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.'"

Hypocritical American exceptionalists?

[nbauman]

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 [aljazeera.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Manar#Banning_of_broadcasts [wikipedia.org]

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 [wikipedia.org]

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."

Re:No shit

[Anonymous Coward]

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 [guardian.co.uk].

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 [wikipedia.org]". 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.

Re:No shit

[xenobyte]

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.