Facebook Ban

Ok I know that this isn't exactly a new story but hey - I've been busy getting the site up. Anyway it's still worth mentioning.

If you haven't heard anything about this - basically what's happened is that Pakistan and Bangladesh had blocked Facebook, because a Facebook group had held a competition to draw the Islamic prophet Muhammed. Obviously these, predominantly Muslim, countries were enraged by this and blocked Facebook as a result. Recently Pakistan has also blocked Youtube and filtered some of Wikipedia. Now Bangladesh has unblocked Facebook, as the site has removed the offensive material.

Personally I think Facebook made the wrong decision in removing the content. The group in question started as a protest against Islamic terrorism; the contest was a method of showing extremists that free thinking people are not afraid of them. I completely understand why Facebook removed the content - obviously they wanted to have the ban lifted as quickly as possible.

No what shocked me was the response by individual Muslims to the Facebook group. Many Muslims have said that they feel "insulted" by the group, and that the group was a "malicious and insulting attack" on Islam and the Muslim people. Some of the comments left on the BBC website suggest that the existence of this group is "Facebook harrassing billions of Muslims [the] world-over," {Billions? - 1.2 billion is the current highest estimate...} and the (initial) lack of action by Facebook was "hypocrisy". These are comments left by young Muslims - some university students; supposedly rational, modern-thinking people. To me this simply demonstrates the incapability of traditional Islam to properly interact with the rest of the world.

It is obvious that these people cannot tolerate anything that contradicts their world-view. More specifically - they see anything that doesn't follow Islam's strict teachings as and insult to Islam and themselves. I cannot understand why these people simply refuse to acknowledge that other views exist other than their own.

In all fairness this is not representative of all Muslims. But for the time being those rational few are heavily outnumbered by those who refuse to acknowledge that not all people subscribe to their beliefs. Within the comments on the BBC webpage there was one person calling for the two sides to "take the time to understand each other". However I will leave you with the one comment from the BBC webpage which I think acurrately sums up the fallacy of the respective governments' reasoning:

"This is ridiculous. I find these to be ill-advised measures. Blocking websites in countries does not prevent the content from existing in the first place. I think the Pakistani government should move to ban pornography (which is still easily available) before they ban Facebook and YouTube which are obviously on the better side of human development."
Myra from Karachi, Pakistan


Sources:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/10130195.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/10192755.stm

http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE6550BA20100606


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