[governance] Bangladesh Govt blocks YouTube

[Tapani Tarvainen]

On Sep 18 00:07, Imran Ahmed Shah (ias_pk at yahoo.com) wrote:

> Sala,

> I am strongly agreed with you for the development of a statement,
> however, that would elaborate the conflict and abuse of the FoE
> Rights, and would ask for the immediate removal of such offensive
> type of contents that violate religious norms, values, morality,
> believe and ethics.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean, but the core meaning of
Freedom of Expression is the right to offend, and in particular to
disparage and ridicule opinions and creeds of any kind, whether
political, religious, moral, ethical, whatever.
(Exceptions like libel apply to people, individuals, not
creeds or opinions.)

After all, speech that does not offend anyone does not need
protection, does it.

And if someone resorts to violence to counter non-violent
speech or other expression, the blame falls squarely on
the former. No matter what someone says, countering and
trying to suppress it with violence is wrong, period.

I would strongly disagree with any statement that would
support anything like censorship under threat of violence.

> International legislation (treaty) restrict the hosting and/or
> distribution of such type of contents prohibiting blasphemy and if
> the contents are not removed by the hosting company, the removal &
> banning the entire website should be the responsibility of the
> Registry.

I hope there will never be such a treaty of any real force.
That would be the end of not only of Freedom of Expression
but of Freedom of Religion as well, for there is no way
to define blasphemy without selecting a (small) set of
religions that'd be specially protected.
Indeed, central tenets of many religions are blasphemous to others.

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen

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