"Freedom of Speech"

Recently there have been two current events that have caught my attention.

1. Followers of the religon Islam have been rioting in response to the publication of a trailer for the film "The Innocence of Muslims"
2. Almost simultaneously, The Al-Furqan Islamic Information Centre of Springvale South, about 45km from my house, and the busineesses and homes surrounding and connected with it, were raided by Victorian Police after they discovered (and evicted) an Aussie Spy working for the government. The police raid found that 'one of the members was collecting a magazine that "touts the Sydney Opera House as a potential terrorist target" and appears to have caused significant disruption to the community, with reports of heavily armed police raiding homes occupied by only women and children.

This directly relates to my project, though I do not yet know exactly how. Reading through the press release on the Al-Furquan website, one finds in stark terms the contrast between "Freedom of Speech" both as a universal democratic idea, and as a propoganda tool to reinforce Western Power, and might understand how it can be both at the same time. The irony of freely protesting a video for being offensive to your religon and this being defended with Free Speech is a situation where political context fails to rationally describe the personal.

In the west we think of Freedom of Speech as being a politically neutral idea. It isn't. It is an ideal which has a reality much different to its definition. "Free speech" in Western Countries is in fact very limited - its just that it isn't directly enforced by the government but by social, economic or cultural forces. Likewise, it excludes certain groups, especially other countries seen as unfriendly, or not in national interest, which are freely demonised.

The West has systems of control, its just that they are not initiated by the government, but by the people.


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I went to visit the Al-Furqan Information Centre last Saturday. There were police in the area, they had sectioned off a bit of the main road near the centre and were sitting around chatting.

Reaching the actual centre itself, I found nothing there. I approached the door, and heard someone vacuuming and a child talking. I elected not to knock, thinking of the intrusion the people here had already suffered, and not wanting to intrude on what was to me at that time a mundane domestic space. I walked around a little, looking mighty conspicuous in my bright yellow leather postie jacket. I tried to take a photo but my phone was out of batteries.


And I left.

Why did I go?

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Al-Furqan Press Release is available here.

Media reports on the raids, which are quite selective in their reporting and present details which stand in contrast to the Al-Furqan media release, are available here, here and here. The text messages referred to in the articles, which refer to meet-ups between the ASIO spy and the agency and make for extremly curious reading, are available here.

The Innocence of Muslims is a fairly distasteful and rudderless peice of provocation and I have chosen not to link to it. If you choose to find it, a warning, it contains material offensive to followers of Islam.