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February 22, 2007
Kareem Amer Gets Four Years For Blogging Insulting Islam and Mubarak
Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman, aka Kareem Amer, a blogger, has been sentenced to four years in prison for what he wrote on his blog. As The Washington Post reports,
An Egyptian blogger was convicted of insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak and sentenced to four years in prison on Thursday in Egypt's first prosecution of a blogger.
Exactly what did he do? Well he wrote on his blog that Al-Azhar University where he was once a student was "the university of terrorism" that "stuffs its students' brains and turns them into human beasts ... teaching them that there is no place for differences in this life." He also said that Egyptian President Mubarak's regime is a "symbol of dictatorship." I'm too stupid to know anything about Al-Azhar University but Kareem Amer's point about the Mubarak regime seems on target.
The real issue is not the accuracy of what Kareem Amer said but his right to say it. A right he doesn't have in today's Egypt and many other countries. I hope that our government condemns this imprisonment, but I doubt that it will. After all Egypt is one of our allies in "promoting freedom" and the last thing our current government wants is to have freedom of speech get in the way of any dictatorship that "promotes freedom."
Please go to the Free Kareem website and learn want is being done to free Kareem.
I also have a more general concern. There seems to be an increase in the number of countries that have passed or are considering passing laws against showing disrespect for religions views or saying thinks that others may consider hateful. Ed Brayton often writes on this issue at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. His most recent post on this subject deals with a case right here in California at San Francisco State University. This case involves a prohibition against so-called "hate speech." As Ed so correctly says,
It is time to mount a major campaign against such hate speech codes all around the country.
Such codes are limitations on freedom of speech and have very little difference in root motivation from the Egyptian law that has just sent Kareem Amer to prison.
Posted by Duane Smith at February 22, 2007 10:06 AM | Read more on Current Events |
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