Last month I had the opportunity to visit the "Terror Museum" in Budapest.
This building, on the premier avenue of Budapest, was the headquarters of the
Nazi Gestapo during WW11. The same building was subsequently used by the
Communist party during their domination of Hungary.
This Museum was of special
interest to me, as my father was born in Budapest. Then during WW11 his
family were rounded up as Jews in Bratislava and transported to Auschwitz.
There all the family died in the gas chambers, except for one uncle who was a
doctor who survived the war.
The Terror Museum in Budapest
records for posterity a regime of terror and control beyond the imagination
of most Australians. Two evil regimes of ideological domination controlled
the Hungarian population using weapons of terror. Thought police monitored
every citizen and every citizen was expected to be a spy on their family,
friends and neighbours. Justice and freedom were extinguished.
In Australia we are starting
to going down the route of thought control. The anti-vilification legislation
in Victoria is now well known, through the case against the two Christian
Pastors. Our Federal Treasurer, Peter Costello, correctly described this
legislation as "bad law".
It is not good enough for the
Christian Church to adapt to bad law by shrinking into a mode of self
protection. We need to pray and act in a Godly way to see this restriction on
freedom of thought removed from our statute books.
The writer of the following
article is Executive Director of the Australian Muslim Public Affairs
Committee:
WHY I HAVE CHANGED MY MIND ON
VILIFICATION LAWS
The Victorian anti-vilification legislation is undermining those religious
freedoms it is intended to protect. Peter Costello was quite correct in his
National Day of Thanksgiving address to describe it as a "bad law".
As someone who once supported their introduction and is a member of one of
the minority groups they purport to protect, I can say with some confidence
that these laws have served only to undermine the very religious freedoms
they intended to protect. At every major Islamic lecture I have attended
since litigation began against Catch the Fire Ministries, there have been
small groups of evangelical Christians - armed with notepads and pens -
jotting down any comment that might later be used as evidence in the present
case or presumably future cases. (The Islamic Council of Victoria is suing
Catch the Fire under Victoria's Racial and Religious Tolerance Act 2001.)
The organisations being targeted by these evangelical Christians are neither
involved in nor supported the legal action by the Islamic Council, and yet
must now suffer the consequences of having their publications and public
utterances subjected to a ridiculous level of scrutiny and analysis. The hope
being, I assume, that some elements of the Christian community might exact
revenge on the Muslim community by way of their own vexatious legal actions.
The problem is that as long as religions articulate a sense of what is right,
they cannot avoid also defining - whether explicitly or implicitly - what is
wrong. If we love God, then it requires us to hate idolatry. If we believe
there is such a thing as goodness, then we must also recognise the presence
of evil. If we believe our religion is the only way to Heaven, then we must
also affirm that all other paths lead to Hell. If we believe our religion is
true, then it requires us to believe others are false.
Yet, this is exactly what this law serves to outlaw and curtail: the right of
believers of one faith to passionately argue against or warn against the
beliefs of another. It is obvious that criticism of one's religion is likely
to offend, but just as Muslims should be entitled to aggressively criticise
other faiths, likewise those same faiths should be afforded the right to
voice their concerns about Islam. The idea that such speech - regardless of
how wrong-headed or offensive it might appear - must be banned to protect
these religious communities is a furphy: discrimination on the basis of
religion was already outlawed; incitement to commit violence was already
illegal; and slander was already covered by existing legal instruments.
All these anti-vilification laws have achieved is to provide a legalistic
weapon by which religious groups can silence their ideological opponents,
rather than engaging in debate and discussion. In doing so, people who
otherwise might have been ignored as on the fringes of reality will be made
martyrs, and their ideas given an airing far beyond anything they might have
hoped for. And at the same time as extremist ideas are strengthened and given
legitimacy by attempts to silence them, the position in our society of the
religions themselves is weakened and undermined.
Who, after all, would give credence to a religion that appears so fragile it
can only exist if protected by a bodyguard of lawyers?
Source: By Amir Butler, Australian Prayer Network.
