Bin Laden books 'don't break law' July 18, 2005 From: AAP
NEW South Wales law enforcement agencies could not take action against people selling books endorsed by Osama Bin Laden because they did not appear to have broken any law, the State Government says. A Sydney shop, The Islamic Bookstore at Lakemba, is selling books endorsed by the al-Qaeda terrorist leader which discuss the effectiveness of suicide bombings and attack Western civilisation as "the culture of oppression, the culture of injustice, the culture of racism", News Ltd papers report.
British police have shut down an extremist bookshop in Leeds after the July 7 terrorist attacks on the London Underground and a bus.
A spokesman for NSW Attorney-General Bob Debus today said the state had laws against racial vilification and incitement to violence.
But on the face of it, the content of the books did not appear to constitute racial vilification or incitement to violence, he said.
"For incitement to occur, violence has to actually take place (as a result of publishing the material)," the spokesman said.
"If the literature is found to contain racial vilification then the laws are there to prosecute.
"If any information or literature results in a violent act that can be proven, then we have laws to prosecute under incitement to violence.
"We take any breach of the law extremely seriously and the threat of terrorism extremely seriously."
People could be prosecuted for racial vilification if a complaint were made against them and the Anti-Discrimination Board recommended pursuing legal action, he said.
But the NSW Government could not ban the books outright, he said.
"Banning that sort of stuff is a federal matter that comes under the classification of material through the Office of Film and Literature Classification," the spokesman said.
The NSW Government could only act against the bookshop or its owners if they had broken the law – and until then, any investigation into the sale of the books was a matter for Australia's intelligence agencies.
Unlike Victoria, NSW does not have religious vilification laws and Premier Bob Carr ruled out introducing them earlier this month.
