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November 24, 2006

Australia: Kids' Novel Dropped For Portraying Muslim Villain

John Dale is an Australian author. His first novel, a thriller called Dark Angel, was published in 1995, and won the Ned Kelly Crime Writing Award for best first novel. Crime Time described Dale as "one of the best latter-day hard boiled writers". Other books he has written are: "The Dogs are Barking", A Dangerous Life, which focused on the life and murder of real-life prostitute Salli-Anne Huckstepp, and Wildlife published in 2004, about the mysterious murder of his grandfather, Harvey Malcolm, who was shot in 1942.

In March 2004, Scholastic publishers commissioned John Dale to write a "tough, snappy, thriller" for children. The publishers wanted child readers to "break out in sweats and their eyes to bulge without giving them actual nightmares."

Dale is director of the Centre for New Writing at Sydney's University of Technology. He came up with a novel entitled Army of the Pure, in which four children are pursued by Afghan terrorists, after they discovered a plot to blow up the Lucas Heights experimental nuclear reactor in Sydney.

In a case of life imitating art, in late 2005, several Australian Muslims in Sydney and Melbourne were arrested for plotting to really blow up the reactor.

Scholastic were pleased with Dale's novel, Army of the Pure, describing it as a "gripping page-turner". They have described his writing as "almost flawless".

Now, however, Scholastic have ditched the children's thriller, states the Northern Territory News, because of the reactions from libraries and booksellers. The reasons why no-one seems to want to stock Army of the Pure is because the main villain is a Muslim.

Dale's agent, Lyn Tranter, said that the publisher's move was a "gutless" decision. She said: "I am appalled that this is censorship by the salesmen." John Dale himself has said the decision is "disturbing because it's the book's content they are censoring".

Dale originally wrote the book to be something that would be, for his son, "a book he could not put down." He said: "There are no guns, no bad language, no sex, no drugs, no violence that is seen or on the page," and claimed Scholastic made their decision to drop the book "100 per cent (on) the Muslim issue."

Andrew Berkhut, Scholastic's general manager of publishing claimed the company had presented the book outline to "a broad range of booksellers and library suppliers" who were concerned that the book involved a Muslim terrorist. Berkhut said: "They all said they would not stock it, and the reality is if the gatekeepers won't support it, it can't be published."

Such is the state of the Western world. While real Muslims plot real attacks upon Sydney's Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in the real world, a fictional tale involving how children might react if they knew something of a terror plot is banned.

It seems that despite the world in which today's children are growing up, where Muslim terrorists seem hell-bent on causing widespread publicity through acts of terror, politically-correct libraries and booksellers would rather delude everyone with the lie that there is no such thing as Muslim terrorism.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at November 24, 2006 8:24 PM

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