Say Anything Blog

Free Speech: YouTube has agreed to scrub material critical of radical Islam after Pakistan’s religious police crashed the popular site in protest. Score another one for the Islamofascists.

The worldwide outage — and anti-speech outrage — occurred after Pakistani authorities ordered local Internet service providers to block access to a YouTube video they deemed “highly provocative and blasphemous.”

The offending video was a trailer for a Dutch documentary set for release next month that shows in detail how Islamic doctrine is an “inspiration for intolerance, murder and terror.”

Experts say the method used to block the site leaked onto the Internet and caused traffic to YouTube to be directed into a kind of “Web cul-de-sac in Pakistan,” as UPI described it.

The method involved Pakistani ISP operators “deliberately putting false information out there” that diverted traffic to the site across the globe for hours, said Daniel Castro of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.

In other words, the Pakistani government essentially committed an act of cyberterrorism. Islamabad denies it, claiming its crashing of YouTube was “not intentional.”

However, “we have determined the source of these events was a network in Pakistan,” YouTube said in a statement. “We are investigating and working with others in the Internet community to prevent this from happening again.”

Meantime, YouTube is giving in to its blackmailers in Pakistan by removing “highly profane and sacrilegious footage” that was offensive to Islam, including cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.

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Their latest round of censorship, shocking in its global scale, is more evidence that the West is in the throes of an epic clash over ideas and cultures — one closed and medieval, the other open and progressive.

Acquiescing to the demands of theocratic blackmailers is no way to bring the other side into the light of the modern world. It only emboldens them.