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The Surprising Truth About Internet Censorship In the Middle East
An anonymous reader writes "Internet censorship is common in conservative majority-Muslim countries, but it may have more to do with politics and technology than with religion. I.e., Iran is not so different from Cuba and China. From the article: 'in an attempt to uncover the various reasons — and ways — that countries clamp down on Internet freedoms, the U.S.-based watchdog Freedom House investigated the issue in 47 nations and released a study of its findings this year.
Employing a number of factors ranging from blogger arrests to politically motivated website blockades, the study ranked each country according to its degree of online freedom.
And, as it happens, Islamic countries do not stand out for their degree of censorship.'"
This is a false dichotomy. The question is whether religion leads to oppressive politics and low technology, not whether oppressive politics are more correlated with oppression and low technology than religion.
Currently hooked on AMP
That's not surprising at all. Almost nothing about the alleged "conflict" between these countries and "the West" have to do with religion and it has a lot to do with post-colonialism and the Cold War. It's just that on both "sides" many people like to spin the issues in the direction of religion. It's ridiculous enough to speak about "Islamic Countries" as if they were a homogenous force or fraction.
Sorry for the many scare quotes but they are all appropriate in this case.
According to report linked to in TFA, the US government has no internet surveillance and does not spread misinformation! Sounds like their report was censored!
There isn't much of a difference in other countries either. China, North Korea, and the USSR were (are) primarily athiest, mostly because the emotions in religion were redirected towards nationalism.
Iran did the opposite, but the effect is the same. In those countries, either religion worshipping the government, or government worshipping religion runs your life, and you don't get to pick which.
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Religious leaders are just another dictator. Religion is only another tool to accomplish the same thing as the politics that teach and exploit strong feelings of strong nationalism/culturalism. The real tool of abuse in all cases is psychology and the sociopaths work their magic on a person from the first day of his/her life..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
What moron thought this was surprising? China doesn't censor internet for political reasons either, remember? It's due to porn and other moralizing.
>80 column hard wrapped e-mail is not a sign of intelligent
>life
I thought everyone realised that the conservative suppressive elements of a cuture are less to do with the religion itself but with the conservative suppressive people at the top.
If a certain ideological view point holds power over the masses, usually through fear, those in power will use it to their advantage. This is true whether it is a political, moral, or ethical idea.
Silence is a state of mime.
Islamic countries are asking for international censorship of the whole Internet. So let them block anything they don't like at home. But they should not be allowed to expand their censorship policies to the whole Internet.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Oppressive regimes in the Middle East rank among the worst (but not particularly worse than) other oppressive regimes in other parts of the world? Is that a "surprising truth"? If anything this just confirms what we already knew - those in power there are interested singularly in that power, and Islam has just been a convenient way to justify it to their population. Not that Islam is conducive to free speech or any other advancement of the human species - but it's not the main reason these countries are censoring the internet.
"From the perspective of the theocratic government, "God himself is recognized as the head" of the state".
Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?
Where the obvious and un-newsworthy are posted with impunity. Please give me more stories with studies finding tv as a babysitter is bad, religions are oppressive or fanatical and governments only care about their own interests.
With that out of the way, a fanatical religious leader who holds authority via his office over his people only leads to more extremes of the above mentioned.
Religious leaders are just another dictator. Religion is only another tool to accomplish the same thing as the politics that teach and exploit strong feelings of strong nationalism/culturalism. The real tool of abuse in all cases is psychology and the sociopaths work their magic on a person from the first day of his/her life..
not quite. religion is voluntary. that's the problem with the political sphere: if dictators ruled by voluntary consent of the people, they wouldn't be dictators, would they?
Yes, totally voluntary. All you have to do is say "You know what, I don't believe in Allah at all, I'm just going to life my life freely" and all the Muslims in the Middle East will take your decision respectfully and allow you to go about your business.
It appears you never read, or if you did, you never understood the studies, and the notion of cultural, national, and peer pressure, etc that are applied from birth, and how they affect your decision making process. Please, try to get through psych 101, at least. And don't feel too bad, you are only one of the multitude that believe as you do.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
They shut down websites because they go against the values of their leaders, we also shut down websites because they go against the values of our leaders, only in our case those values are measured in US dollars and the driving motivation is not a (perhaps misplaced) belief in a higher power but instead pure, unadulterated greed.
Well, even more no shit... Religion is a method of people in power controlling people not in power... big woop.
There are only a few country where politics rule! Almost all of the world is ruled by religion!
No, most of the world is ruled by culture. The fact of the matter is that very little of religion's commandments are actually followed, whether we're considering Christians, Jews or Muslims.
Having read all three books (Torah, Bible and Koran - what can I say, I like to read science fiction stories before going to sleep), I can tell you that they all (yes, all) condemn such things as stealing, killing etc.
If religion was so powerful, there wouldn't be that much violation of its fundamentals, like stealing and killing. Religion is used as a means to not-so-religious ends, and that is because all three monotheist religions,are easy to misquote, misinterpret, and misuse.
Getting rid of all religions could be A Good Thing...or not. Even if they went away, there would still be plain godless Ideology, which has been proven to be at least as effective in turning whole countries into shit for supposedly noble causes.
Question:
Do we really have more freedom in the U.S., or do we just permit freedom for ideas we believe in? Are we smug, hypocritical American exceptionalists?
Javed Iqbal was sentenced to 5 1/2 years for offering Al Manar on his cable TV system.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2009/04/2009423233919457969.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Manar#Banning_of_broadcasts
Occupy Wall Street wasn't allowed to express its First Amendment rights to assembly.
I'll take support for human rights whether it comes from the left or right. Freedom House seems to be the latter. I do wish they would show more concern about attacks on freedom of people like Javed Iqbal in their own backyard, but that may be an unreasonable request when you consider the source of their funds,
Here's what Chomsky said about Freedom House. Fair?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_house#Criticism
Chomsky and Herman argue that the group's history has been characterized by excessively criticizing states opposed to US interests while being unduly sympathetic to those regimes supportive of US interests. The authors suggest this can be most notably seen by the way it perceived the US ally El Salvador in the early 1980s, a government that used the army for mass slaughter of the populace to intimidate them in the run-up to an "election", but Freedom House found these elections to be "admirable". Chomsky further claimed in 1988 that Freedom House "had interlocks with AIM, the World Anticommunist League [sic], Resistance International, and U.S. government bodies such as Radio Free Europe and the CIA, and has long served as a virtual propaganda arm of the (U.S) government and international right wing."
You are making a point about apostasy, which is fair enough, but most of the muslims have no problem with my not believing in Allah, because I am not and have never been a muslim.
And it's great that you were born so lucky. If your parents were muslim and you wanted to not believe, 33% of the UK's muslim would want you dead.
Not that your comment is even accurate on sharia. Muslims do not have any problem at all with not believing in allah. Not for muslims, not for non-muslims. However they will want to kill you for
1) any perceived insult to "the prophet" (insult allah all you want, another indication that islam's "god" is just a cruel stupid little medieval dictator)
2) any perceived insult to muslims as a group
3) not paying for their war on non-muslims (yes, you read that right. Also known as jizya)
Please note that this is not an exhaustive list. In particular, once they demanded any non-muslim give up their firstborn son in a system called "devshirme". Or just start a genocide for no reason in particular. Happened more than 100 times in muslim history, including by the paedophile prophet himself, both on muslims and infidels for mostly imaginary reasons, so please don't claim this is somehow not part of islam.
There's a billion Muslims in the world today. Billion, with a B. If they were really as violent and fucked up as the average American seems to believe, we would have turned the planet into a glass-floored parking lot by now.
They're also isolationists... According to surveys here in Denmark, most non-western immigrants gets nicely mixed in with the native population in just a few generations - mixed marriages with both male and female immigrants - with the significant exception of Muslim immigrants. Even though they're one of the biggest non-western immigrant group, the number of marriages that does not involve a conversion to Islam by the native part can be counted on one hand. It just almost never happens. The actual numbers are 4-5 between a male immigrant and a female native, and ZERO where the immigrant is female. Even the numbers involving conversion are heavily skewed - while there's hundreds of male immigrants marrying female natives converted to Islam, the number of female immigrants marrying a danish native converted man are still less than a dozen. Most female immigrants basically marry either fellow immigrants or men from the homeland.
This all means that the integration of Muslims is bound to fail. And has failed consistently all over western Europe.
As a nice counterpoint, Asian non-Muslim women married to Danish native men are actually the biggest group by far within the mixed marriage community. And these Asian-Danish families are usually well integrated with higher-than-average income, higher-than-average educational level and zero ghetto issues (gangs etc.). The asian immigrants work and learn the native language. They dress like the natives too, don't make a fuss about weird dietary 'rules' and interact quite normally with everybody else, no matter what gender etc.
So, it's obvious to everyone that what the Muslims are doing is wrong. They either need to do what other immigrants are doing or go somewhere else. It can't continue like it has been. The tensions are getting stronger and it will end badly and then go to worse.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
I think you misunderstand the intent of the Jizya. Jizya (for non-muslims) and Zakat (for muslims) are merely the Islamic version of the taxation system.