Censorship in Turkey

(Bianet/IFEX) - Three associations representing Turkey's biggest educational, writing and film-making unions organized a panel on 7 March to discuss the The Justice and Development Party (AKP) government's recent censorship of classic literary works, such as Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince and John Steinback's Of Mice and Men.

Turkish students read books in school library

"The government aims to give society a more Islamic identity by censoring classic literary works," said Ünsal Yıldız, chairperson of Egitim-Sen, Turkey's Education and Science Workers Union.

Noting that the early AKP government promised to transform Turkey into a more transparent and pluralistic society, Yıldız claimed that the AKP has finally shown its true colours.

"It is not only about censorship," Yıldız continued. "The government is putting pressure on every opposing opinion. We are experiencing lay-offs at major newspapers. The purpose behind all of these practices is to flourish political Islam in Turkey's mainstream culture." Yıldız further claimed that several classic literary works have been edited to sound more Islamic.

"From Oscar Wilde to Leo Tolstoy, to Heidi and Pinnochio. We see this even in cartoons. This reminds us of the military coup days in 1980, where teachers were facing investigations for what they used in their curriculum. As the union, we strongly encourage our teacher members to keep 'state-censored' classic literary pieces in their curriculum, with the original version."

Mustafa Köz , chairperson of the Writers Union of Turkey, described government censorship as "black humor."

"We have a government that sees writers and literature as adversaries," he said. "They want to form a new society by putting a barrier between people and literature. We won't let that happen."

Poet Ataol Behramoğlu from the Moviemakers Labor Union of Turkey also supported the panel, saying that an intervention on literary works would severely damage their quality.

Turkish women journalists

Related reading:  Freedom of Expression in Turkey; Turkey's Women Journalists Release Statement

Stop SOPA and PIPA and Piracy?

Wikipedia and Google joined hundreds of other websites on Wednesday in a sprawling online protest against legislation in the US Congress intended to crack down on Internet piracy.

Wikipedia shut down the English version of its online encyclopaedia for 24 hours to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) introduced in the House of Representatives and the Senate version, the Protect IP Act (Pipa).

Google blotted out the celebrated logo on its US home page with a black banner and published an exhortation to users to “Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the Web!”

Like Wikipedia, social news site reddit also went dark, urging visitors to call their lawmaker or sign a petition opposing the House and Senate bills. “These bills provide overly broad mechanisms for enforcement of copyright which would restrict innovation and threaten the existence of websites with user-submitted content,” reddit said.

Culture and technology blog Boing Boing also took itself offline to protest what it called “legislation that would certainly kill us forever”.

Reporters Without Borders shut down its English-language website for 24 hours warning that the bills “would sacrifice online freedom of expression in the name of combating piracy”.

Blogging platform WordPress.com covered its home page with black banners with the word ‘censored’ as did technology magazine Wired.

The popular Cheezburger humour network posted messages of opposition to the bills on all of its 58 sites, which include icanhascheezburger.com, FAIL Blog and The Daily What.

The draft legislation has won the backing of Hollywood, the music industry, the National Association of Manufacturers and other groups.—AFP

YouTube Project Parodies Damascus Censorship

(RSF/IFEX) - 9 January 2011 - To draw public attention to media censorship in Syria, Reporters Without Borders and the JWT Paris ad agency have produced a short video inspired by parodies of Siri, the star app on the new iPhone 4S. It shows a man hunched over his iPhone failing to get any information from Siri about Syria except the weather forecast, the only news the government is not censoring.

The outside world is managing to get some limited information about the protests in Syria and the government's bloody crackdown, but the authorities have taken radical steps to prevent Syrians from reporting anything that strays from the official line. The local media are gagged and foreign reporters have been expelled. Would-be citizen journalists who try to use the Internet are arrested and mistreated.

In order to highlight these violations of freedom of information, JWT Paris had the idea of showing Siri, whose answers to queries are not always relevant, being completely stumped by questions about current events in Syria because of the government's news blackout.

Available for viewing on the Reporters Without Borders website and social networks including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, this video is the third joint project between Reporters Without Borders and JWT Paris.

We previously worked together on the campaign for the release of the two French journalists who were held hostage in Afghanistan, Stéphane Taponier and Hervé Ghesquière, and on the "Journalists Hunt" awareness campaign.

For more information:

Reporters Without Borders
47, rue Vivienne
75002 Paris
France
rsf (@) rsf.org
Phone: +33 1 44 83 84 84
Fax: +33 1 45 23 11 51
http://www.rsf.org/

Only the Pope Can Accuse Cardinals

VATICAN CITY, JUNE 28, 2010 (Zenit.org).- In the Church, only the Pope can level accusations against cardinals. This was the clarification made today by the Vatican at the conclusion of an audience between Benedict XVI and Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the archbishop of Vienna, Austria.

The meeting took place between the two to discuss statements made by the cardinal regarding the investigation of his predecessor, Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër, who resigned in 1995 amidst allegations of sexual abuse.

Cardinal Schonbörn made comments to journalists April 28 that were interpreted by the media as an accusation against Cardinal Angelo Sodano's treatment of the investigation. It was understood from his statements that he believed that the then secretary of state, under Pope John Paul II, had blocked the inquiry for "diplomatic reasons."

Benedict XVI received first Cardinal Schönborn, a former student of his, to discuss the situation. The two were then joined by Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who is now the dean of the College of Cardinals, and the current secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.

The Vatican communiqué confirmed that in the second part of the meeting, "some widespread mistakes were clarified and resolved in part derived from some expressions of Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, who expressed his displeasure over the interpretations made."

The note then continued, "It is reminded that in the Church, when it is a question of accusations against a cardinal, the competence belongs only to the Pope; other entities can have a consultative function, always with due respect for the persons."

Read it all here.

Facebook Ban and Govt. Censorship

Rebecca McKinson writes a blog post More problems in Facebookistan, here last paragraph quite aptly sums up the frustrations of the Muslim community as a whole – she says

This larger context also helps explain the extent to which moderate and cosmopolitan Muslim Facebook users who believe in free speech against censorship were so alienated and upset by the fact that Facebook allowed the “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” page – which on the several occasions when I looked at it was full of obscene and gratuitous anti-Muslim hate speech – to stay up for more than a week. It’s well known that Facebook quickly takes down other racist and anti-semitic pages. Yet they allowed a page full of nastiness and hate against the Muslim faith to stay up.

Personally, I too cant stomach the fact that the Facebook administrators continue to deliberately allow such uncontrolled hatred to continue on their websites which is a direct violation of their terms of service, it seems they are keen to prove a point, push the limits of decency and be responsible to engage the world in a deliberate religious war. I continue to condemn the blasphemous cartoons and the hypocrisy of the Mark Zuckerberg but at the same time am fully against a blind outright censorship enforced by the government of Pakistan on the entire domain, if such images are not acceptable under the Constitution of Pakistan then a mere block on the particular pages and other subsequent pages should have been enough.

Read it all here.

Today was the day the Pakistan Government was to have lifted the block on Facebook. It has done so.

May 31 (Bloomberg) -- A Pakistani court ordered the government to lift a ban on Facebook Inc., the world’s No. 1 social networking service, 12 days after it blocked access to the website, according to a lawyer.

“Facebook assured the court no blasphemous material will be available to users in Pakistan,” Chaudhry Zulfiqar, the lawyer who asked the court to block Facebook on May 19, said by telephone from Lahore today. Palo Alto, California-based Facebook’s corporate communications department didn’t immediately respond to an e-mailed enquiry.

The Lahore High Court ordered the ban on Facebook on May 20 and blocked Google Inc.’s YouTube video service a day later. The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority also blocked 450 Web links for carrying objectionable material.

The ban began after a Facebook user started a competition asking participants to draw sketches of Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam. Creating images of the Prophet is prohibited in Islam.

Censorship or Good Parenting?

Keeping the principle of free speech safe requires vigilance; if people in America really were seeking to ban books--to forbid their printing or sale, for instance--it would be important to focus on their efforts and to raise awareness about them.

But that kind of "banning" isn't what the ALA is talking about at all.In fact, according to their website, the ALA's Banned Book Week is really called "Banned and Challenged Book Week. A "challenge" to a book occurs when someone objects to some of the content of a book, and, most of the time, asks that the book be removed from children's access. Parents were responsible for 57% of such challenges between 1990 and 2008, and an astonishing 70% of the challenges involved books that were either in a school classroom or a school library. Moreover, nearly a third of challenges made to all books (including books aimed at adults) were made because the challengers found the materials to be too sexually explicit.

Now, if the vast majority of challenges to books involve parents, centre around books available in schools, and deal with such issues as sexual explicitness, offensive language, or the unsuitability of the books for a specific age group, then I think we're no longer talking about book-banning or censorship. I think we're talking about parenting.

The attitude of the ALA is that a parent only has the right to censor or control what his own children read. He doesn't have the right to request the removal from the school library or classroom shelf those books which he finds obscene or dangerous to morality, because someone else might prefer for his children to read those books. The school alone has the final say in what books are appropriate for the children under its care to read, and if a child reads at school a book or books which his parents absolutely forbid at home--well, then, perhaps the parents' values are too narrow and restrictive to begin with.

Read it all here.

Iran/China Buy Technologies to Block Access

"The Wall Street Journal" has reported that European companies Siemens (Germany) and Nokia (Finland) have supplied the software for surveillance of telecommunications in Iran through a "joint venture" Nokia Siemens Network. Nokia confirmed the sale of its technology using "deep packet inspection" (DPI), which allows interception of all kinds of communications, such as emails, phone calls, images or messages posted on social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc). DPI is generally used to grade data on the Internet (sending an email on high priority for example).

China's MIIT on 8 June this year said that it had given companies operating there six weeks to fit their computers with new software - Green Dam Youth Escort - paid for by the government to protect "young people" from"harmful" content online. Since March it has been downloaded more than 3 million times, is apparently used in 2,279 schools and installed in some 518,000 computers. Chinese companies Lenovo, Inspur and Hedy have reportedly already installed the software on more than 52 million computers.

The Open Net Initiative says that the software "has an influence that goes well beyond the protection of young people: the filtering options include blocking political and religious content" (download the study in PDF on RSF's website). So far only Microsoft has shown concern about the effects on the free circulation of information as a result of installing this software.

http://www.ifex.org/china/2009/06/25/internet_censorship/