If anyone wants to talk about ‘root causes‘ here’s one:
Kareem’s father decided “to attend the court verdict session with his four brothers, who completely memorized the Holy Quran, to announce disowning the accused Abdul Kareem inside the court room, in order to reduce the embarrassment and pressure that civil rights organizations are applying on the court panel (…) The father of the accused also described the organizations that are working on having his son acquitted as “monkey rights” organizations.”
The full story of Abdel Kareem Soliman, a 22-year old Egyptian blogger sentenced to four years in prison for insulting Islam on his blog, is here.
I found this together with a presentation about online censorship in Pakistan. Don’t Block The Blog is an online campaign launched by Awab Alvi and Omer Alvie on March 3rd 2006, to support free speech of Pakistani bloggers and internet free speech in general.
We at DBTB support the right of free speech for everyone. This umbrella of free speech rights also covers those sites that we might consider offensive. In order to ensure free speech for most average citizens who voice their opinions for no other reason then just to tell the truth, one has to accept the right of free speech of even those who have an extremist or hateful political agenda.
This is a big deal as in any totalitarian environment, and let’s face it countries with islamic population do not tolerate alternatives, governments can pay only lip service to the notion of free speech. The moment you disagree with the accepted religious, social and by extension political parameters, you are blasphemous, disruptive and imprisoned. Take your pick. Sami Ben Gharbia, a Tunisian political refugee living in the Netherlands since 1998, interviewed Awab Alvi.
The only way the authorities (in any country) can successfully ban a specific topic or content on related sites, is by banning the whole of the internet in that country. Otherwise, it can NEVER be done. What usually ends up happening, as in the case of the cartoon issue, the most useless, hate-filled, and irrelevant site ends up being popular (and as result gets a much larger audience) due to the ban enforced on it.
This is going to be a long campaign… and I am not talking about bypassing the ban with technology. Proxy by-pass servers and mirror sites are technological solutions, albeit essential, to a human mind problem. Unless coupled with conviction and resistance, technology can work for the other side – just ask Cisco. But there is some good news:
…and while repressive regimes are particularly effective in building substantial Internet filtering systems and at creating an atmosphere of fear in which people censor themselves, there are amazing individuals who are making a difference. In the asymmetrical battle — individual vs. State — taking place between two parties with vastly different resources, a few freedom-loving people have been taking on the sophisticated state censorship machine, armed with nothing but their passion and creativity.
Adriana,
I’m glad you picked this up. I’ve been following this disgraceful case for a bit. I am going to do something. I’m going to do that because i’m trying to get my blog up and am struggling with editing Blogger code. I hate other people’s code.
I really have no idea why people who claim to believe in a divine, omniscient being of infinite power who can put somebody through eternal torment (and eternity is quite long, especially towards the end) feel the need to apply temporal punishments for offending their god(s).
My understanding is that Kareem was big on women’s rights (and God knows they need them in Egypt). Quite how his dad (who appears to be a real piece of work) equates that with “monkey’s rights” is beyond me.
“I really have no idea why people … feel the need to apply temporal punishments for offending their god(s).”
Because God told them to, of course! Easy!
You can find the definition and required punishment for this the crime in section o8.1 and o8.7 of Reliance of the Traveller. But you can probably guess what it is anyway. Islam takes a far more active view of the duty to “prevent vice and promote virtue” than do Westerners.
Calling unbelievers (esp. Jews, but also Christians) apes, monkeys, and pigs is quite common in Islamic rhetoric. The origins of the phrase are to do with those bits in the Koran where God turned Jews into apes and pigs for working on the Sabbath, but I think in this case it’s a simple bestial metaphor – Westerners are debauched and inclined to animal lusts. The rights Westerners want to claim are those that allow/encourage such behaviour.
Quite what would happen to any Westerner who described Muslims and their beliefs in such a fashion, I leave to your imagination…
Pa,
Are you being ironic or something? If us Westerners are so given to bestial lusts how come we manage to cope with scantily-clad women all around us and the vast majority of the time we don’t rape them? Unlike, in Islamic states where “animal lusts” are controlled not by reason and morality but by burkhas and beatings. And sometimes much worse. And in some cases, these animal lusts aren’t controlled at all. Muhammed’s “take whatever your right hand can hold” antics being a case in point.
Pa is clearly just describing what a great many mainstream Islamic thinkers really think. They really don’t “do” dissent.
We got past the whole “burn the heretic” thing, they haven’t.
“Know the enemy, and know yourself”
Sun Tzu, The Art of War.
Yes, I was just explaining what the guy meant, not agreeing with it. Granted, we don’t burn heretics any more; but we do have our own taboos still, which can be useful for understanding.
Since this post is somewhat religiously oriented, I will respond in that vein.
There is in the gospels a story told that Jesus asked his followers, “Who among you, if your son asked you for bread, would hand him a stone? If he asked for water, would hand him an asp?”
The point, of course, repeated many times in different ways, is that if flawed humans can be kind and solicitous to their offspring, how much more can men have faith that God will sustain them in times of need.
I am not interested in an argument as to whether this belief is correct, or logical, or reasonable. I point it out for this purpose—
Children, as they grow and mature, also hunger for the truth about the world around them, facts they can use to order their lives, and the wisdom to live successfully, with some semblence of happiness and security, meaning and fulfillment.
I would submit, however, that this father, and many too many like him, and not just in the community of Islam, have responded to this request for sustenance by handing their child a stone.
Even more, the child thirsts for that which is good and righteous, values that sustain and nourish, upon which a life of decency and worth may be built, and the family that will carry on his name and line will be supported.
It truly pains me to see that so many youth have been given an asp, which they have clutched to their bosom, with the inevitable result. Asps will be asps, after all.
There is another famous warning in the gospel, having to do with the fate of he who leads a child astray.
Whether one believes in the afterlife or not, inculcating a suicidally destructive theory of life into one’s own progeny is its own punishment.
Just as the servants of the emperor had to endure the unendurable, and the volk of the thousand year reich woke to find only debris and death all around them; just as the children of marx are still stumbling through their archives, trying to understand the deaths of millions, so too will the children of islam, on some future day, look at each other and wonder…
“When their minds cried out for knowledge, and their hearts for value, how could we hand them ignorance, and death?”