Wednesday - March 29, 2006

Mad Mullahs Shutdown Blogs

The Mad Mullahs in Iran are intent on keeping the people of that country under their thumb no matter what they have to do. Their latest target is blog sites run by Iranians, some in Iran and some in other countries. Using sophisticated filters they block almost all outside web sites for fear the people in Iran might realize what a fascist dictatorship they are living under.

The revolution is coming one day to Iran and it won’t be a peaceful one. Totalitarian regimes never last because people won’t stand for it forever. Sooner or later, the Mad Mullahs will all be stood up against a wall and sent to meet Allah. It can’t happen soon enough, in my opinion ....

Iran Hard-Line Regime Cracks Down on Blogs
_{Mar 29, 4:19 AM (ET)}

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) - On his last visit to Iran, Canadian-based blogger Hossein Derakhshan was detained and interrogated, then forced to sign a letter of apology for his blog writings before being allowed to leave the country. Compared to others, Derakhshan is lucky. Dozens of Iranian bloggers have faced harassment by the government, been arrested for voicing opposing views, and fled the country in fear of prosecution over the past two years.

In the conservative Islamic Republic, where the government has vast control over newspapers and the airwaves, weblogs are one of the last bastions of free expression, where people can speak openly about everything from sex to the nuclear controversy. To bolster its campaign, the Iranian government has one of the most extensive and sophisticated operations to censor and filter Internet content of any country in the world - second only to China, Hopkins said.

It also is one of a growing number of Mideast countries that rely on U.S. commercial software to do the filtering, according to a 2004 study by a group called the OpenNet Initiative. The software that Iran uses blocks both internationally hosted sites in English and local sites in Farsi, the study found. The filtering process is backed by laws that force individuals who subscribe to Internet service providers to sign a promise not to access non-Islamic sites. The same laws also force the providers to install filtering mechanisms.

The filtering “is systematically getting worse,” said Derakhshan, who was detained and questioned during a visit to Iran last spring, just before the election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But is the government threatened because the tens of thousands of Iranian blogs are all throwing insults at it, or calling for revolution? Not quite. The debates on Iranian weblogs are rarely political. The most common issues are cultural, social and sexual. Blogs also are a good place to chat in a society where young men and women cannot openly date. There are blogs that discuss women’s issues, and ones that deal with art and photography.

- More on Mad Mullah Censorship here ...

- Here’s a list of Iranian blog sites (in English) on the net ...

Posted by The Skipper     on 03/29/2006 at 09:29 AM   
Filed Under: • Cyberspace-Internet • Muslims •  
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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

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It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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