice - it seems to depend on what group you are in at the time. So we accept material from all sorts of people in all sorts of establishments - some that see themselves as dissenting, and some that don't.

George's suggestion that this site is funded by "money men" is a nonsense. The funding comes from the organisations listed as members, advertising, as well as from my own resources - the site runs very leanly. Perhaps if George spent more time researching his articles than he has done researching this comment he would find more publishers willing to publish them.