An Egyptian writer and human rights activist, Karem Saber, has been sentenced to five years in prison for writing a book of stories titled Where is God?
The complaint against Saber and his book Ayn Allah (Where Is God?) was initially filed in 2011, months after the fall of former president Hosni Mubarak’s regime. Saber’s was reportedly the first blasphemy case of its kind after Egypt’s revolution.
The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information condemned the charges against Saber when they were made, citing “deep concern of the return of religious and political Hesba cases.”
Hesba cases (also written as hisbah) stem from Islamic Sharia law, allowing “all Muslims the right to file lawsuits in cases where an exalted right of God has been violated, even if this does not directly harm them,” as ahramonline reports.
Welcome to hell.
Welcome to a hell where all followers of the nationally coerced religion have the right to file lawsuits in cases where “an exalted right of God has been violated” – even though as far as anyone really knows there is no such “God,” and there is no reason to think anyone knows what its “exalted rights” might be or how they might be violated, and there is no reason to think anyone knows that such “rights” should be respected by human beings.
Welcome to hell, where real human beings are persecuted for the sake of an imagined brute-deity and its imagined “rights” and its imagined hypersensitivity and vindictiveness.
Slymepitters take note – THAT is censorship. Having your misogynist comments critiqued, condemned or challenged isn’t.
And, as of this morning, a blundering, obtuse, unteachable, incorrigible US government is about to interfere in yet another middle-eastern civil war……..
someone on a local patch called me a bigot for dissing the Tea Potty.
Here’s some synonyms for ‘bigotry’ and nothing I said even remotely
resembles these.
“dogmatism, illiberalism, illiberality, illiberalness, intolerance, narrow-mindedness, opinionatedness, partisanship, sectarianism, small-mindedness”
Gretchen:
I’ve been curious for a while now about people like that. What do they think ‘bigot’ means? Same as the people who who say they are being discriminated against by people who are criticizing their discrminatory views.
Tony! – in my experience, bigoted means “someone who says mean things about someone I agree with”. For left wingers, it means “someone who says mean things about someone”.