Mosque smarts and technical dunces
When I wrote Temple smarts and street dunces
as the subtitle to my write-up Earth-queers quaking in Israel
on the 21st of February, I was not anticipating writing Mosque smarts
and technical dunces 5 days on.
On Sunday, the Pakistani government had ordered ISPs
to block all access to YouTube because of content deemed offensive to Islam
and they all complied.
The smarts at Pakistan Telecom hijacked the IP address
of the YouTube web server and in conjunction with PCCW
an ISP sent seekers of that site down a rabbit hole.
In fact, it sent the global user community of YouTube
down the rabbit hole for two hours.
The jury is out as to whether this act was deliberate
or just a case of ignorance about how Internet protocols work because Morocco,
Thailand and Turkey
have successfully implemented bans to YouTube without bringing the whole house down.
Accountability or ridicule
Did I not say, “The sooner adherents and followers call
their leaders to account the less their beliefs and dogma are subjected to ridicule”,
to leaders we now have to add technical people.
This also extends however tenuously to the use and abuse
of knowledge, when Pakistan acquired knowledge of nuclear weaponry the smarts
involved opened an illegal market of nuclear proliferation threatening
global peace.
Fostering an intellectual environment
Sadly, the real problem is the fact that the Pakistani
government has failed to foster an intellectual environment amongst its people.
In the weekend, a friend sent me a few links from YouTube
to do with a grandmother doing some “commendably” shocking things like kicking a
toddler out of the path of an oncoming train – I found the material utterly offensive
and definitely not funny, I did not bother to view the other link but deleted the
email and was ungentlemanly enough not send acknowledgements or thanks.
What I am saying here is I made the decision to view
the content and once I found it was not to my liking, I refused to create more revulsion
by viewing the rest of the material.
If the email had come with a clearer idea of the content,
I would not have opened the links at all.
Give the people more credit of discernment
Surely, the people of Pakistan should be able to make
informed decisions like that; as refusing to view YouTube videos with refer to the
Mohammedan cartoons (Warning: Links to the cartoons, you exercise
a personal prerogative in clicking on the link) or Geert
Wilders’ Islamic ruse called Fitna
to be released in March and still be about to seek out videos that glorify Islam
or teach Internet protocols properly.
Censorship is a very blunt and unwieldy hammer to hit
the nail where the government has lost the persuasion of ideas that they have to
use the coercion of tyranny by resorting to blanket bans.
Very typical of ordering everyone to wall off the windows
in their homes because the wind is blowing and it might carry bad odours when people
should have the choice to open or close their windows at will to let air in or keep
it out as they will.
In the process, technical ignorance on the one part
and government policy failure on the other have combined to depict proud, independent
and intelligent Pakistanis as ignorant, incapable of making informed decisions and
brought Islam to unnecessary ridicule in the name of protecting the self-same religion.
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