Freedom of Speech

By Ahsan Javed · Wednesday, May 19, 2010 4 Comments

Blocking something is ridiculous and pathetic. It is like if a robber breaks into your house, you go and jail the manufacturer of his gun. As for the draw day, all what we are doing right now is playing into their hands. They must be laughing right now, talking about how conservative and volatile we all are, and we are exactly doing that.

What Actually is the Story?

A Seattle based cartoonist, Molly Norris made a cartoon in protest to censoring the episode of South Park Show, which was threatened earlier by Muslims not to show Holy Prophet’s (PBUH) depictions. Supporters of Draw Muhammad Day argue that this campaign in response to those protests and killing threats to Comedy Central regarding the censorship of South Park in America.

Norris who actually started all this, now claims “I’m against my own concept becoming a reality”.

I did NOT ‘declare’ May 20 to be “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.” I made a cartoon about the television show South Park being censored. I wish that was what our energies were going toward — protesting revolutionmuslim.com’s threat to Comedy Central, and Comedy Central’s over reaction to it which set America on a slippery slope toward censorship. (Norris)

Click Here to listen the interview of Molly Norris, after this much protest.

Role of Facebook and Us:

Facebook isn’t innocent, they are obviously biased. As it is clearly against the terms of service of facebook. But we should have thought about it when we joined it. Now we are whining and protesting to an atheist and godless cooperation even though we knew what sides they belong to. And it laughably amusing to see people disabling their account for a day or so. Why not delete your account right away and rob Facebook of your source of revenue forever?

Looking actually at the figures, a rough idea is that, there are more than 2.3 Million Facebook users in Pakistan, and the guys who are aware with online revenue will easily get idea how much earning one can have, with impressions in million, but for the laymen, here is a rough calculated revenue generated by Facebook though Pakistani users:

(Image via PakBee.com – PkReaders is not responsible for the validity

of these stats in nay case, figures may differ)

But who actually is going to delete his/her account from Facebook? May be you don’t want to, or even if you do, you don’t know how to. I bet 99% people don’t  know how to actually delete your account.

Or even if the facebook is banned Pakistan, is it going to be a permanent or temporary ban? No one knows what is next to come. Is banning really the solution?

Then What to Do?

Register your protest by talking goodwill with towards those people. they don’t know about our Prophet (PBUH)or about his blessed life, we are the only representatives now. If we want to present a positive image of our religion, we then ourselves should be the practical models of the teachings of our Holy Prophet (PBUH). When out in society, we have been taught to put on our best behaviour because it reflects our parents’ upbringing and the values they’ve instilled in us. Why then is it a surprise that our actions as an Ummah led to the non-Muslims’ misperceptions about our Prophet.

What is expected from government?

After all this, if government takes keen interest in the issue, thinking something on the solid platform which would provide enough power and courage to the Ministry to take solid action, which really is not expected as we seen earlier, government bodies didn’t even bothered to take any action. Facebook got banned after the LHC ordered PTA to do so. Where our government stands? Still we have time, as it is clear violation of TOS by a renowned company, in my opinion it will really be easy to nail down facebook, if protested through proper channels.

Future steps are ought to be taken, but atleast for now, this ban should be permanent.

Note: This article is a joint venture of Ahsan Javed and Manan Anwar.

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Tags: blashphemy, campaign, Cartoon, Conflicts, dispute, Draw Day, facebook, Internet, Media, Mohammad, Muslim World, social media, war