Pakistani Lawyer Wants Mark Zuckerberg Executed 1318
Earthquake Retrofit sends along a piece from The Register reporting on a nightmare scenario of legal jurisdiction on the Internet: a Pakistani lawyer has filed blasphemy charges, carrying the death penalty, against Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives (and the pseudonomous user who initiated the "Draw Muhammad" contest last month). Pakistani police have apparently opened an investigation, according to this Google translation of a BBC Urdu report."
You know... (Score:4, Interesting)
... while the wider implications are scary, I'm not sure I really have a problem with this particular case. Think they could make Four Square a crime against humanity while they're at it?
Sure, why not? (Score:4, Interesting)
This should be interesting... (Score:2, Interesting)
It should probably be noted, that the US has an extradition treaty with Pakistan, the court could in theory demand extradition of Mark Zuckerberg by US authorities, to be turned over to the custody of the court in Pakistan, to face the charges.
I thought the US was the only country that thought it could apply its laws to anyone in the world, even its own citizens when they don't reside in the country.
Can't wait for HTML5 (Score:4, Interesting)
Once canvas takes over, we draw can Muhammad every fucking where.
It's sad, because I really want to support executing Zuckerberg. But . . .
I get the general religious offense in drawings of Muhammad. In that regard, it's like the Piss Crucifix. But, I don't see the need for the great animus behind all this. I mean, are Muslims really such pussies they can't take a fucking joke about their Prophet? Also, isn't this sort of elevating the Prophet to the level of a deity? And if so, doesn't that sort of nullify the Muslism creed (there is no god but God, and the stick figure behind the "censored" blackout bar is His Prophet)?
In the meantime, here's a fucking ASCII drawing of Muhammad . . .
O ----( Allahu akbar! ) -|- | /\
Re:This should be interesting... (Score:1, Interesting)
Most countries require that their citizens follow the law, even when they are outside the countrys border. For example if you go on vacation with a "friend" and murder him somewhere where murder is legal your country will still consider you as a criminal when you get back home.
Next time the border guards make odd claim on where the border actually is; politly remind them that citizens of their country are required to follow their particular constitution regardless of where they are and that they have no jurisdiction outside their cointries border.
Islam question (Score:4, Interesting)
Could someone explain why some Muslims believe that their rules need to apply to non-Muslims?
As a point of contrast, many Christians believe that their primary responsibility is to not themselves sin. Secondarily is to encourage their fellow Christian to avoid sinning; this includes (at the worst) kicking people out of the church when they're chronically unwilling to shape up. But But it's pretty hard to find anything directly in Christian theology that suggests Christians are supposed to try to impose these standards on non-Christians.
So what is it about some Muslim theologies that leads them to try to, for example, feel justified and/or compelled to try to kill Dutch cartoonists and Facebook executives?
Re:I love moderates (Score:4, Interesting)
Reformation vs no reformation. It's pretty easy to figure out which ones went through which 700 years ago.
It's a real risk for Zuckerman (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a real problem for Zuckerman. He's previously made fund-raising trips to Dubai. [techcrunch.com] That's over. The UAE has blasphemy laws [wikipedia.org], which they enforce. The UAE also has an extradition treaty with Pakistan [dailytimes.com.pk], but not with the United States. So he can no longer visit Dubai, and is unlikely to get funding from any source in the Arab world. He can't even fly Emirates Air.
Re: Sure, why not? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They would only be hurting themselves (Score:2, Interesting)
What facebook should be ashamed of is that they bowed to pressure from these lunatics.
Yeah, that's the only thing facebook should be ashamed of...
Re:I love moderates (Score:2, Interesting)
Matthew 10:34-37
(Jesus speaking to his disciples)
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that Christians ignore most of the worst parts, but you can't pretend they aren't there.
So we're judging the entire muslim world (Score:3, Interesting)
based on the actions of their equivalent of Jack Thompson? Oh way to go there. Let's show the rest of the non-Judeo Christian based world just how merciful and understanding we really are.
Here's a thought. Why don't we read up on what actual Islam is, versus the supremacist Arab culture that permeates and corrupts it. Karen Armstrong did a wonderful job of pointing out what Islam actually is, and how Arab culture with it's tradition of jahilliyeh has since permeated and corrupted it (note to the curious - Wahibist Islam is a fundamentalist version of Islam where the clerics try to reconcile the pre-Mohammed "heroic" cultural mores of Arab tribal culture with Islam itself - which is what Mohammed explicitly fought against).
but wait. It's far easier to learn programming, and read physics textbooks, and read Dawkins/Hitchens, and other men bloviating about the evils of religion, when they don't even have any real expertise in theology to begin with (Dawkins is a BIOLOGIST). And therefore, when one Muslim version of Jack Thompson goes with an attention-getting stunt, we automatically do to the entire muslim world what people who didn't understand gaming did to us gamers - we stereotype and hate. Way to go, there.
Re:The dangers of submitting to local community ru (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, I wonder what the people who post insulting things about someone else's religion think they're achieving. Is there any beneficial outcome from that?
Depends what you mean. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I love moderates (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It comes down to... (Score:4, Interesting)
Politically motivated or not, religion was a useful tool to justify them. Without that tool, they would have had to fall back on reason, which means they might have found it a lot harder to justify their position.
Re:I love moderates (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd add fraud and other white collar crimes for cases where the damages exceed the statistical value of a human life [msn.com].
This is not an 'incident', this is endemic behavio (Score:1, Interesting)
Listen to this, read this, learn it by heart:
Muslim Outrage [msunderestimated.com]
Re:I love moderates (Score:2, Interesting)
Also, while Islam didn't have a "reformation", it also has the "two-substantially-dissimilar-and-mutually-displeased-with-one-another-sects-operating-under-one-heading" thing going, with the Sunni and Shia branches(plus some smaller oddball variants), and that hasn't exactly exposed its warm and fuzzy side.
Islam is currently having a reformation, actually. It's called Wahhabi Islam, and is getting its claws deep into every part of the Islamic world. This is the version of Islam commonly exported from Saudi Arabia to other parts of the world - principally of significance to most here, the US and Europe.
Ironically, Iran (and parts of Iraq) are the only parts of the Islamic world which aren't seeing huge increases in Wahhabi - and they're also the only significant Shia populations. Considering the sect warfare within Islam alone, it might give some pause when considering Iran's nuclear program and give us cause to both support and quickly oppose said program.
Re:I love moderates (Score:1, Interesting)
Christianity did not spread via wars of conquest. Christianity does not have a history of killing people who produce works of art depicting God or Jesus Christ, nor does Christianity have a history of killing people who renounce Christianity.
Yes, there were the witch hunts and the inquisitions and Catholic vs Protestant wars and pogroms, but those were societal and governmental issues carried out under the name of Christianity while Islam as a religion calls for wars of conquest and killing nonbelievers.
If you look at the primary sources of Christian conquests like the Conquest of Mexico, the Catholic priests sat down with Maya and other Mesoamerican priests and leaders to discuss how the Christian God and beliefs were the same as their own, which is why Creole and Central American Catholicism embraced local feast days and minor deities.
An example - Our Lady of Guadalupe contains Aztec symbolism - Her blue-green mantle was described as the color once reserved for the divine couple Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl.
Orthodox Islam doesn't allow for differences like that, nor do Islamic run schools bolster science like Catholic and Jesuit schools do.
Re:I love moderates (Score:2, Interesting)
Unitarian doesn't belong there. Unitarian is on the other side of the river from trinitarian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarianism [wikipedia.org]
Re:I love moderates (Score:3, Interesting)
If we want Islam to go through a reformation/enlightenment, we need to bolster the economies of those countries first. People often point to Saudi Arabia as a counter-example that economy is everything in moderating belief, but to me, all that points to is that a country surrounded by conservative/radical Islamic countries, has a hard time becoming moderate on its own.
I disagree. Those economies are never going to improve, unless the people change their own culture and religion. That's exactly what happened in Europe and saved it from being a theocratic hellhole. They didn't have some enlightened outsiders come in and fix up their economies to make them prosperous so they'd give up on religious wars; they fixed up their own economies.
In a nutshell, you can't force improvement on a culture from outside. You'll always be seen as an oppressor, trying to force your ways upon them.
The only way to treat Islam is to wall it off from the developed world. Don't allow Muslims to immigrate to advanced nations, and keep them in their own countries. Don't restrict trade with them, however (except for nuclear materials and weapons of course), but trying to merge them into Western society isn't going to work, and just pisses off the Westerners because they're being asked to accommodate the Muslims by adopting Sharia Law, Islamic dress codes, restrictions on free speech, etc. The only immigration that should be allowed is for those who have given up the religion altogether and are willing to adopt the culture of their new host country. But even those people tend to have a lot of problems with their disaffected Western-born kids, however, as seen in France where it's the second-generation Muslims that are always rioting. They need to stay in their own countries, and fix their own societies from within. However, this philosophy also means we need to get our asses out of their countries, and stop trying to control everything over there; no more military interventions (unless there's a REAL threat, like ICBMs, not some made-up threats). If there's no Western troops in their lands or manipulating their governments, they won't have an excuse for any terrorist acts against Western nations. You don't see people from the fucked-up nations of subsaharan Africa wanting to terrorize Westerners, because Western nations don't have any involvement there (mainly because there's no oil).
Re:I love moderates (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I love moderates (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, once "God" was invented to be the default for all questions where "I don't know" would otherwise be the answer, then man corrupted the idea of a universal answer into a power grab. Religion isn't about power. People want power. They use God or guns or food or whatever they have to gain that power. Religion is a tool in the quest for power, but not the cause. It just so happens that we are so far removed from the beginnings of it that it's hard to see the difference in what "religion" is and what "those who run religions" want.
Re:The biggest protector of child molesters (Score:3, Interesting)
The son of one of Hamas's founders admits that the social restrictions on dating and sex in Islam and the Middle Eastern tribal society is one of the leading causes of militarism in Islam.
Of course it is. There's even a Pentagon handbook outlining that the most important part of nation building is getting the angry young men off the streets. We are biologically programmed to have a period of extreme activity and aggression during certain years of the males of the species. Channeling these energies from the intended purpose of mating into something else is very easy and has been one of the first tricks of social engineering discovered. Why do you think we recruit soldiers in their late teens? Physical performance is not the reason, it peaks a couple years later.