On April 15, 2024 (AEST) in Sydney, Australia, a 16-year-old boy stabbed a priest in the pulpit at Christ The Good Shepherd church, along with three other men who came to his rescue. Because the service was live streamed, the attack on Fr. Mar Mari Emmanuel was caught on videotape and available on the internet. It was the second knife attack with multiple victims in the area in three days. The first, which left six dead, was at nearby Bondi Junction.

The Australian eSafety Commissioner asked social media owners to remove the footage worldwide or face hefty fines. All of them complied except Elon Musk at X (Twitter). He blocked it only in Australia, though any Australian with a VPN can see the disapproved material on X.

Musk’s view was that “I just don’t think we should be suppressing Australians’ rights to free speech”and “if ANY country is allowed to censor content for ALL countries … then what is to stop any country from controlling the entire Internet?” For that, Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese called him an “arrogant billionaire” and Senator Jacqui Lambi thought he should be jailed with the key “thrown away.”

However, a federal court in Australia disagreed and refused to extend the injunction on May 13. There will be another hearing later.

So what did Australia want to censor?

Here a brief (1:04 min) approved but age-restricted video at YouTube:

Now here’s the part that is censored but still up on X as of May 14, 2024 PST. It’s also up at another X account here. (Customary caution to viewers of course.)

The censored part shows the actual stabbing and the screaming parishioners storming the altar to rescue the priest and pin down the stabber.

This longer form uncensored video (7:30 min) that does not show the stabbing provides helpful context:

Mar Mari Emmanuel, the leader of the Assyrian Church of the East in Australia and New Zealand, was highly respected locally but was also a lightning rod because he was outspoken on extreme COVID lockdowns, tensions with Islam, LGBTQ demands, etc.

The near-riot gathered outside the church in the longer video above was likely a product of timing. Sydney was reeling from the Bondi Junction stabbings. The accused in that unrelated attack is Joel Cauchi, 40, who had longstanding, poorly controlled mental health issues.

It seems as if Albanese, Prime Minister since 2019, wants — among other things — to reduce media coverage of the underlying tension that the latest stabbings have suddenly brought into sharp relief. Poor social control of violence and of mental health issues is just not a good look for his Labor Party government. He seems fixed on the idea that more censorship of bad news is the answer.

Emmanuel preaches forgiveness after attack

Rev. Emmanuel was partially blinded by the assailant’s knife but he proclaimed later from the pulpit, “I ask the Lord Jesus Christ to accept this eye as a token of love and sacrifice,” in Arabic. Of his attacker, he said, “This young man who did this act almost two weeks ago, I say to you my dear, ‘You are my son and you will always be my son’.”

The parents of the unnamed 16-year-old accused told media that their son had longstanding serious anger management issues but was not a terrorist. However, he appears to have been triggered by the priest’s criticisms of “my Prophet” (Mohammed). The court case will doubtless enable more information to come to light.

The role censorship plays

Australia has tried out censorship before in order to paper over failures. For example, when George, Cardinal Pell (1941–2023) was accused, improbably, of child sex offenses, the case was eventually tossed by the High Court of Australia for lack of believable evidence. But why did the case go through so many layers of compliant courts and take so long to be heard by judges with critical thinking skills? One reason is that the courts had suppressed all reporting of the details of the case. Australian media paid A$1.1 million in contempt of court fines over the reporting they did do, in defiance of the order. Had all media in Australia enjoyed a free hand, the nonsense case would never have got as far as it did. It’s hard to see what public interest government censorship of news served then or serves now.

The story also highlights once again, the way X (Twitter) is one of the few important social media to resist creeping government censorship.

You may also wish to read: When censorship parades itself as a science… A House Subcommittee discovered that the National Science Foundation — which is supposed to support science and engineering — is readying censorship tools. The bee in the bonnets of the researchers who received the funding for the internet censorship program is that Americans can’t tell fact from fiction.