Feral Jundi

I did not make this poster below, but I thought it was worthy of Feral Jundi.  There are tons of awesome drawings and posters that folks put up over at the Facebook group, and I am sure they are busy just processing all of them.  This little Facebook group is also pissing off all the right people and bravo to the creators. And hey, I think every day should be Draw Muhammad Day just so these dorks get the message. lol –Matt

——————————————————————

Pakistan blocks YouTube, Facebook

By Sami Zubeiri

May 20,2010

ISLAMABAD — Pakistan on Thursday condemned caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed that appeared on Facebook, blocking access to the networking site and YouTube in a growing backlash over Internet “sacrilege.”

Students and Islamist activists protested against the drawings and denounced the West in an expression of outrage that sparked comparisons with riots across the Muslim world in 2006 over drawings published in European newspapers.

The caricatures appeared on Facebook after a private user asked people to submit drawings of the Prophet Mohammed in an online competition that sparked fury in conservative Muslim Pakistan.

“We strongly condemn the publication of blasphemous caricatures of our holy Prophet on Facebook,” foreign ministry spokesman Abdul Basit told reporters in the capital Islamabad.

“They are committing these acts in the garb of freedom of press, which is not acceptable to us,” he said.

“Such malicious and insulting attacks hurt the feelings of Muslims around the world,” he said.

Islam strictly prohibits the depiction of any prophet as blasphemous and Muslims all over the world staged angry protests over the publication of satirical cartoons of Mohammed in European newspapers in 2006.

In 2008, a suicide attack outside the Danish embassy in Islamabad killed eight people. Al-Qaeda claimed the attack to avenge the cartoons.

The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) extended a ban on Facebook, ordered by a court until May 31, to wildly popular video sharing website YouTube and Wikipedia in a bid to limit access to “blasphemous” material.

The PTA said it had blocked more than 450 links to derogatory material on the Internet, defending the move “in view of growing sacrilegious content.”

The regulator called on Facebook and YouTube to resolve the matter as soon as possible in a manner that “ensures religious harmony and respect.”

Pakistan also briefly banned YouTube in February 2008 in a similar protest against “blasphemous” cartoons of Mohammed.

Facebook expressed disappointment at being blocked and said it was considering whether to make the offending page inaccessible in Pakistan.

Wahaj us Siraj, a spokesman for the Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan, said blocking Facebook and YouTube would slash up to 25 percent of all Internet traffic in Pakistan. Wikipedia had also been blocked, he said.

Dozens of members of the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami, the main Islamic opposition party in the country of 170 million, protested in Islamabad, calling for a boycott of Facebook and supporting a government ban of the website.

Chanting “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest) and “We love Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him,” they shouted “Al-Jihad, Al-Jihad”, denounced Israel and urged people to lay down their lives for Islam and the Prophet Mohammed.

The protestors originally planned to march on the US embassy, but riot police armed with shields and batons prevented the crowd from moving towards the heavily guarded diplomatic enclave and they dispersed.

In the eastern city of Lahore, students, religious activists and clerics protested, and banned organisation Jamaat-ud Dawa — considered a front for the militant group blamed for the 2008 Mumbai attacks — also held a rally.

They chanted “down with America” and called for an end to diplomatic relations with Denmark, Sweden and Norway, trampling flags of those countries into the ground as an expression of disgust, an AFP reporter said.

“We are chanting slogans against the US because Facebook is their creation,” a Jamaat-ud-Dawa political leader, Khalid Bin Waleed, told AFP.

In the northwestern city of Peshawar — gateway into the tribal belt where the military is fighting the Taliban and the border areas with Afghanistan that Washington calls an Al-Qaeda headquarters — the ban was widely supported.

But the bans also sparked debate about freedom of expression in a country with a relatively free media, an estimated two to 2.5 million Facebook users and a sizeable, largely Western-educated elite.

In Karachi, some intellectuals disapproved of the ban, despite their anger over the caricatures, saying censorship could fan extremism in a country already hit hard by Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked violence.

“Pakistani people have the right to know about what is happening in the world… this move will certainly help extremism,” said Aslam Khwaja, a writer.

Story here.