Internet Censorship's First Death Sentence?

mrogers writes "A journalism student in Afghanistan has been sentenced to death by a Sharia court for downloading and sharing a report criticizing the treatment of women in some Islamic countries. The student was accused of blasphemy and tried without representation. According to Reporters Without Borders, sixty people are currently in jail worldwide for criticizing governments online, fifty of them in China, but this may be the first time someone has been sentenced to death for using the internet. Internet censorship is on the rise worldwide, according to The OpenNet Initiative."

Comments

1st censorship death sentence

[mwasham]

But not the first death sentence due to the idiocy of sharia law.

Re:1st censorship death sentence

[Clay Pigeon -TPF-VS-]

That is why democracy fails. It is literally two wolves and one lamb voting on what is for dinner. A constitutional republic is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote*.

*paraphrasing ben franklin

Re:1st censorship death sentence

[mwasham]

Unfortunately, if you give a bunch of religous zealots democracy they will vote to stone you to death and revert to a dictatorship.

Re:1st censorship death sentence

[snl2587]

Which is why democracy can't just suddenly be implemented. The people have to want it, leaders included (or, at least, the majority of them). The U.S. democracy (or, I should say, democratic republic) only got started because the people at the time didn't want a monarchy or the like and would not have immediately voted to change it back (not like votes matter all that much as it is, they only put people in power to "represent" you).

In short, this just helps to prove that the neo-con idealogical goal of converting the world to democracy is misguided at best.

Re:1st censorship death sentence

[mwasham]

To compare the US with countries that utilize Sharia law shows your ignorance.

Re:1st censorship death sentence

[NeutronCowboy]

Hah. Pure idiocy. If the nation that is voting is that fractured, it has no business being a nation. The underlying assumption of democracy is that the vote is done by a general public that has some common interest, some common denominator (even if it the lowest).

Besides, your analogy is completely misleading. What if it's 2 lambs and a wolf voting on what's for dinner? You're implying that the minority has an inherent right to protect itself via violence from the outcome of a vote. Do you really want to open the door to wahabists buying guns and contesting votes via shootouts because in America, they're the lamb in the minority? Didn't think so.

Re:1st censorship death sentence

[c6gunner]

You're implying that the minority has an inherent right to protect itself via violence from the outcome of a vote.

That's absolutely correct. I don't much care if the whole nation votes unanimously to kill me, I'm still going to defend myself until I run out of ammo.

Re:1st censorship death sentence

[nutshell42]

That is why democracy fails. It is literally two wolves and one lamb voting on what is for dinner. A constitutional republic is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote*.

Completely ignoring the fact that wolves are likely to be well armed too and much better trained and more ready to use violence.

"Between the weak and the strong one it is the freedom which oppresses and the law that liberates" --Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

Our rights are based on the insight that everyone's in some kind of minority and that it's important to protect the rights of everyone instead of just the will of the majority.

In other words: We should have written the constitution and the law books as the US did in Japan after WWII, with some minor input by the Afghanis, to prevent stuff like this from happening. Yes, that would have alienated a lot of them but they don't love us now either. And if we have to go through an insurgency that will probably last for another decade we should at least make sure that we do it for a new order that's actually worth fighting for, not for a slight variation of the old one that's almost as oppressive but a tad less ready to export terrorism.

Another problem's of course that too many people in the West are ready to throw out 200 years of lessons learned the hard way to protect themselves against terrorism, the 456th leading cause of death in the western world.

Re:1st censorship death sentence

[The Breeze]

With respect,in response your statement that democracy can't suddenly be implemented, I would submit that General Douglas MacArthur and postwar Japan would prove your argument to be false.

A more correct argument would be that "Democracy can't just suddenly be implemented without extreme skill and a firm hand in control during the transition."

Alas, extreme skill - or, indeed, skill of any sort - seems to be lacking in our "nation-building" efforts of late.

Re:1st censorship death sentence

[Adambomb]

The issue here is a group maintaining its power, that just happens to be making use of the local religion to do it. Sharia law is NOT uniform in all islamic countries, or even amongst different sects in the same nation in some cases. The clergy in afghanistan ARE NOT the ones who are considered the be all end all for interpretation of sharia law.

To polarize this by religion is ridiculous when its a governing body making the judgement to begin with. Yes, they are the clergy in afghanistan, but they're just humans maintaining their positions of power not widely accepted views from the entire world of islam. If I were to use the same tactic in reverse, i'd be spouting things like
"What part of "Thou shall not kill" is so hard to understand?" like the onion, or perhaps suggesting one contemplate when it was that executing the mentally challenged was finally banned in texas....part of the proverbial bible belt yes?

Course its always a lot easier to spout a knee jerk response and feel righteous about it. I suppose thats why springer existed to begin with. Look at it this way, culturally a blanket statement of "blasphemy" tends to have other people look the other way when someone is sentenced to death in that country, so that is the bent the officials used to silence their critic.

In north america, we call it "witchcraft" "communism" or "terrorism" and replace death with life without parole, economic destruction, or character assassination...except for certain states of course. We also have a culture of questioning blanket statements concerning freedom of speech, and went through our own embarrassing period with Salem and such.

Granted, I prefer here to there based on this, but i've lived in this system all my life so I cannot really compare at all. The arrogant attitude that the US is somehow of a "superior class" and shouldn't be compared with other governments is just racism enhanced by jingoism in the end though.

If we want to be angry, be angry with Hamid Karzai for not demanding a pardon. He's been dealing with western diplomats long enough to know what kind of outrage this would cause, even if he isn't humanitarian enough to do so on his own. And if he somehow doesn't have the balls to step up to the clergy, then who is REALLY in power in afghanistan currently?

Re:1st censorship death sentence

[kylben]

Every Afghan shall have the right to express thoughts through speech, writing, illustrations as well as other means in accordance with provisions of this constitution. Directives related to the press, radio and television as well as publications and other mass media shall be regulated by law. They're following the same way the US is, alright. Using the loopholes that allow the government to do whatever it wants to do... well whatever it wants. In the US, the weasel clause is "without due process". In the Afghan constitution, I'm sure there's a clause about not blaspheming Allah, and so "in accordance with this Constitution" means that free speech is inviolable unless it blasphemes Allah - which is whatever the government says it is.

Re:1st censorship death sentence

[Anonymous Cowpat]

concur - people lead themselves into tyranny when they get themselves into the mindset that personal self-defence is not the single most important; fundamental; inalienable and absolute right that exists for all.

Re:1st censorship death sentence

[plover]

I agree that it took both tremendous skill and discipline to restore Germany and Japan to the world, and the success is incredible.

But there are a lot of significant differences between them and the nations following sharia law, and nobody has yet figured out how to bridge them.

In both Germany and Japan, there was a central figure of extreme authority, a small group of insiders hoping to be next in line, a larger group of thugs willing to do their bidding because they enjoy hurting people, and a large percent of the populace that was willing to believe that their crappy lot in life was the result of "population X" (fill in the X with Jews, Poles, gypsies, westerners, Chinese, blacks, Arabs, homosexuals, or whoever is a convenient target.) All forms of tyranny essentially use this same model. And defeating them is also quite well understood: destroy the head, remove the insiders, and the movement dies. But in those cases, it was the national government that was responsible for the war. They were well known, easy to identify, and easy to physically locate. The fact that our politicians were willing to sacrifice a lot of innocent civilians with our bombing campaigns made it that much easier.

But the current situation with violent Islamists is very different. First and foremost, their battle is based on religion, rather than politics. Despite the occasional memo coming from Osama bin Laden, there is no official head, no single "pope" of Islam dictating the violence -- mullahs all over the place are free to interpret the Qu'ran however they wish and issue fatwas of their own. Many are corrupt, seeking only to establish or maintain a power base for themselves, and the Westerners|Su'unis|Shi'a are easy and convenient targets for raising the ire of the populous. But being heads of religions, they have elevated themselves to being "above" questioning -- indeed, TFA is about the impending death of one such questioner. And the blanket of religion protects them all -- an attack by the U.S. on even a minor but corrupt mullah would rally much of ordinary non-violent Islam against the Americans. And each corrupt mullah has built himself up as a mini-tyrant, and is surrounded by a small group of insiders plus a wider group of thugs, making each individual sect almost as hard to clean up as a whole nation.

The historical example would suggest a strategy such as the simultaneous assassinations of all the corrupt mullahs and their circles. And that is so heinous and illegitimate as to be unthinkable, even to our current violence-prone government, not to mention impossible to coordinate. And who would decide their guilt? Who would do the investigating? Where would the trials be held? We'd essentially be using both a Gestapo AND a schutstaffel to pull it off. It would require an absolutely corrupt process, bringing new corrupt people and a new horrible set of problems into the mix.

We in the West know very little about Islam, or how to influence it. I'm sure we're trying to find ways to convince the honorable mullahs to discredit the corrupt ones, but they already have a huge base of well-deserved mistrust for us. New meddling in their business will not endear us to them, either.

MacArthur had it easy, by comparison.

Re:1st censorship death sentence

[wiredlogic]

Japan had already walked down the path toward democratization in the Meiji era. It's also worth pointing out what Japan has today is something of a sham democracy (not that the US isn't either). There are multitudes of battling special interests that work in the classical mold of Japanese clan society. The only thing that prevents them from bursting apart, Kenya-style, is their tendency to patiently wait while consensus building.

Re:1st censorship death sentence

[IgnoramusMaximus]

Hope!?

That was one of the saddest and depressing posts ever, bereft of any hope for humankind's future whatsoever!

What are the basic implications of his stance? That there shall be always majorities voting to kill minorities? That the way to go forward is a landscape of bunkers with deranged, rabid, paranoid occupants eyeing each other's "neighbours" through squinted eyes and the sights of the ever bigger guns in their formidable arsenals while looking for a slightest sign of "aggression" so that they can open up with their canons, rockets, nukes and what not on each other, "until they run out of ammo"? That the societal structure be based on the size of one's armory?

And this is hope?! Me thinks you should look under the heading of "nightmare" in the dictionary and you will find the definition much more fitting.

The sad, pathetic and wholly uninspiring assumption of that post is that humans will never be able to dis-entangle themselves from their evolutionary reptilian brain baggage and will forever remain snarling, greedy, short-sighted, delusional, unreasoning and completely despicable creatures they are now, forever clawing each other eyes out over some pathetic plastic trinkets or incomprehensible ramblings of long-dead senile imbeciles enshrined in some "holy" book.

And what is even more depressing, is that some here seem to gleefully and impatiently look towards their dream of some sort of apocalyptic shootout coming true, where the last man standing with the biggest gun and the longest dick swinging "wins".

"Hope" he says...

Re:1st censorship death sentence

[IgnoramusMaximus]

His hope springs from the fact that there are others in this world who are aware that the only way to keep tyranny at bay is to be prepared to fight it. "Si vis Pacem? Parabellum!".

Wolves at each other's throats, forever then! Would-be tyrants clawing their way to the top to replace the ones being "kept at bay" via bullet holes in their skulls by "patriots" sporting portable tactical nuclear missiles, then anti-matter, than some kind of planet-busting time-space continuum weapons, until the end of time! (or the premature end of the unfortunate planet Earth having given birth to such a hopeless flock of pathetic trogloditic morons)

Your Orwellian rant is the speech of a man who expects always to be in the majority, and expects others to protect him if he's not.

Huh? Wha? Orwellian? In minority? Protect?!! Do you have any clue what Orwell's distopia was actually about?

While your attitude may serve you in a pluralist democracy, it hinges on the existence of the men whom you despise - men who understand that vigilance is not just a necessary evil, but a way of life.

Nice try. But no cigar. These supposed vigilant "defenders" exist solely because of those of their own kind ON THE OTHER SIDE. If it weren't for macho, gonad-thinking, greedy, power-hungry, religious lunacy infested and heavily armed imbeciles elsewhere, enlightened societies would not need to tolerate their own pet zoos of macho, gonad-thinking, greedy, power-hungry, religious lunacy infested or other kinds of armed imbeciles as a counter-measure to unleash on the other idiots if needed.

And that is the fact so very uncomfortable to all these would-be "defenders" of our "freedoms" (who usually congregate in some sort of new True-blue Patriotic Neighbourhood, Homeland or Motherland Security organizations, usually complete with demands for everyone else to "temporarily" relinquishing their freedoms so that they could be "vigilanty" defended).

All of this shit is pure base animal "logic". The stuff that fills reptile brains. Kill or be killed! Eat or be eaten! Rat-think. Far below what the so-called "technologically advanced" and "civilized" society should strive for. The very fact that so many here cannot seem to raise above the level of thought processes of a snake, is a sad testimony indeed as to how far humanity is from any sort of hopeful future.

They DO mean keeping informed of the world around you, being ready to defend yourself and others, and seeking to cultivate similar attitudes in those around you.

Indeed! Informed out of the pages of Der-Sturmer, being ready do defend yourself from the taxman (or the mailman) and to cultivate similar attitudes in those around in your Montana "militia", while on patrol for them "illigul immigrunts", around the still.

It can be as simple as starting a neighbourhood watch, or as complex as organizing an armed neighbourhood militia to defend your streets, as some of your fellow citizens had to do recently in Louisiana.

The moment the citizens if my country need an "armed militia" "defending the streets", the country would be done for. There indeed would not need to be a point to a such a country anymore as it would have by then devolved to an anarchy of roaming bands of self-appointed thuggish banditry calling themselves "militias" and final rule by the barrel of a gun. Usually at first by the upper-class trigger happy "militiamen" "defending" their God-given hoards of stuff against them "unwashed thieving lazies", only, given enough time, to be followed by a swift reversal when the "unwashed ones" figure out that they have 10:1 numerical advantage.

Ask yourself, how well could you provide for your family tomorrow if a New Orleans scale disaster hit your city?

There is a world of a difference between living in a c

Re:Thank god the USA invaded that country

[Kandenshi]

I to am gratified to know that the billions of dollars borrowed, and that will have be repaid by my children, were so well spent. Your children will be paying the interest on that loan. It's unlikely they'll be able to afford to pay the whole thing right off.
Now your grandchildren... MAYBE they might pay it off.

Re:nice religion ya got there, guys

[Dun Malg]

thank god no-one was ever killed on behalf of christianity... Who said Christianity doesn't suck too? You really think that's a fucking defense of the bullshit that is Sharia?

Still disturbing as fuck

[foreverdisillusioned]

The fact that they made this "original" decision at all shows what kind of government we've installed/allowed to rise to power in Afghanistan.

Re:Still disturbing as fuck

[JustASlashDotGuy]

The fact that they made this "original" decision at all shows what kind of government we've installed/allowed to rise to power in Afghanistan. I am torn. Half of me agrees with you, while the other half is in conflict. As sad as it is, this government is much better than what they had before. In the past, the Taliban would have just killed you and then gone about their day. There would no time for an appeal by the international community nor local population.

The government isn't the problem, it's the politicians that are currently making up the government. The framework is in place for the elected officials to lose their standing as soon as the next election comes up. It would not necessarily be a bad thing in my eyes for an entirely new senate to be elected. One side may claim its a failure of the government 'we set up', however I would see it as a beneficial option given to the citizens as a result of the government 'we set up'.

We didn't select their leaders. They selected their own leaders. The US cannot be blamed because the citizens didn't choose wisely nor know how their elected representatives would act. Picking candidates wisely comes with time and experience; many of us in the US still haven't learned how to look past the flashy smear commercials during our election time.

They are still a very young democracy with new ideals being forced upon them. There will be many more examples of this in the future. When/If Iraq's democracy takes hold, I guarantee you will see the same stories from there as well. It's up to all of us an in international community to tactfully and politically inform them that they are being idiots when they do something as idiotic as this.

Re:Thank god the USA invaded that country

[FlatEric521]

I suppose this helps prove that you cannot force people to change their beliefs regardless of the political system they operate under. Sure, the US invaded and changed the government in Afghanistan, but you can't change the religious beliefs of the the people living there. For many of the followers of Islam in the Middle East, things like blasphemy are punishable by death. Those beliefs are reflected in how government responded, since even "democratically" elected leaders hold the same beliefs.

What I consider the bigger concern in this article is that the separation of Church and State as it is understood in the US is not being practiced in this newly started democracy. Here we have an instance where a religion calls for death to blasphemers. The government, showing that it is clearly backing a specific religion, was going along with it. That was what the Taliban represented in the first place. They ruled the country according to what they understood their religion dictated. The US may have changed the way that people achieve power in the country, but it seems that elements of the Taliban are still alive and well in this non-Taliban government.

Re:nice religion ya got there, guys

[clarkkent09]

Your religion sucks too (assuming you are a Christian). Living under Islamic law is not so different from living under Christian law (see most of European history from 5th to about 15th century). In Bible "god" explicitly demands killing people for worshiping other gods and other silly things like adultery and working on Sabbath.

The only reason we don't have a similar situation to Afghanistan in the West today is that we (including those calling themselves "Christian") ignore most of what Bible says and choose not to live according to its rules. If we didn't, we would still have daily stoning sessions for blasphemy, adultery, homosexuality etc

We had a choice. We could have stopped it.

[foreverdisillusioned]

We didn't select their leaders. They selected their own leaders. The US cannot be blamed because the citizens didn't choose wisely nor know how their elected representatives would act.

That didn't stop us from setting policies in Iraq unilaterally, like banning anyone who was ever a member of the Baath party from holding any position in the new government. We installed the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ruled for over a year in Iraq. After that, a non-elected interim government ruled for (about) another year. I don't know offhand how that compares to our efforts in Afghanistan, but my point is this: we didn't relinquish control of Iraq until we were sure that relatively secular, pro-western leaders were going to take over.

And we damn sure should have done the same thing in Afghanistan, especially if we cared about the potential for them to become future terrorist producers/trainers/harborers.

Re:Thank god the USA invaded that country

[Original Replica]

It's quite possible to be Islamic and not follow Sharia

Now that really depends on which Muslims you ask. Unfortunately the Muslims who feel that proper Islam requires Sharia Law are also much more prone to enforcing their religious views with physical force. They may even be in the minority in many places, but they are the vocal, violent minority. So yes, "it's possible to be Jewish and not follow all 613 laws in the Torah" but it is also possible to do so in Israel without being beaten, maimed, or executed.

Re:nice religion ya got there, guys

[Howitzer86]

Get rid of it? How? Are you going to stick a gun to my head and tell me what to believe and what not to believe?

Would you... dare I say... sentence me to death for criticizing an Atheist government?

Religion isn't the problem, blowing shit out of proportion is. Atheists can be just as bad as Christians or Muslims or Scientologists, they are after all - people.