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Terrorism and child abuse linked according to AOL

Sarah | 08.01.2006 13:41 | Analysis | Terror War

AOL is placing full page advertisements in the UK, and presumably in the US, newspapers. The one in the Sunday Times of January 1 2006 read as follows: “Child abuse, terrorism, racism.”

This headline was accompanied by pictures of a little child, an exploding bomb and a burning cross.

“Should censorship really be the only thing not allowed on the internet?”

This was followed with a section headed ‘Discuss’. It read:

“The World Wide Web is a bit of an understatement. It just keeps getting bigger, with more and more information being added every day. And that’s the beauty of the internet – anyone, anywhere can put anything on it. It belongs to everyone. A place where freedom of speech can exist.

“But is it so beautiful when the information put there is the views of paedophiles, terrorists and racists? With no-one regulating the internet, this information is now within reach of more homes than ever before. It is the World Wide Web after all. But who in the world should regulate it? Should it, and could it be regulated at all?

“We have a view - that internet providers, governments and individuals can work together to keep the internet open, but safer too. Which is why one of the things that we do is support the Internet Watch Foundation, set up to monitor and minimise the availability of child abuse images online. But where does censorship begin and freedom of speech end?”

Reply

Censorship has already begun and freedom of speech is under grave threat. The Internet Watch Foundation, which you support, is manned by ex police with links to their colleagues in the UK police force. As with Prohibition in the past, the police in both the UK and the US are using child porn and so called ‘child abuse images’ for racketeering and corruption. It is becoming increasingly difficult to challenge and expose their activities because of their influence on the servers.

Note how we began with child pornography as that was an easy one to use as the exception where free speech could not be allowed. See how quickly it expanded to ‘Child abuse, terrorism, racism’. There are already calls for as further expansion to ‘inappropriate behaviour’. The expression ‘child abuse images’ is full of a priori bias and is deliberately highly misleading. There is virtually no ‘child porn’ left on the open Internet. The vast majority of what might be considered to be ‘child porn’ is held legally by the police and is being used for entrapment and corruption. The law is such now that it is almost impossible for a journalist or book author to expose these practises without breaking the law. Here is one example: critics of Operation Ore in the UK, who want to expose police corruption, are receiving child porn images by email, almost certainly from the police forces they are trying to expose. Any attempt to bring these images to the attention of a responsible authority could result in the prosecution and imprisonment of the individuals trying to expose the corruption.

Where there is effective criticism of the police being expressed on a web site, the police and their compliant friends in the tabloids are bringing pressure on servers to shut down these critical web sites. These are the servers that AOL has such trust in.

Let’s look at the three ‘horrors’ that AOL wants censored. ‘Child abuse, terrorism, racism’. We’ll assume that AOL is making the common mistake of calling illegal images of children ‘child abuse images’, but must first note that the police call them this as the expression is so emotive. A large amount, and possibly the majority of such images, consists of child nudity, from kids in the bath to those in naturist resorts. A significant number is made up from ‘erotic’ posing and other kinds of play and romping. Child nudity and erotic posing by children or of children are illegal, but this does not make them ‘child abuse images’. What AOL and the other censors now want banned also is any discussion on the Internet about whether child nudity and harmless posing should be banned. Should anyone attempt to say that perhaps they should not, then, according to AOL, ‘the information put there is the views of paedophiles’.

Now terrorism. You dare not enter the US as a foreign tourist or on business if you are an open critic of the Bush regime’s present overseas or domestic policies, such as a critic who denounces the biggest gulag of prisons in the world, right in the US. A blogger saying this can become ‘a terrorist supporter’, and can be lifted by the FBI upon entry at a US airport.

And racism. This is simply bullshit. Are all writers to now avoid saying that Aboriginals, gypsies and Canadian Indians tend to have a liking for alcohol, that male African government officials tend to be corrupt, that Irish tinkers fight at tinker weddings and funerals?

We need full page advertisements, not calling for censorship, but hoping that our slide into the police state can be halted before it is too late.

Source:  http://www.inquisition21.com


Sarah
- Homepage: http://www.inquisition21.com

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