Pakistan court orders Facebook ban Due to Events of Draw Muhammad Day (OP)
Pakistan court orders Facebook ban
LAHORE: A Pakistani court Wednesday ordered authorities to block Facebook in the country over a page encouraging users to post caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) on the site.
The ban on Facebook came into effect immediately after the court ruling [GALLO/GETTY]
A Pakistani court has issued a ban on the social networking site Facebook after a user-generated contest page encourged members to post caricatures of Prophet Mohammed.
The Lahore High Court on Wednesday instructed the Pakistani Telecommunications Authority (PTA) to ban the site after the Islamic Lawyers Movement complained that a page called “Draw Mohammed Day” is blasphemous.
Sajjad Chaudhry, the presiding judge, instructed officials with the ministry of telecommunications to submit a written reply to the ban by May 31 when courts will open a detailed hearing on the case. A ban is to be enforced in the meantime.
"We have already blocked the URL link and issued instruction to internet service providers,” Khurram Mehran, a spokesperson for the PTA, said.
About 20 people carried banners outside of courthouse in Lahore, condemning Facebook and praising Prophet Mohammed.
Protest
Lawyers also petitioned the Pakistani government to register a strong protest with Facebook’s owners.
"The competition has hurt the sentiments of the Muslims," lawyer Chaudhry Zulfikar Ali said.
Facebook users in Pakistan, however, told AFP they could still access the site after the ban was imposed on Wednesday.
Officials with the Pakistani government told the court they had already blocked Facebook pages relating to the competition, but the lawyers group argued that no part of a site can be banned unless the entire site is blocked.
Pakistan has 45 million Facebook users, according to lawyers.
The Facebook page for "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" had just over 40,000 supporters while the opposing "Against Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" had more than 53,000.
Pakistan lifts Facebook ban but 'blasphemous' pages stay hidden
Monday 31 May 2010
Pakistan lifted a two-week-old ban on Facebook today but said it would continue to block individual pages containing "blasphemous" content.
Pakistan banned Facebook on 19 May in response to an online competition that invited people around the world to submit drawings of the prophet Muhammad. Muslims consider all depictions of Muhammad as heretical.
Yesterday Bangladesh also banned Facebook, saying it would lift the restriction only when the offending material was removed.
In recent weeks Pakistan extended the censorship to hundreds of other sites, including YouTube and Wikipedia. Most are now accessible again.
The censorship triggered criticism on Twitter and in the country's English-language media, but no street protests. Internet users were initially able to circumvent the ban through proxy sites but were thwarted when the government blocked those too.
Najibullah Malik, the Pakistani official orchestrating the censorship, said Facebook had removed all "sacrilegious material" from its website and promised that "nothing of this sort will happen in the future".
But by late afternoon a Facebook page entitled "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!" was still online. One image depicted a bearded face with an explosive fuse trailing from his turban pasted on to a photo of a naked woman. The page was not accessible in Pakistan.
A Facebook spokewoman said the company had restricted access to the page in certain countries, including Pakistan, "out of respect for local rules" but had not removed it in others.
Facebook critics say some drawings on the Muhammad page are so offensive to Muslims that they constitute hate material. They point out that the site has previously censored sensitive material in Pakistan, including blocking a lawyer who tried to set up a satirical page entitled Taliban Times.
The competition to draw Muhammad was conceived by a Seattle cartoonist in protest at threats against the creators of the US cartoon South Park, which portrayed the prophet in a bear suit during a recent episode.
Many commentators were reluctant to defend the right of westerners to "defame" Islam but also accused their government of using the ban as an excuse to crack down on freedom of expression. It was notable that while Islamic groups took to the streets to support the ban, their secular opponents stayed at home.
"There was a lot of anger, a lot of resentment, but nobody took any action. Why? Because they had no counter-argument to make," said Nadeem Farooq Paracha, a cultural commentator with the Dawn newspaper. "Anything to do with Allah, or the prophet, and everyone keeps quiet. That's the problem with our country."
Pakistan already bans a wide variety of websites with political or human rights content including those run by Baloch or Sindh nationalists, and videos of Pakistani soldiers beating civilians. Pornography, however, is freely available.
These people continue to attack and insult Islam because know that the Muslims will do nothing permanent. They will only get emotional enough to protest and then ban/boycott for a little while and then they will shamelessly come back to using these services. The blame goes on the Muslims who are slaves of these companies' products and services that they won't give these up but will allow Islam to be defamed.
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