It’s shocking enough that Pakistan recently told two American Muslims that they could face 10-year prison sentences unless they took down a “blasphemous” U.S.-based website. Worse still is that Pakistan has long had help in imposing Sharia law from a value-signaling U.S.-based tech company — Twitter.
As for the targeted website, TrueIslam.com, it “is the online home of the American Ahmadiyya Muslim community, run by an American group, hosted in the United States, and represented by American citizens,” reports Breitbart.
Ahmadi Muslims, persecuted in Pakistan, “emphasize in their worship ‘commitment to peace, their law-abiding nature and determination to create a harmonious society for all people, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity or faith,’” Breitbart relates, quoting TrueIslam.com. Breitbart continues:
The attempt to silence “blasphemy” in America follows repeated vows from Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan that he would endeavor to criminalize speech that offends Muslims globally, including using Pakistan’s platform on the U.N. Human Rights Council to enact global laws to silence enemies of Khan’s interpretation of Sunni Islam anywhere on the planet. The U.N. General Assembly approved a resolution introduced by Pakistan in December against alleged “Islamophobia” calling for the silencing of speech offensive to Muslims.
Blasphemy against Islam is a crime in the Pakistani penal code. Blasphemy against Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, or the Quran in particular, is punishable by death.
… The Pakistan Telecommunication Authorities (PTA), the nation’s government media watchdog, sent a message to Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA’s spokesmen, Amjad Mahmood Khan and Harris Zafar, last week demanding they unpublish TrueIslam.com or face criminal prosecution in Pakistan. The message accused the American citizens of violating Pakistan’s blasphemy law, which prohibits Ahmadis from identifying as Muslim [Pakistan considers Ahmadis “imposters”], and threatened over $3 million in fines and a prison sentence of up to ten years for each if they did not take it down. As all individuals involved are Americans and the alleged infractions did not occur in Pakistan, the move represents an attempt to enforce Pakistani law on American soil.
The Islamabad government has help in this, too — from “American” Big Tech. As Jihad Watch’s Christine Douglass-Williams reminded us Saturday:
Back in December 2018, FrontPage Magazine Managing Editor Jamie Glazov actually received a warning notice from Twitter:
We are writing to inform you that Twitter has received official correspondence regarding your Twitter account, @JamieGlazov.
The correspondence claims that the following content is in violation of Pakistan law: Section 37 of PECA-2016, Section 295 B and Section 295 C of the Pakistan penal code… Twitter has not taken any action on the reported content at this time. We are only writing to inform you that content posted to your account has been mentioned in a complaint.Then only three months ago, Twitter sent a notice to Robert Spencer, saying that his tweet violated the laws of Pakistan, to which he rightly responded:
In sending out these notices, Twitter is behaving as if Islamic blasphemy law applied to people outside of Sharia domains. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation has been working for years at the UN to compel Western countries to criminalize criticism of Islam (under the guise of prohibiting ‘incitement to religious hatred’).
Of course, Twitter is the same company that banned President Donald Trump — and just yesterday, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell — from its platform for life.
Yet dictators such as Iran’s “supreme leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who sent tweets calling for Israel’s destruction, still have accounts on Twitter. So does Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani; and its foreign minister, Mohammad Zarif.
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Note, too, that their regime “pledges Death to America, calling us the Great Satan,” wrote Representative Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) January 8. “Chinese Communist Party officials who say Coronavirus was sent to China by the US military aren’t suspended,” either, he added.
Since then, however, China’s U.S. Embassy Twitter account has been suspended — for posting a message deemed dehumanizing toward Muslims.
Don’t congratulate Twitter too much for this “principled” act, though. After all, the company is officially banned in China (though approximately 10 million Chinese users circumvent the prohibition). So its stand doesn’t cut into its bottom line.
And that is the Big Tech bottom line. Google postures about inclusiveness, tolerance, democracy, and other “woke” values, but then helps China suppress its own people. And while Parler has been taken down by GoogTwitFace for supposedly facilitating the January 6 Capitol mayhem, the past summer’s left-wing rioters and looters “often coordinated their attacks on Facebook and bragged of them in real-time on Twitter,” pointed out history professor Victor Davis Hanson Sunday.
So should we maybe, just perhaps, suspect that Parler was targeted partially because it competes with Twitter? Could it be, as Hanson puts it, that Silicon Valley uses “social activism to mask 19th-century robber-baron monopolization of its markets”?
This isn’t to say Big Tech is without faux principles, just that they’re negotiable as faux principles will be. And Islam’s critics in America don’t compare to the wider Muslim market, which really is too big to flail.
