Pakistan Lifts YouTube Ban For 3 Minutes, Finds More Blasphemy

On Saturday, Pakistan briefly lifted the months-old ban on YouTube, spurred by the widely distributed U.S.-made video presented as a trailer for a film titled "Innocence of Muslims" and decried in many places around the world as blasphemous toward Islam. "After months of criticism of the ban, the government decided to allow Pakistanis to have access to YouTube again, saying steps had been taken to ensure that offensive content would not be visible. But those efforts apparently failed, and the authorities quickly backtracked," writes the New York Times. "Quickly" is right: access to YouTube was apparently open for just three minutes, which seems about right; it shouldn't take longer than that to discover things on the site to which adherents of any particular religion might take umbrage. What's surprising is that this took lifting the censorship on a wide scale, rather than just taking a smaller peek through tunneling software.

Comments

Re:Ban the Transistor!

[alienzed]

Isn't religion the root of all blasphemy?

Re:Ban the Transistor!

[Cinder6]

My (likely--hopefully--erroneous) understanding of Islam is that everything is the will of Allah. If that's the case, then Allah wills blasphemy. Thus, it stands to reason that blasphemy doesn't exist, because (presumably) anything Allah does is holy.

I hope my understanding is wrong, because that's more insanity than I'm comfortable with.

Re:Who cares?

[arielCo]

I'm surprised it was up for a full 3 minutes.

Must... resist...

That's what SHE said!

Sorry, had to.

Re:Who cares?

[fustakrakich]

That's bullshit. Only the people that voted for Romney voted for Romney. People who voted for Ron Paul voted for Ron Paul. Don't try to lay the guilt trip on those who didn't vote for your favorite candidate.

Blasphemy in whose term ?

[Taco Cowboy]

While the majority of the Pakis are Muslims, the Pakistan population is *NOT* 100% Islamic.

There are Hindus and Christians living in Pakistan.

Just because something is viewed as "blaspheme" to _some_ of the Muslims that doesn't mean it is blasphemic to the Hindus or the Christians.

To ban Internet just because of the "Islamic blaspheme" is to exercise the "Tyranny of the Majority" rule.

Imagine if America set up a law banning open prayer due to "noise pollution" - that would certainly makes the lives of many Muslims that bit tougher, wouldn't it?

Striesand effect (I think?)

[ryzvonusef]

As a Pakistani, I can only find this hilarious, albeit morbidly so.

You see, all they have succeeded in making sure that *every* one knows how to use proxies.

You see, as long as people got their damn facebook and youtube, no one gave a flying hoot about anything else. We (including I myself) didn't know there was even a way to access websites banned by the PTA, and since we were *good* boys and girls, we didn't care about *bad* websites being closed, so we didn't bother finding out how we could access them.

Now, they can't access youtube, well guess what, people started asking, how can we access restricted websites? Answer: Proxies etc.

We are not bad people, right? We just want to access youtube to watch University lectures (pakistan's virtual university has a youtube channel with all their lectures online), how to stitch clothes (my mom's favourite, she learnt many a good cloth making designs on youtube) etc...

And while we are doing this to only access youtube now, well, a proxy opens the way to *all* websites.

Now even the websites they would *genuinely* want people to stop visiting (porn etc) are open to all. Guess what, my dear local mullah, you have only succeeded in making sure people now have the tools to visit the same evil websites you wanted to stop.

Yeah, all that, um, *effort*, that 15 year old kid did to find and collate a list of 780,000 porn websites for the govt to ban? The internet routes around obstructions, b'ch!

Not that the govt cares either way, they are busy making sure the bhutto dynasty can continue on... these are all attention diversion tactics, to hide the fact that I can't find gas for a week (btw, Gas means CNG in local context, Petrol is hardly ever used, though even *that* has run out! yeah our govt is awesome)

And it's not like *anyone* is pretending they are *not* using youtube; for example, TV channels often put their programs on youtube for people to view, and obviously they must be using proxies, since they haven't switched to other websites. They bald-faced-ly give links to the youtube version on their facebook page, for example.

But no one can dare admit that the youtube ban is a farce, or they will be part of the *blasphemous* campaign. Also, apparently, by Pakistan banning youtube, we have brought down Google to it's knees (I have seen actual *statistics* to that effect, don't ask me where they got their figures from), we are winning! We can't give up a step away from victory!

Vive la révolution islamique!