Shockadelic Said -
"Muslims today are not the Muslims of 1900 or 1800.
You only need to watch the news to see it."

I think after that comment I might be done with this forum entirely.

SM,

Where have you been old chap.
We've missed your wisedom on this forum.
We need your objective musings.
This man is the voice of the people afterall.
(He's the only one with a microphone).

I think after that comment I might be done with this forum entirely.
Yebiga,
Please explain ?

Divergence and Joe,

Thanks, I understand the need for defamation laws and that is fair enough. I only make the point that we do not have a totally uninhibited right to free speech. What the Abbott government is attempting to do is give justification to bigoted hate speech under the guise of free speech.
In the draft released by Brandis today the government wants to remove the words "offend, insult and humiliate" from 18C but still retaining the word "intimidate". An important change is that it will not be necessary to be seen as intimidating an average member of the targeted group, but rather be seen as intimidating an average member of the community. In the Bolt case, Justice Bromberg ruled "that fair-skinned Aboriginal people (or some of them) were reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to have been offended, insulted, humiliated or intimidated by the imputations conveyed by [Bolt's] newspaper articles". Given the proposed changes there would be little likelihood that a judge would rule that an average member of the community would feel intimidated by what Bolt wrote.

If you believe all races are equal, why would you be offended by some fool who thinks or says otherwise? No amount of legislation can stop incidence of racial bigotry occurring in our streets, schools and workplaces. The legislation in place is merely symbolic of our increasing struggle with modern reality.

Its nice that so many of us are concerned about hurt feelings from bigotry. I wonder though whether this and much else is in practice both unnecessary and ultimately harmful. Every year we seem to permit governments to further and further encroach into areas it had previously been absent. I am finding this over caring itself oppressive.

There is no such thing as racism in Australia but all the foreigners are racist.