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

[Captain Splendid]

True, but considering the country was recently 'liberated' and democracy was 'brought' to it, it is a little weird.

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

[towsonu2003]

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

I am utterly confused. I never expected such anti-Americanism on /. You are talking about the US, right?

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

[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

[flyingsquid]

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

Actually, this case is about political censorship; it isn't about religion, or even about the journalism student at all. The student's brother is a journalist who has written pieces critical of one of Afghanistan's political factions, they haven't been able to get him, so they resorted to arresting the journalism student and trumped up some charges. This is about suppressing political dissent; there was a story about this on NPR a few days ago. It's unlikely that the student is in real danger of execution: apparently Karzai has to OK any executions. He doesn't strike me as that kind of a guy, but even assuming he was completely lacking in moral fiber, it's doubtful he would: doing so would cede power to his rivals and piss off his international allies. But I agree that Sharia is an idea whose time came and went in the Dark Ages, along with burning witches and trial by duel. When your court claims to execute God's Will, that gives it power that is difficult to check, and as seen here, that leads to abuses.

Re:1st censorship death sentence

[Mike Micelli]

Women shouldn't be allowed to read or use computers, after all they only have one purpose. What purpose is that? Not having sex with you?

Re:1st censorship death sentence

[rucs_hack]

If the nation that is voting is that fractured, it has no business being a nation

Alas if it is left alone, we get a repeat of the same situation that led to the reason we had to 'help' [koff] them in the first place.

The Taleban used to execute women for, well, pretty much anything. That's not good, but neither is it representative of the entire population.

The problem is, there are a fair few million people who are Afghans, and they'd rather not leave, what with it being their ancestral home of many tens of thousands of years. What do you think would happen if, say, Utah lost proper government for a while and became a place ruled purely by the whims of religious men with absolute power and no desire to let things change?

Do you think the normal folk in Utah would all think it was ok to leave and let the state collapse/be fenced off? Or that they might perhaps want a little help to sort things out.

Re:1st censorship death sentence

[Mr. Slippery]

The United States in not a democracy, never has been. Democracy is an insanely stupid form of government. What we have is a constitutional republic.

It's a constitutional democratic republic, which is a form of democracy.

Our puppet government in Afghanistan is also a constitutional republic, the "Islamic Republic of Afghanistan", with a constitution adopted in 2004. Instead of being in the name of "We, the people", theirs is in the name of "In the name of Allah, the Most Beneficient, the Most Merciful".

Article Thirty-Four of said constitution states:

Freedom of expression shall be inviolable. 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. Every Afghan shall have the right, according to provisions of law, to print and publish on subjects without prior submission to state authorities. Directives related to the press, radio and television as well as publications and other mass media shall be regulated by law.

So I see they're doing as good of job of following their constitution as our government is of following ours.

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

[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

[rcw-home]

What do you think would happen if, say, Utah lost proper government for a while and became a place ruled purely by the whims of religious men with absolute power and no desire to let things change?

Fifty states and you picked that one as an example? :)

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...

Opportunity knocks

[Perp Atuitie]

I guess the RIAA will be moving its headquarters to Kabul.

Nope

[BertieBaggio]

The Afghan Senate decided to go back on it's original decision

But the first story / headline is much more likely to bring in people from the RSS readers / aggregators etc. Not that internet censorship isn't a topic worth discussing; but the latest information is more useful than this misleading summary.

Sheesh.

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.

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.

EVERY religion sucks!

[mangu]

thank god no-one was ever killed on behalf of christianity...

No, let's say thank "god" no one was ever killed on behalf of religious skepticism, or agnosticism, or whatever you call it.

Any kind of blind belief, where faith never bends to reason, is evil, no matter if it's faith in Islam or Jesus Christ.

Robert Heinlein said it best, in "If This Goes On -":

"Yet you are willing to assert your own religious convictions and to use them as a touchstone to judge my conduct. So I repeat: who told you? What hill were you standing on when the lightning came down from heaven and illuminated you? Which archangel carried the message?"

"I believe that a man has an obligation to be merciful to the weak ... patient with the stupid ... generous with the poor. I think he is obliged to lay down his life for his brothers, should it be required of him. But I don't propose to prove any of these things; they are beyond proof. And I don't demand that you believe as I do."

"I believe very strongly in freedom of religion - but I think that that freedom is best expressed as freedom to keep quiet. From my point of view, a great deal of openly expressed piety is insufferable conceit."

Re:Don't tell the RIAA they can do this...

[florescent_beige]

Shariaa law?

Sharia == Smokescreen

[Ricin]

From what I read here and there (google) this is really about this guy's older brother who's also a journalist and who has written about one or more of the tribal chiefs aka warlords (and since they're our "friends" now they have moved up into all sorts of higher positions). One thing that stung was apparently his reporting how this tribal chief and others (apparently it's an old custom) enjoy capturing and abusing teenage boys. Maybe before being sold and shipped to Guantanamo, who knows.

I think, but am not sure that's in the Uruzgan province where our dear Dutch soldiers are protecting such scumbags while spreading freedom and democracy.

And there are persistent rumors that Karzai (mayor of Kabul)'s brother is opium chief number one in that lovely place. Well I reckon something has to pay for weaponry and the squanders of war and newfound power. And they can cheerfully dump the heroin into countries such as Iran. You know, to stop the terrorists there.

BTW, in Iraq they now HAVE sharia law. Officially. It's only a few pages away from the oil privatizing clauses in their new and illegal constitution brought to them by the benevolent US of A. Gays are killed. Single women (and there are MANY widows there) are targeted. The whole shebang. So they get death from above, death from starvation, death from disease, and death from their own governments militia (and the madhi). Almost makes death by M16 a mercy killing, doesn't it.

Re:Thank god the USA invaded that country

[ScrewMaster]

Now tell me how narrow-minded I am..

You're so narrowminded that you could peer through a keyhole with both eyes!

(Sorry ... I just wanted to use that line.)

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: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.

Re:This is OUR fault. WE did this.

[Vellmont]

What is WRONG with you people--you jingoists, you untiring flag-wavers, you twin-tower-tattooing rednecks, you support-the-war-or-you-aren't-a-patriot fucks?

There's a certain segment of the population that just likes things to be simple. They don't understand the world, and they don't want to. They rely on the President or Bill O'Reilly, or hell, even Susan Sarandon to tell them what's right. If the leadership tells them something simple like "we gotta get them terrorists" they'll defend that forever. Questioning that would be going down the path of trying to understand something they don't want to.

Everyone does that to SOME degree with some topic. If my mechanic started talking about how bad Chevy transmissions are compared to Ford transmissions, and how Chevy was a rotten company for making bad transmissions, my eyes would glaze over, especially if I heard all the time how great Chevy transmissions are from my friends, family, etc. Obviously I think international politics are more important than transmissions... but my point is there's a certain amount of willful disengagement with the populace.

Your message is right, but your approach is wrong. You sound like Ron Paul (in the sanest thing he's ever said) talking about Iraq at the Republican debate the other night. People, at least in the US, don't like to listen to ranting and raving people. It doesn't matter what they're saying, it's just an automatic "this guy sounds crazy, whatever he's saying is crazy".