From the Age:

Plea to lawmakers: close down hate sites
Paul Heinrichs
December 3, 2006

THE Federal Government is being urged to make laws that allow the removal of hate material and racial vilification from Australian-based websites.

The B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC), a Jewish human rights body, wants the change after failing to have limits placed on the website www.missionislam.com through appeals to politicians and use of existing legal channels.

The site, run by the Muslim Information Service in Sydney, is an extensive resource and link system aimed at influencing young Muslims, and points them to extreme views and well-known anti-Semitic material.

Some of the material would also be offensive to Christians and Freemasons.

The Anti-Defamation Commission wants the Government to give the Australian Communications and Media Authority the power to take racist material off Australian-based sites.

Under a section called “New World Order”, the site links to a republication of a document known as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a Czarist Russian forgery from around the turn of the 20th century purporting to be a Jewish conspiracy.

Others sections describe Jews as a “cockroach infestation” and purport to list their characteristics while urging the termination of Israel.

ADC executive officer Manny Waks said the organisation had been “attempting to shut this vile, anti-Semitic website, or at least for its outrageous content to be removed, for more than a year”.

However the ADC had been frustrated by ACMA’s inability to deal with the issue, due to strict guidelines which extended only to dealing with violence and pornography, not hate or other offensive material.

Communications Minister Senator Helen Coonan said the Government could act only if the material breached the law.