Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Copts asking their government for censorship

A controversial movie still in production about a Coptic Christian woman in Egypt who has a baby out of wedlock after the church’s refusal to grant her a divorce has come under fire from Coptic activists who are seeking to ban the movie for insulting Christianity. Coptic lawyer and activist Nabil Ghobrial warned in an official filing Monday that the Coptic church would sue those involved in the film as well as governmental authorities if production was not halted or the film censored.

But brothers, wait! You are so often suffering from the government's censorship. Why now ask for its application! I really do not think the Copts are wise to do this. Much better, they shoud demand a total lifting of all censorship. That is the direction Arab countries should go. Not backward into asking the government to function as the thought-police.

For more on this issue, see www.watan.com.

1 comment:

Snake Oil Baron said...

Isn't there a saying about people always wanting liberty for themselves and accountability for everyone else? Maybe it was privacy for themselves. Personally I want meatballs for myself and Brussels Sprouts for everyone else.

At any rate, pointing out that the entertainment industry is biased or hostile to you is one thing, asking for there work to be censored is quite another. I personally do not even believe that hate speech should automatically be stopped since preventing people from saying hateful things in the public sphere where they can be witnessed and refuted does not stop the hate or its spread. If the hate directly incites acts of violence it should be stopped. If the hate is systematic and no opposing views are allowed as with the anti-Semitic state media in regimes like Syria (or Western TV and newspaper media) then calls for reform are justified. None of that seems to be the case in this story. Maybe having been repeatedly censored makes the tool of censorship more tempting. Lead us not into temptation as someone once said.