Censorship

A few years back, Boston Harbor was so polluted that if one took a bucket of water out of there, dumping it back into the harbor would be in violation of anti-pollution laws. Now it seems a similar thinking is being applied to the Koran.

If Kafka met Monty Python, and George Orwell edited their collaboration, they might have come up with something like the following real-life exchange.

It took place in an Australian court where two Christian pastors were found guilty of "religious vilification" of Muslims by lecturing to their flock on Islam. At one point during the trial, defendant Daniel Scot began to read Koranic verses in his own defense. The Pakistani-born pastor hoped to prove to the judge that his discussion of the inferior status of women under Islam, for example, had a specific textual basis in the Koran. As he began to read, a lawyer for the Islamic Council of Victoria, the plaintiff in the case, objected. Reading these verses aloud, she said, would in itself be vilification. Poor, ultimately convicted, Mr. Scot put it best: "How can it be vilifying to Muslims when I am just reading from the Koran?"

CAIR and various other Muslim groups haven't yet had the Koran banned, but they have forced NRO and others to stop selling other books critical of Islam.