11-05-2010, 10:25 PM
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Zen Warrior
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Join Date: Sep 2010
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US Islamic Website is Taken Down
I find this story disturbing in two ways. One, that it was taken down and the questions regarding speech rights, but two, that stuff like this is actually so available on the web. My concern is that over-the-top sites like this will start to erode our freedoms out of safety concerns, which is legitimate, but at some point, we will probably have to confront the issue from the speech rights side. 
Quote:
LONDON — A United States-based extremist Islamic Web site was taken down on Friday after the British authorities complained of a post praising a young woman who stabbed and nearly killed a British lawmaker over his support for the Iraq war.
The post included a list of 383 British lawmakers who voted for the war, with instructions on tracking their movements, and it called for Muslims to “raise the knife of Jihad” against them, according to The Times of London, which reported the post on Friday. It also included a link for buying a kitchen knife, the report said.
The site, RevolutionMuslim.com, is no longer available, but Google shows a cached version that predates the post. It is registered in Bellevue, Wash., a suburb of Seattle, and was run this year from Brooklyn.
E-mails and calls to the site went unreturned Friday. But a large disclaimer at the top of the cached version cites the First Amendment right to free speech and states that it is “not affiliated with any terrorist states or organizations.” It says it “condemns all forms of terrorism carried out in the name of freedom and democracy.”
Why the site was taken down was unclear. Legal experts say that it is difficult for the government to force a site off the Internet. But the government could pressure a site operator or service provider to take it down.
The British Home Office said it had raised the issue of the post with the American authorities, and the Metropolitan Police counterterrorism section said it had also made inquiries.
The site drew attention this year when, after an episode of the cartoon “South Park” centered on the Prophet Muhammad, it posted the addresses for the show’s creators next to a picture of the body of the Dutch film director Theo van Gogh. Mr. van Gogh was fatally stabbed and shot in 2004 after making a documentary film about the abuse of women in some Islamic cultures.
A spokesman for the site claimed at the time that the message was not a threat, merely “a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them.”
The stabbing case that was the focus of the recent post ended Wednesday with the 21-year-old attacker, Roshonara Choudhry, being given a life sentence. She stabbed the member of Parliament, Stephen Timms, twice in the stomach at a public meeting in May in what she called “revenge” for the people of Iraq.
She cited RevolutionMuslim.com as one of her inspirations. She found more in the YouTube videos of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Muslim preacher who affiliated himself with the Yemen-based group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. YouTube had received complaints from American and British lawmakers about the videos in recent weeks. On Wednesday, the day Ms. Choudhry was convicted, YouTube removed hundreds of them.
On Thursday, Revolution Muslim published its praise of Ms. Choudhry as a “heroine,” and expressed the hope “for her action to inspire Muslims to raise the knife of jihad against those who voted for the countless rapes, murders, pillages and torture of Muslim civilians as a direct consequence of their vote.”
Miguel Helft contributed reporting from San Francisco.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/wo...t=nytimesworld
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Courtesy of Swissman
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