Pakistan Seeks To Block Facebook Again

Mightee writes "Pakistan, which was in the news last year for blocking Facebook over a 'Draw Mohammad Day' competition, is seeking to ban the social network again due to the second round of the same competition, reports Pakistan Today. Justice Sheikh Azmat Saeed, presiding over the Lahore High Court, ordered the Ministry of Information and Technology to block access to Facebook nationwide on the charge of 'spreading religious hatred on the Internet.' The court also directed the ministry to police the Internet and block all other websites that were found guilty of the same charge, but it spared search engines like Google (which it is targeting for other reasons)."

Comments

Oh just block pakistan already

[sqldr]

Seriously. If their government don't want to use the internet, then they can fuck off.

Re:Oh just block pakistan already

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, thanks for shitting all over the people in Pakistan fighting and dying for liberty.

Re:Oh just block pakistan already

[Anonymous Coward]

Its another mechanism to control the social uprising and it wont last long....hopefully!

But then we might be deprived of all those great posts about how women shouldn't be allowed to learn to read. And what would the world be without their shitty "God is great! Now check out these pics of me beheading someone for not wearing a beard!" blogs?

Interestingly, Karachi University has 75% female population and so that many other universities and schools across. Although there are problems abound, but talk about 'blowing' things out of proportion..the sick taliban mentality does not respect any boundary, religious or political or even sanity.....

- A Pakistani national, born in Nigeria, raised up in Saudi Arabia and lived in Germany! BooHoo!

Hurting feelings?

[acidradio]

Is that REALLY the ruling? Seriously? I'm sorry but Pakistan, for being a nation that owns and operates nuclear weapons, needs some tougher skin.

Re:Hurting feelings?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

My understanding is that the rule is "Having enough nukes means never having to say you're sorry."

Don't over think religion.

[Dutchmaan]

Now I'm not a muslim but, it seems to me the whole basis for not depicting Mohammed is probably in the same vein as christian tenet of not worshipping "carved" images (likely of Christ), which serve as nothing more than a focus to keep people on the message rather than the man that gave it. Granted this is my own interpretation, but it seems people just can't help but use one sin to fight another sin, which in itself is an oxymoron. Sometimes I think it would haven been easier to just say "hey guys!! Be good to each other and make each other happy" instead of a bunch of "laws" for religious lawyers to pour over so that they can show their entrance exam was passed to get into heaven.

Re:Don't over think religion.

[MightyMartian]

You do realize the name of the logical fallacy you're invoking, right?

Re:Don't over think religion.

[MightyMartian]

I'm married to a practicing Catholic, and she doesn't look upon the veneration of Mary or the Saints as treating that veneration as the same as if it was a god. In fact, the whole notion of veneration makes it rather clear that veneration is not the same as worship.

Of course, I think the whole lot, Protestants and Catholics and Orthodox alike, are full of crap, but that's an entirely separate discussion.

Re:Don't over think religion.

[Mashiki]

It's one of those odd things. And it's actually covered at least in the various writings that you should treat your neighbor as yourself and all that. Remember that Christianity and Judaism(much like in other world religions) have both had reformations. And in those cases, during the reformations there was a lot of infighting, doctrinal wars, and all that. With and without blood being shed, and in the end. You had your hangers on to the old ways, you had your splits, and you had those that said 'screw this' and ignored all the stuff that didn't make sense in the modern day. But still like the core message in the book(s).

So moving on, for the majority of Christians, if you do something like oh...lets go with the old cross in a container of piss. Most will say that it's distasteful. Some will mock it, you'll get the occasional nut that will attack it.

For Muslims, an image you'll see riots around the world. You mock or use the Muhammed or anything like that in that context you'll see riots, fatwa's, cries of religious leaders calling for blood. Suicide bombings, and so on.

But just remember up until recently and recent being about the last 70ish years, depicting Muhammed, and using his name and all the rest was just fine, though there was some provisions. They were still using him on postcards in Persia in the 1920's. It wasn't until they were caught up with the whole blow back with Amin Al Husseini and his clusterfuck with the Ottomans and using Islam beside Nazism that it became a verboten topic.

Re:Don't over think religion.

[MightyMartian]

True by the invoker's own definition, and not by the wider one. It's a fallacy, as all but a pretty small number of Protestants still claim Catholicism and Orthodoxy are not Christian churches, and more to the point the members of those churches certainly self-identify as Christians and on a pure numbers game they have as good a claim as any to considering themselves Christians.

And considering that the older traditions do not advocate Sola Scriptura or insist that only the Bible can be a source of revelation, it strikes me that the Protestants are the ones down on this point.

Long and short, it's the No True Scotsman fallacy.

Re:Don't over think religion.

[Dutchmaan]

The Bible has been translated (from various ancient texts) and interpreted and rewritten in ways that explain things as how they were interpreted. This is why you have so many different factions in modern theology. Everyone puts their own personal spin on the translations. Personally I love hearing about what certain passage *might* mean based on etymology. Certain passages make much MUCH more sense to me after hearing various interpretations. So to say no true Christian would "willfully disobey parts of the Bible" I take with a rather large block of salt, because the people who translated and interpreted those scripts were men themselves and subject to as much error and ideology as any other man, which in my opinion, makes the modern Bible a work of man, who's message may be divine, but needs to be searched for, not blindly followed.

Hatred for the new interface too?

[macwhizkid]

Ironic given the level of unrest in the USA today... about the new FB interface, that is.

"People in most countries use Facebook to protest their government. People in the USA use Facebook to protest Facebook."

Justice Sheikh Azmat Saeed

[ZombieBraintrust]

I think we do a diservice to Pakastan by pretending a country wants to block Facebook. Let pile are ridicule on Justice Sheikh Azmat Saeed the judge who is promoting this. By saying Pakastan want this we are letting him off the hook.

Re:Justice Sheikh Azmat Saeed

[MightyMartian]

I think we do disservice to Pakistan by pretending it's a country. This is a place with at least two parallel governments, one civilian, one covert, and it's impossible to say who actually runs the place. This is a place that has tribal groups who fell more loyalty to the contents of the nearest outhouse than they do to other tribal groups or to the nation state as a whole.

Can't blame them.....

[genner]

I don't like the new layout either.

Re:Translation

[Goaway]

Generally, none of the people participating in any "draw Mohammed day" are forbidden from doing so. Thus, they are not actually doing anything to promote any kind of freedom.

What they are doing is acting like brats and angering a lot of people. That is not a productive way to spread your views, it will just cause people to backlash.

Re:Translation

[MightyMartian]

If your faith is so brittle that some non-believer mocking it causes you to go into a frenzy, then I posit that you are little better than the people you're angry at.

It was a pathetic infantile set of responses to a pathetic infantile set of inflammatory acts. Both sides are equally pathetic and stupid. But when push comes to shove, I'll have to throw in my lot with the pathetic infants drawing nasty pictures over those demanding such actions be banned, because, well, the latter are well and truly enemies of liberty.

Stupidty knows no bounds

[xenobyte]

People have been drawing pictures of Mohammad throughout the ages but for some (stupid and illogical) reason it was a page of cartoons in the danish newspaper Jyllandsposten that really got them worked up.

Now, Denmark is a small country (pop. 5 mill) and the newspaper in question is only written in danish, and is extremely unlikely to be found in shops outside the western hemisphere. Nobody in the Muslim world would have known about those cartoons if it was for an expedition of imams from Denmark that travelled around the middle east with a collection of drawings and other artworks, of which several had no connection with Muhammad, like a photo from a french farmers festival featuring a man with a pig snout. The intension was to create headlines and incite a response. It worked and ever since certain regions have been way overly sensitive about drawing Muhammad. The only way to combat that is to keep on drawing Muhammad again and again and again until they figure out that a drawing is just that - a drawing. Nothing to be worked up about.

For a rather complete collection of Muhammad images through the ages, including the infamous Muhammad Cartoons, go here: http://zombietime.com/mohammed_image_archive/