Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Court Decision: Banning The BookFace










The Lahore High Court in it's infinite wisdom made the unilateral decision to ban Facebook. No more poking, no more changing statuses every 30 minutes, No more fb events and no more Facebook Fan Pages....not to mention, no more Farmville. Needless to say, I and every other facebook user in Pakistan are probably still reeling from the shock of being cut off.  (The ban is temporary, and only till the 31st of May) Suddenly I have several few hours of the day free, in which I’ll constructively use to write hate mails to Facebook, the Lahore High Court, Mr. Faisal “I’m just an incompetent fool’ Shehzad and Shoaib Akhtar (he just seems to annoy me lately with his “I can bowl 6-7 overs’ whining"). Then a remembered what Proxy Servers were and my life went back to order. whew.

The reason for the outright ban was because of the controversy generated by a facebook page, created by a Seattle based 
imbecile cartoonist, that proposed a cartoon drawing competition of the Prophet (PBUH), in response to the notoriously un-politically correct South Park decision to censor an episode that depicted the Prophet (PBUH). BTW: The Cartoonist withdrew from the campaign citing that her intention was to emotionally castrate South Park for their censored episode.  

So….if this cartoonist made a plain website and had pages across different communities such as Twitter, MySpace, Xuqa, Orkut etc, would we ban all of those too? Or just ban the evil internet? What is a measured response and why are we the only country in the world that’s decided to ban facebook……



I conjectured a meeting between two bored (as opposed to boring) sitting LHC judges.

Judge 1 ‘Dude, I’m bored’
Judge 2 ‘Me too….lets do something’
Judge 1 ‘Prosecute Musharruf?’
Judge 2 ‘Someone else is already doing that, we don’t want to be copy cats, besides he already has like 200 thousand Bookface friends.....’
Judge 1 ‘hmm…intense.....We need to ban bookface.’
Judge 2 ‘alright….why?”
Judge 1’because I only have like a dozen friends and all of these cute gori girls keep turning me down….Hilary Clinton didn’t even accept me, even though we shared a really nice moment when I moved to the side as she stomped past with her Punjabi heroine strut’
Judge 2 ‘what a bitch’
Judge 1 ‘indeed’
Judge 2 ‘well, constitutionally, we can’t ban bookface over your lack of friends’
Judge 1 ‘Can we ban it because it’s immoral and corrupts  the impressionable  youth?’






Judge 2 ‘Can’t, that’s why the Punjab Assembly tried 
banning those late night cell packages, if we ban it for that everyone will think we actually care what the politicians say….and we would look like a bunch of dim witted copy cats.
Judge 1 ‘What about safety, can’t we just claim that the terrorists use bookface to  communicate, incite violence and carry out attacks on politicians’
Judge 2 ’Can’t, that’s why the city 
governments banned Pillion riding’
Judge 1 ‘Shucks, can’t we frame it that the less we use facebook, the more we can bridge the 
energy deficit….by like 1000 megatrons?’
Judge 2’ I think you mean Mega Vats, and no, that wouldn’t work either….unless we banned computers…’
Judge 1’ We can’t do that, we just banned the import of foreign computers, Shit, we need to figure out something, I got wasted last 
Fashion Week and told this equally wasted  hot model  that I could kill bookface, if I don’t do it, she’ll laugh, not take me seriously and never go out with me and keep dating those political vederas’
Judge 2 ‘ I know how you feel, you’d think after we got rid of a freaking President, that we’d be like instant babe magnets…haha, it’s brilliant when we can join a protest and then pretend to be spear heading it!’
Judge 1 ‘By jove, I’ve got it, we ban bookface, ‘because some kid’, who is actually a high ranking ISI agent, creates an fan page where everyone can depict pictures of our Holy prophet’






Judge 2 ‘So you want to ban bookface because one of the four hundred million users, who is actually a proxy of one of our agents, creates a page that calls on people to draw pictures of the Prophet....would they fall for it?’

Judge 1 ‘Yes!, it would work fabulously, both the Jamaat Islami and ‘I’m a modern Islamist’ folk would all rush to the cause! They seem bored nowadays. And as we’ve seen, students don’t need a reason to congregate and protest (by protest, we mean loot shops and burn cars).
Judge 2 ‘They do seem bored and lifeless lately….. and that was before their pet Rottweiler Taliban students  started bombing their own rallies’





Judge 1: ‘Well, the bookface owners name is Zuckerberg….that’s Zionist I think’
Judge 2 ‘Zionist works, but we can just claim that Zuckerberg is related to Fasi Zaka…that chap ruins my drive home every week’
Judge 1: ‘Bugger, can we ban him too?’
Judge 2 ‘nah, we’re thinking about putting him on the payroll. Though we could add something about an American plot somehow….maybe squeeze a few more $ billion out of them’
Judge 1 ‘They still have our swiss bank account no.?’
Judge 2 ‘Yep, and our ‘just incase’ green cards’
Judge 1 ‘We are going to hell’
Judge 2 ‘Nah, God’s a judge too, he’ll help us out.’

Unfortunately, I think these gentlemen may not have realized that there are these nifty things called ‘Proxy sites’, from which you can access facebook by bouncing servers.



Dear LHC Judges,

You can deny us electricity, you can deny us justice and you can deny us effective honest government, but we’ll be damned if you try to take away our facebook. You already gave the creators of this ‘Draw Muhammad (PBUH)’ what they craved the most…publicity. 



Thanks a lot for giving a voice to an unknown cartoonist and showing the rest of the world how out of control we Pakistani Muslims really are....Bat Shit Fucking Insane Bunch of Retards You Are.  
We are the youth,  
we are smarter than you and we’ll show off just to prove to you how capable we are.

Welcome to our world.


































With all of the scorn & lack of respect we can muster,

Pakistani Youth

PS: Don’t worry about the blasphemous cartoons, we can crash the Facebook servers and make that cartoonist life a living online hell....and when we are done with them, we'll come for you!




Besides....We All Know What Facebook Is Really Meant For.

8 comments:

Xeb said...

Hahaha, this most made me laugh out loud! :P

Ps: Word verification: umsad. irony is everywhere today!

Alpha Za said...

Thanks for the comment Zeb! Glad you liked it. Please consider this as further Proof that Karachi is better ;)

We have no Youtube now either...Frick!

word verification: umsad....it's just one of the those day

Anonymous said...

It's a strange old world, isn't it? I was going to say this is up there with Canute forbidding the tide to come in, but then that's doing an injustice to Canute who was demonstrating the foolishness of his courtiers who had suggested he was so great a king that he could stop the tides if he wanted! There's always someone trying to stop technology's inexorable march. Your judges won't be the last. Strange isn't it that they can't see how foolish they are. I hope you come through this troubled period without too much trouble. Anyway they don't seem to realise their most subversive voice is working on blogger! Love Alec

Alpha Za said...

@ Alec: Strange old world indeed. Stupidity knows no bounds. I remember reading about tide story. I thought Charlemagne did it....to prove that he wasn't greater than God.

haha, they actually did ban blogspot for like 18 months....I shit you not.

I doubt I'm there biggest problem... yet!

Thanks for the comment.

Usman said...

Murtaza,

yar, this is an excellent post! To be honest, I couldn't believe that this post is coming from Pakistan. I checked your profile, and I was not all wrong.
Great blog, Keep it up!

Alpha Za said...

@ Usman: Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it. Yes, Pakistan still does produce a few half decent things, and I'm glad you think that my humble blog is one of them.

Thanks for the comment.

Rukhsana Shama said...

Hey, I haven't read the post, I am just heading to, I have made a petition on petition online against the ban...do sign:
http://www.petitiononline.com/pak123/petition.html

Alpha Za said...

@rsh: Thanks rsh, I've signed your petition and I encourage others to do so as well. Particularly any mildly inebriated LHC judges who might be reading this (Hint Hint).

Hope you enjoy the post when you get around to reading it ;)