Internet bullies, intimidation and “Fitna mushrooms”!

We witnessed yesterday how the enemies of freedom and western democracy, in a move that was entirely predictable, reportedly resorted to threats of violence against the staff of the NewsLeak Internet company, for daring to demonstrate a commitment to freedom of speech through hosting Dutch MP, Geert Wilders, controversial video “Fitna”.

What is not so widely known is that this follows, only by a few days, Internet company YouTube, being forced to remove several video clips from its site, following the Turkish Government ordering the blocking of access to the video-sharing Web site!

In a statement in Turkish sent to The Associated Press on Thursday, YouTube said the company “reviewed the videos that led to the most recent ban on access and removed them because of their content, which violate YouTube’s content policy.”

This follows a court in Ankara imposing a ban on access to the site at the request of a prosecutor who had argued the clips were disrespectful to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.

According to media reports: “Access to YouTube, which is owned by Google Inc., remained blocked in Turkey on Thursday morning, and Turkish authorities could not be reached for comment on when access might resume”.

Other governments have tried to block YouTube in their countries as well.

One recent gaff by Pakistan’s government led to a broader outage affecting most of the world because a Pakistani telecommunications company implementing the block made a mistake in its technical configuration.

The YouTube ban in Turkey has highlighted this Muslim country’s chequered record on free expression, which Turkey claims it wants to improve as part of its bid to join the European Union!

Although it is not known for sure, it is thought that the “offensive” videos removed to appease the Turkish Government, rightly or wrongly, linked Kemal Ataturk and his Muslim regime, with aspects of the extermination of some one to two million Christian Greeks and Armenians during and after, the First World War. This being a holocaust that the Turkish Government, even today, refuses to officially acknowledge – despite it occurring in living memory! Indeed the American ambassador in Constantinople at the time, described it thus:

The ambassador “accused the “Turkish government” of a campaign of “outrageous terrorizing, cruel torturing, driving of women into harems, debauchery of innocent girls, the sale of many of them at 80 cents each, the murdering of hundreds of thousands and the deportation to and starvation in the desert of other hundreds of thousands, [and] the destruction of hundreds of villages and many cities”, all part of “the willful execution” of a “scheme to annihilate the Armenian, Greek and Syrian Christians of Turkey.”

Returning to the subject of “Fitna” we can confirm, as we predicted yesterday evening, that copies of the video have popped up like mushrooms overnight throughout Cyberspace! In the cause of the preservation of freedom of speech, we can tell you that one such “mushroom” may be found: here .