Stabbed bishop backs Musk in fight to keep church attack footage online

The Sydney bishop allegedly stabbed by a young terrorist has sided with Elon Musk in the billionaire’s censorship war with Australia, arguing video of the assault should remain online.

Meanwhile, the nation’s top spy, ASIO boss Mike Burgess, has backed age limits to stop young children being exposed to social media.

Lawyers for Musk’s social media platform, X, are in talks with one of Australia’s top silks, Bret Walker, SC – who is known to charge $25,000 a day – to have him argue their case in a dispute the company described as a globally significant fight against the Australian regulator’s order to take down graphic content.

Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel supports Elon Musk’s attempts to keep the video of his attack online.

Ahead of a full Federal Court hearing on May 10, Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel has provided X with an affidavit supporting the images remaining on the platform.

“He’s strongly of the view that the material should be available,” X lawyer Marcus Hoyne said.

The bishop, who was seriously injured in the April 15 incident, is a well-known Assyrian Orthodox church figure. He has developed a worldwide online following for his conservative positions on COVID-19 measures, trans rights and geopolitics. His alleged attacker appeared to refer to the bishop’s previous statements about Islam after the incident.

This masthead has not been able to reach the bishop to confirm the details of his affidavit.

The preacher’s argument will fuel Musk’s case as he fights against what he describes as a “global content ban” made by an Australian regulator, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who believes the presence of the clip online could be used to radicalise.

Inman Grant’s fears were echoed by Australian Federal Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw, who told the audience at a National Press Club address on Wednesday that “you don’t want it to add fuel to the fire in the sense of people being able to download it and be inspired by that, whether it is in Australia or anywhere else”.

The police chief said the continued distribution of the video could jeopardise prosecutions and inspire extremist acts.

Musk’s company claimed it had geo-blocked dozens of posts of the video in Australia. But the Australian regulator is demanding the videos be blocked for those within Australia using a VPN service that evades the geo-block feature.

At a case-management hearing in the X case, Federal Court judge Geoffrey Kennett set up a hearing for May 10 at which the US firm will argue against the eSafety commissioner’s take-down order.

Hoyne, the lawyer representing X, said the hearing might need to run over several days because of the implications of an Australian government attempt to dictate content available to users around the globe.

“This is not a satisfactory process, but we are where we are,” Hoyne said, adding the Australian regulator’s view of its own jurisdiction was “exorbitant”.

X owner Elon Musk has described Senator Jacqui Lambie as an “enemy of the people”.Credit: AP

“I’m not dealing with the political or media issues here. I’m just dealing with the legal issues.”

Hoyne said the watchdog’s case was futile because the attack footage had spread far and wide beyond the URLs being targeted by the regulator. The case displayed elements of the so-called “Streisand effect” whereby a bid to downplay something had the opposite effect of drawing attention to it, he said.

The court granted a temporary order this week demanding that X remove links showing video of the incident. This injunction has been extended until the final hearing, but the platform is fighting the ruling.

Musk has been weighing in on the contest through his own posts on X, stating in a pinned post: “I’d like to take a moment to thank the PM for informing the public that this platform is the only truthful one.”

He described Senator Jacqui Lambie as an “enemy of the people of Australia” after she told Sky News she would be switching off X and suggested the other 226 MPs do the same.

“That bloke should not have a right to be out there on his own ideology platform and creating hatred, showing all this stuff out there to our kids,” Lambie said.

Musk responded to two clips of the Tasmanian senator, criticising Lambie’s position.

“This woman has utter contempt for the Australian people,” he said in one post. “She is an enemy of the people of Australia,” he said in another post.

A day after the Coalition revealed it supported a minimum age for teenagers to create social media accounts, ASIO boss Mike Burgess said the rule change “would help my job”. He was speaking at a joint address during which he and the AFP’s Kershaw criticised tech giants for fostering extremism.

Burgess also said acts of violence against women could be classed as terrorism if perpetrators were motivated by dangerous “incel” ideology.

Police are investigating whether Joel Cauchi, the perpetrator of the Bondi Junction attack, was targeting women. It is not known whether the stabbings at the shopping centre were driven by a particular ideological purpose.

Burgess said there were incels (self-described involuntarily celibate men) who believed violence against women was the answer.

“So, of course, if we saw that and indications of that, that could well be a terrorist incident,” he said, adding that although incels existed in Australia, they weren’t “dominant in the threat landscape”.

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