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Afghan Student Gets 20 Years For Blasphemy
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "Despite nationwide public support for his initial death sentence, a three-judge appeals court has reduced the sentence of Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh to 20 years in prison. Kambakhsh was charged with circulating an article on women's rights that he found online. From the article: 'Family members have said Kambakhsh was beaten and threatened with death until he signed a confession and that local journalists who expressed support for him were warned they would be arrested if they persisted.'"
He wasn't really charged for the blasphemy, it's because he was very critical of the government and some of their corrupt friends, and they found something useful to charge him with.
"Kambakhsh's journalist brother, Yaqoub Ibrahimi, has said he believes the blasphemy charges were a pretext and that Ibrahimi was the authorities' real target because of articles he wrote about abuses by local warlords and militias."
They beat a confession out of him
Producing most of the worlds heroin is just fine and dandy.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
It is better in the same ways that the Taliban was better than the Russians. And the Russians were better than the Germans. Should I keep going?
A) They're not forcing men and boys to grow beards
B) Girls and women are allowed to attend schools
C) They're not blowing or destroying religious icons from other religions or artifacts from 2,000 years ago
D) Roads, an electric grid and sewer systems are being (very slowly) built
E) Every person who wants to vote is allowed to
F) And most importantly, women are not being forced to wear burkhas if they don't want to
Granted this current ruling is nonsense and Kharzai knows it, but he is very weak and doesn't have the backing to overturn the verdict.
I'm not saying the current government is perfect. Far from it. But to compare this government, which is working with other countries to attempt to undo nearly 40 years of war and strife, to the Taliban is disingenuous. It will take, at a minimum, ten years to begin to change the mindset of the people, specifically the warlords and the men, to allow greater freedoms.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
This is the government my countrymen are fighting and dying for?
No thanks.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Obviously we must fight to overthrow this oppressive government that we set up!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's a generally good idea about as much as forcing blacks to sit at the back of the bus was a generally good idea. Seriously, how did that remark get marked Insightful?
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
Did you miss the part that said "Despite nationwide public support for his initial death sentence"? This isn't the Afghan government opressing it's citizens, it's the citizens asking the government to kill this man.
Which means that we are the ones saying the citizens don't have a right to determine the laws of their land. I wonder who the totalitarians are in this case.
It is really tough to consider that these flagrant transgressions still go on in todays environment.
Define "todays environment" Because this is Afghanistan we're talking about, not a developed country.
Different societies have different values. And Americans are usually guilty of ethnocentrism when they discuss the world at large.
As far as I'm concerned, legal punishment of any severity for simply challenging the beliefs of the majority is not acceptable anywhere. If that makes me ethnocentric, then so be it.
You know, a long time ago, the citizens of America in the south didn't have a problem with slavery.
Does that make it right?
Perhaps it falls under "stuff that matters".
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Well than why do I keep getting legally punished for challenging the majority's opinion that someone can somehow "own" something and that all thing's aren't everyone's?
You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle
Your statement is, as the topic, absurd.
1) You aren't challenging the majority's opinion. You're deciding that your opinion is correct and acting on it.
2) In acting on your opinion, you interfere unjustly with whomever's stuff you've decided to take.
He was accused of challenging an idea and sentenced to death for it. Yet challenging an idea confers no harm on others. Imposing ones religious beliefs and executing those who question them DOES confer harm. As does your taking of others' property.
Mostly because the rest of the world suffers at the hand of the Federal Government. Were the states to actually act and reign it in, then they might be aware of the 50 governments that make up the Union.
As a Canadian, I've been cautiously supportive of the Canadian mission in Afghanistan. Hamid Karzai has pleaded, in person, with the Canadian Parliament to keep troops in Afghanistan for as long as we can afford to, citing that a swift withdrawal by Western nations would undoubtedly result in the country being torn apart by warlords and extremists. This is a sentiment that I can agree with and support in principle.
Then I hear about these ridiculous trumped-up charges based on Islamic law. Yes, Middle-Eastern culture is fundamentally different than ours. No, we don't have a right to tell other nations how to run themselves socially.
But the question we have to ask ourselves is do we want to be in bed with a nation, irregardless of that nation's values, that oppresses its own people?
This is the kind of situation that calls for passive condemnation. If our troops are in a country to help them rebuild their society in the name of democracy, how can we reconcile that with the way the new regime oppresses its citizens? It becomes a "lesser of the evils" argument.
If this is the society we are helping to build, then perhaps we shouldn't be helping at all.
I didn't say they should. However I believe we should choose our battles, and if we choose to tell others how to behave, the same standard should be applied to us. I believe we should not kill people at all.
Again, the same should be said about the United States. Removing the Taliban from government is not going to change the fact that the majority of the population believes this man should be killed. How exactly we go about convincing millions of people not to execute people is the unknown question. We can't even do it in some countries that claim to be civilized.
Please look into the politics of the "War on Drugs".
Sadly, this argumentation is common on Slashdot when the topic isn't free speech or DRM circumvention. Oh the different standards.
Let this be a reminder that laws can be stupid and evil, and do not define right and wrong.
\u262D = \u5350
There are many things that even supposedly free societies will not allow to be discussed.
The term for that is 'taboo'. It existed in societies from the very beginning, still exist today, and considering human nature, will still exist in the future in one form or another.
As George Carlin said, you don't have rights. You have privileges. Privileges that can be revoked at any time.
Absolutely! Rights are only rights as long as they are upheld by the mighty. Occasionally, they help the not-so-powerful average guys, but usually, rights are just one manifestation of the current balance of power in a society. Just look at the rights the US grants to the content industry w.r.t. the right the US grants to grannies and 7 year-olds who commited the unpardonable "crime" of copying a bunch of mp3s. Or the rights of big business, banks etc. to get a bailout, w.r.t. the "rights" of broke homeowners to be evicted and thrown on the street.
It's really that simple, but very few people realize it because the harsh truth hurts.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Actually, its both.
The Afghan government is, in fact, oppressing some of its own citizens, including this man. That this oppression is also popular does not stop it from being government oppression. Nor does the fact that there is a widespread support for even more extreme oppression than is being committed. Indeed, government oppression is often popular (often because the government has deliberately set up the victims of that oppression to take the blame for problems in society, or because the government has conducted the oppression as a way of winning plaudits from a society that already blames those being oppressed for problems in society), and oftentimes the mob supports even more extreme measures than those the government enacts in its oppression.
There is a reason that, e.g., America's founders did not view a popularly elected government with unlimited unauthority as a suitable safeguard of liberty, and instead set up an almost totally hamstrung government and then, when that was clearly on the road to failure from lack of sufficient authority to get things done, a more powerful but still tightly restricted government.
You suggest that we, the western nations, have no right to tell Afghanistan that it cannot kill or imprison someone for raising political issues. I suggest you flip the coin and look at the other side. If Afghanistan wants the help of the west, then it must accept commonly accepted human rights as part of the package.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
That's not even difficult. Figure out what portion of your "foreign aid" is in the form of weaponry designed to kill people, and you'll have it.
Well you know what ? Some of those people actually do "get it", that it's a little crazy to kill someone because they can tell the difference between a woman and a goat.
Those people often emigrate to Canada, the U.S. or Western Europe, to live with like-minded people. Maybe they realize their homeland is too far gone to be saved.
Regardless of what we think, humanity runs its course. The best thing we can do is support those who seek change, either at home or abroad. In that same stream of consciousness, we must protect our own values, just as religious fanatics protect theirs.
You can't tell others how to life their lives, but you can stop them from ruining yours!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
He was accused of challenging an idea and sentenced to death for it. Yet challenging an idea confers no harm on others.
It does if your reality consists of the belief that blasphemy and enciting others to blasphemy will literally send them to hell. That's one reason religion is dangerous. It's not based on a rational reality. It's based on extreme beliefs that aren't supported by the best forms of truth we know (scientific fact), and it can therefore be manipulated and twisted to vilify others.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Yeah, it's amazing how it does absolutely nothing at all.
Hey, as a condition of your military alliances and free trade agreements, why don't you require foreign governments implement the bill of rights instead of the DMCA. I mean it, contact your congressman about this please.
In the meantime, I'm doing a study on US oppression, specifically on the different ways the US oppresses its own citizens compared to citizens of other countries. If you could help me get US citizenship so I can further my studies, I'd be grateful. I'm willing to suffer this oppression, since it's for the cause of science and all that, you see.
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Despite nationwide public support for his initial death sentence... local journalists who expressed support for him were warned they would be arrested if they persisted
I bet the polls and statements that show nationwide public support weren't at all influenced in the same manner that local journalists were!
Other posters are saying that the death sentence is the will of the citizens and not an act of a totalitarian government. They are naive in their doublethink.
since as everyone knows: if you spend 6 months working in a soup kitchen helping people you get 1 free murder which is of course canceled out by your good deed and for which you should not be punished. :-)
Nobody can be trusted to decide what is right and wrong for everyone. It is much better for some people to live under unjust and unethical laws than it would be for those same unjust principles to be imposed on everyone.
Every time you think "my morals should be imposed on the world because I'm right" stop and imagine how your life would be if the people you most disagree with were able to apply their principles to you.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Only if you calculate it the way most favourable to yourself.
What is most fair, if you're comparing the generosity of different groups ?
Comparing which portion of their wealth the different groups give?
Comparing how much each group gives pro person ?
Or comparing how much each group gives in total ?
Only if you do the latter does USA look good. But this is the view where a 300 people group donating $1000 is consideres more generous than a 30 person group donating $500, which is frankly absurd.
If you do it per capita, then the leader is luxembur at $500/person/year, followed by 10 other countries above $100. USA is at $25.
If you do it relative to wealth, then Norway is top with donating $10 for every $1000 in gdp (i.e 1%), USA is horribly, embarassingly low on the list, donating not 1%, not 0.5%, but less than 0.2% of GDP.
It's not much to brag about that you've donated 10 times as much as sweden -- when you're a country 50 times as large as sweden.