Banned in Turkey

Although biologist Richard Dawkins invented a new weapon as Seph said, your laws shouldn’t just allow blocking sites (geez I hope you don’t really believe you can block something on internet) just because there are so called ‘insulting’ comments inside.

Our famous blocker H.Y. (I am scared to write his name) was able to block wordpress.com after his lawyers found there are several blogs written against him there. Therefore you couldn’t access the rest of wordpress.com bloggers because of those blogs.

A bill was signed into law back in May 2007 in Turkey, named “Regulating the content and prevention of crimes in internet domain”. It contains several broken articles but the famous one, number 8 states:

When there is sufficient evidence of the following crimes are committed with the content, access to content is suspended:

Crimes defined in Turkish Penal Law:

  1. Inciting suicide (article 84)
  2. Sexual abuse of children (article 103, paragraph 1)
  3. Inciting drug use (article 190)
  4. Supply for materials against health (article 194)
  5. Obscenity (article 226)
  6. Prostitution (article 227)
  7. Providing opportunity and environment for gambling (article 228)

and…

  • crimes against the law numbered 5816, “crimes against Atatürk”.

Well, nobody can argue on some topics but how can a court or a judge just define an obscenity level and block access to websites according to that? And how come we still have a law protecting the spiritual individual rights of Atatürk in this century? Doesn’t it make him as a great dictator which we are frantically against?

Anyways. This is embarrassing.

Apparently Dawkins ban seems not to fit these but perhaps is related to article 9 removing content from the website, right of denial. Famous blocker of all time found some articles and even some contributor comments insulting and asked them to be removed from Dawkins’ website. If the content provider doesn’t remove the defamatory content, I assume court can give a decision to block access to website.

I am wondering if this is the objectionable content in that article:

I am at a loss to reconcile the expensive and glossy production values of this book with the “breathtaking inanity” of the content. Is it really inanity, or is it just plain laziness – or perhaps cynical awareness of the ignorance and stupidity of the target audience – mostly Muslim creationists. And where does the money come from?

If that was it and court accepted the objections such as blasphemy, religion insulting as the valid arguments than it is time we should inevitably consider having a dual legal system like Britain.