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In Iran, Blogging May Be Punishable By Death
An anonymous reader writes "In Iran, crimes such as apostasy (leaving a religion, in this case Islam) and armed robbery are already punishable by death, but a new bill in Iran aims to add to the list 'establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy,' effectively giving the government a free hand in silencing bloggers. The internet is widely used in Iran, despite its previous attempts at censorship. Will this change as the censorship grows more rampant?"
Iran = Let us do what we want and you do what we say or the US will come get you.
US = Let us do what we want and you do what we say or the terrorists will come get you.
Politics of fear: it works. Sadly.
The problem you may be having is with your sampling group. Unless you happen to be traveling to Iran itself, the people you are meeting are travelers themselves, and possibly of a different overall mindset than hardliners, who would be less likely to travel. (I base this on my father, an American, who stoutly refuses to travel anywhere requiring a passport, simply because it's "not America")
..simply because I've had a boyfriend, I don't think this is particularily surprising. It is a supressive theocracy. Like other theocracies it has no qualms with torturing and even killing innocent people in order to silence criticism. This is common in dictatorships religious or not. The fundamental problem is the dictatorial rule and the regime's complete lack of limits in terms of what lengths it will go to in order to protect its own survival. Soviet was the same. Zimbabwe is the same. The only difference is what excuse these regimes use to justify their crimes. In soviet it was political ideology. In Iran it is religion. In Zimbabwe it is skin colour. What they have in common is that they kill and torture people in order to make the public afraid of organising opposition, their official reasons (religion,economics,race,culture) for doing so have little to do with their actual objectives. It's all about supressing dissidents, all other reasons is smoke and mirrors trying to obscure the true nature of the regime.
Many or all of these things are already punishable by death in Iran if you do them without the internet. Go over there and start distributing literature trying to convert people from Islam to another religion, and you've got a potential date with the executioner.
Hence, it is not blogging that they are making punishable by death. They are simply closing a loophole that may have let yo escape punishment by using blogs instead of, say, print or radio.
If we are going to be upset, we should be upset at apostasy being a capital crime at all, not that they have noticed that blogs can be used for apostasy and are closing that loophole.
OK i guess this will be modded as flamebait, but perhaps it's US's responsibility to just stop messing with other countries altogether, no breaking, no fixing, just leaving them alone.
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.