Slashdot Mirror
Egypt Arrests More Bloggers
2think writes "The BBC is reporting that after bloggers highlighted recent public sexual harassment within view of Egyptian police, the government of Egypt has been arresting bloggers." From the article: "The most recently detained blogger, Abdel Kareem Nabil, was detained in Alexandria on 6 November and was charged with disrupting public order, inciting religious hatred and defaming the president. Amnesty International says Mr Amer appeared to have been detained for expressing critical views about Islam and Egypt's al-Azhar religious authorities."
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
My blog
It should be no surprise that countries with little or no protection of free speech are arresting people for their comments online. Many bloggers use their real names (or make it easy for police to trace them. The people who would be arrested for public dissent should not be surprised if they are arrested for dissent online ... I would hope that many of these people relish the thought of being arrested for blogging, as it sometimes creates worldwide recognition to their cause or their plight.
... it's not like governments are quick to catch up with technical trends.
It certainly seems that blogger arrests are on the rise, such as the recent Greek blogger arrested for content he didn't write, and the constant string of arrested bloggers and other internet users in China (such as documentary filmmaker Hao Wu). This is probably an indication that Governments are just now learning about the influence commanded by a popular blogger rather than a change in policies around the globe
Huh? Don't mind me, I'm just the new guy.
but does it run Linux?
Nooooooo!!!! Slashdot censoring Scuttlemonkey.
... Wait. Is that a good thing? ;)
...that everybody had the mustached man asking them to meet them in a dark alley...
Read Subject
Sometimes when this sort of story pops up, I wonder whether our kneejerk reaction to defend the blogger is a combination of our values of Freedom of Speech and antipathy towards Islam. That the blogger was anti-Islam seems to be totally irrelevant since Egypt is a secular state (much like Turkey). Are the reporters using Western anti-Islamic sentiment to shape and color our views regarding this particular event? When I see an article demanding that I declaim a country's police force, I have to wonder what sort of forces are at work behind the propaganda.
A quick check of the nickname Ayyoub shows that the original Tareq Ayyoub was a reporter at al Jazeera who was killed by American missiles when the station was struck during the invasion of Baghdad. It's a short jump to see that someone fanning anti-American sentiment would take the same name for the purpose of rabble rousing. Who stands to gain the most from such anti-Westernism in the West? The socialist party. A quick check shows that this Ayyoub blogger is a radical socialist. How's that for a coincidence?
Anyway, if you defend this guy, you're being played like a fiddle by the very forces that seek to destroy Western culture. Happy defending, Free Speechnauts!
Egypt is one of those countries which has a horrible human rights records that you rarely hear about in the United States because they have been allies with our government. In other words, our media and government normally look the other way at the human rights abuses in Egypt. You can listen to a very informative interview here about an attorney in the United States who has been imprisoned for helping a prisoner to communicate with political allies in Egypt.
If blogging, like voting, could actually change anything, it would be illegal.
Wait for it, folks...
Egypt shouldn't be arresting bloggers. They should be arresting furries.
...fuck Islam and Egypt's al-Azhar religious authorities.
My question is why do they arrest them? Don't they know that the more the people are suppressed the more they rebel?
This clearly demonstrates the fact that islamists hate the free flow of ideas and, much like our christians, hate the fact that somewhere, someone is saying something which doesn't fit into their sky ghost cosmology.
It's savages like them and like the christian right who are going to plunge the world into the next dark age (we've already got the tools for an inquisistion set up in gitmo, syria and egypt).
"...and was charged with disrupting public order, inciting religious hatred and defaming the president."
All we need now is a set of 8 X 10 glossies, some turkey stuffing and a gang of father-rapers.
Face it - if a pair of handcuffs have your name on them, you're going downtown and the charges only have to stick for as long as it takes to throw you in the back of the paddy wagon. Once they find out how this all works, they'll put this guy, or someone like him, on their payroll with those otherwise shady tactics working for their own purposes.
Also top-posters please.
living here..it's quite common to see Al-Azhar ridiculed, mostly due to the current status of the religious institution in being submissive to governmental pressure. The government is also ridiculed all the time, including in major papers/media. It's just certain people you can't talk about, like the big man at the top. Like any dictatorship, a line is drawn between that which is pretended to be freedom and that which cannot be tolerated by those who engineer the whole thing.
As for Islam: I don't see why he had to bring religion into this. Rape is punishable by death in Islam, and the religion enjoys extreme loyalty from the people even though they may not be religious in practice. I would agree with detaining this man for his own safety.
Some of the founders didn't want a bill of rights. They were completely fine with the rights idea, they were just afraid that people would decide it was an exhaustive list or get the idea that the government grants rights.
So, to summarize your argument,
This guy:
Has a screenname that happens to also be part of the name of someone America killed, as confirmed by "a quick check"
Is a socialist, as confirmed by "a quick check"
Is being persecuted for criticizing the "secular state" of Egypt
ergo, he's part of some propaganda machine seeking to destroy Western culture on behalf of a socialist agenda.
Nevermind the fact that he's being detained without any given reason. Nevermind that Al-Azhar is very much not a secular institution.
Clearly, free speech has gone too far. We wouldn't want to engage the wrath of those big bad socialists by standing up for this rabble rouser!
...to 1984
This is not america? Well I object to that bias! That cannot be right!
Here is the type of incident they have been blogging about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2SGamUeMec
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
Egypt is one the "moderate" arab countries, always eager to support USA in all of their cowboy adventures in the middle east. In return of that, they don't get "democratized" a la Iraq. Oh, the hipocrisy!!
I don't have a sig.
And for far less..
Let's think about that:
http://home.comcast.net/~plutarch/islamcult.html
That muslims are scums.
I'm a strong supporter of rights to free speech, and I was really reading the thread in preparation of making a comment on how this incident in Egypt is an excellent example of how "hate speech" (in the example, the allegation of 'inciting religious hatred') can be used to arbitrarily curtail speech. This could easily happen in the U.S. in Europe; anyone who "rocks the boat" or causes controversy or offends someone else could find themselves slapped with a 'hate speech' violation.
However, with that said, I don't think it's right or proper to restrict what private organizations, compromised of individuals by their own free association (specifically, not unions or other groups into which membership is mandatory for some people), do within their own organization. If you say something critical of an organization you're in, and they decide to censure you / throw you out, that's their business and yours. Unless there's some contract between them and you, so that it would become a contract-law dispute, I don't see that there's a public interest in regulating that. (Although I could see carving out exceptions for whistle-blowers, but even then I'm not convinced, since that could be done anonymously: if you do it publicly so as to take credit, although you shouldn't be punished, I'm not sure you should necessarily be shielded from the company letting you go, either.)
So if some blogger revealed privileged information in his blog, and as a result his party tossed him out, that's not a free speech issue. The government didn't come down on him -- if it had, then I'd have a problem with it. There is a right to association which is important, in addition to the right to free speech: if you say that groups cannot control their own membership, then you cheapen and chip away at the right to association, by making membership a meaningless concept. People have a right to associate -- and disassociate themselves -- with and from whomever they choose, for whatever reasons they choose, unless there is a very compelling public interest in regulating it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
What's going on here? Not a single comment blaming this on the Iraq war? Nobody trying to tell us that the US is a much worse police state? Wow. Must be an off-day for the slashdot trolls.
My point is that Egypt, like many other countries "The West" criticizes, has much bigger issues to deal with than freedom of speech.
I agree with all your points, right up until you said this. I don't think that any of the other issues that you mentioned, are necessarily more important than freedom of speech. If anything, freedom of speech is their biggest issue, and in order to secure that, they'd need to fix the rest of their government: because a corrupt government generally isn't conducive to a free society (because corrupt governments generally hate when people point out how corrupt they are). Corruption and lack of freedom go hand-in-hand.
Conversely, a major step towards fixing all those other problems you mentioned, would be more government transparency, and a freer civil society. Cleanup and restoration of a free society also go together.
They're not separate issues. Freedom of speech shouldn't be minimized as an issue, because other parts of the government are equally fucked.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I wonder if many Protestant Europeans tried to help the Catholics in Catholic countries who spoke out publicly about the Catholic Church's Inquisition.
The media was much more direct and local (mostly word of mouth, except the church sermons and monarch's decrees), the population smaller, the expectations of free expression and even justice much lower.
But people were still people. I wonder how much more support people in places like Egypt get from freer people outside, proportionately, than in similar situations elsewhere in the past.
If there are records of parallel situations in different times/places, I'd like to know how they turned out.
--
make install -not war
You do realize that bloggers can be arrested for "inciting religious hatred" in any number of so-called western democracies, right?
The Egyptian government was embarrassed, but its response was to completely deny the incident and censor its press from reporting it. Hence, the outrage came out in the blogs. Note that this happened almost 4 weeks ago on Oct 24 and it's just NOW starting to come out. The government has also taken the stance that the bloggers are trying to "humiliate" Egypt and Islam by talking about the incidence and that's why they are persecuted. Please read these articles for more information
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/15/world/africa/15c airo.html
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=56301& SelectRegion=Middle_East
http://www.sandmonkey.org/2006/10/30/the-eid-sexua l-harassment-incident/
"Rape is punishable by death in Islam"
And yet recently in Pakistan (a strongly Islamic nation), the government ordered a sentence of rape (by multiple rapists) to be carried out against a woman. Last time I knew, this group of men had not been sentenced to death.
Where were you when the voynix came?
That the blogger was anti-Islam seems to be totally irrelevant since Egypt is a secular state ...
I agree about anti-Islamic sentiment fueling a knee jerk reaction but didn't Egypt pass an amendment to its constitution in 1980 that prohibits any law that contravenes the prevailing principles of Islamic Law
Doesn't sound too secular to me. But then again I suppose you could say the same thing about a lot of countries. UK law prohibits Catholics from being monarchs, for example.
"civilized peoples around the world that don't value free speech- and even see such freedoms as a danger to civilization itself."
Then we have to wonder if such fascists (who deny such a basic human right) can even be called civilized.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I'm now convinced that America has no friends in the middle east- only trading partners controlled by the enemy of us all, the petroleum corporations.
Of course America has no "friends" in the Middle East, at least not unless you count Israel. But why should we? I don't mean this in terms of 'america is evil, blah blah blah,' but in terms of what, exactly, do Americans and most people in the Middle East (Muslims in particular) have in common, in terms of political philosophy? Precious little, at least from where I'm sitting.
A secular government, where religious freedom is taken for granted, and the government draws its power and legitimacy from the consent of the governed, and not from a mandate from God, is one of the cornerstones of Western society. Every schoolchild in the U.S. can (or at least, should) be able to tell you that the separation of Church and State is one of the keys to our whole system.
If you went to most places in the Middle East and asked average people about their thoughts on religious freedom, I'm not sure that you would find wide support for governments that didn't base themselves on religion. In the same way that a secular government is just assumed in the West, I think in the Mideast (excepting Israel, which is for all intents and purposes Western), an asecular quasi-theocracy would just as easily be assumed. A government that didn't recognize and allow for some form of Sharia law or have an Islamic-derived constitution would be a non-starter in many places.
Expecting these two philosophies to coexist as "friends" is ridiculous. They're not compatible, nor reconcilable: they begin from radically different assumptions about the function and place of religion and government. Barring a few million Muslim people waking up one day and deciding that, yes, religion should definitely take a back-seat to government, the U.S. will never have any "friends" in the Muslim world: it cannot. At most, the East and West ought to be able to tolerate and trade peaceably with each other, agreeing to disagree in public while probably scorning the other afterwards in private, and hopefully finding common ground on particular issues of mutual geopolitical advantage.
But expecting the U.S. to ever have a relationship, as a nation, with Jordan or Saudi Arabia, as it does with Great Britain or Israel is silly. It's not going to happen: Western nations are just much closer to each other on a host of fundamental political and philosophical issues.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
You've clearly got the moronic trolling quota all tied up.
You make a lot of assumptions about what I do and don't know, and what actions I will and won't take.
News Flash: projecting your own foot-dragging apathy on the rest of the world isn't very productive.
This is not a slam against any religion in particular. ALL of them have periods were being raped is a crime punishable by death. Just that fortunally most of them have been reduced to curiousty with their freaks locked in empty churches/temples/whatever except for Islam.
in other islamic countries those bloggers would have been beheaded and their families killed.
lovely religion
There are lots of countries on this planet that pretend they have adopted Democracy and western values, but their internal affairs prove they haven't.
The one thing that holds those countries back is religion. Religion is a prison in those countries: it does not let you think on your own.
The real battle is not to fight for free speech, but to fight religions...
Link
Apparently, according to one of the people being interviewed, there is very high unemployment amongst young men in Egypt at the moment. This leads them to gather in large groups with nothing to do. Also, because sex before marriage is forbidden under Islamic law, and none of them can afford to pay dowries (being unemployed) they ain't gettin any !
None of this excuses the behaviour, but mobs of young horny men behave much the same way the world over.
I wish I could link to some audio, but the BBC World Service site is not search friendly (at least when searching for content of audio).
Aah ha - found a similar news story in text here.
The Embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt
3521 International Ct. NW
Washington DC 20008
Phone (202) 895 5400
Fax (202) 244 5131
Email: embassy@egyptembdc.org
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Of course fighting religions worked so well for Stalin...
religions should be fought not by the sword, but by education and science...
In order to have a stable nation, it is necessary to have either freedom of speech or a non-democratic government.
Free speech without the right not to be arbitrarilly detained or tortured is only the right to scream.