CAIRO: A Cairo court on Saturday ordered the government to block access to the YouTube website for 30 days for carrying an anti-Islam film that caused deadly riots across the world, but the ruling can be appealed and based on precedent may not be enforced.
Judge Hassouna Tawfiq ordered YouTube blocked for carrying a 14-minute trailer for the movie “Innocence of Muslims,” which puts Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) and Islam as a whole in bad light.
The film, which was produced by an Egyptian-born Coptic Christian who’s now a US citizen, sparked deadly protests that killed more than 50 people in more than 20 countries last year.
In the past, a similar order to ban pornographic websites deemed offensive in Egypt has not been enforced because of high costs associated with technical applications, although blocking YouTube may be easier to enforce.
YouTube’s parent company, Google, declined to remove the video from the website last year, but restricted access to it in certain countries, including Egypt, Libya and Indonesia, because it says the video broke laws in those countries. At the height of the protests, YouTube was ordered blocked in several countries, including Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia.
Lawyer Mohammed Hamid Salim, who filed the lawsuit in Cairo, alleged the film constitutes a threat to Egypt’s security. Protesters in Cairo scaled the US Embassy’s walls and brought down the US flag in a demonstration against the film last September. Street clashes ensued for days around the embassy.
Similarly last year, an Egyptian court convicted in absentia seven Egyptian Coptic Christians and a Florida-based American pastor, sentencing them to death on charges linked to the anti-Islam film.
The case was seen as largely symbolic because the defendants, who mostly live in the United States, were outside Egypt and unlikely to ever face the sentence. In a related case, a Cairo court also convicted a Coptic Christian blogger who shared the film on social networking sites. The blogger was sentenced to three years in prison for blasphemy and contempt of religion, but released on bail shortly thereafter.
During the 18-day uprising that toppled longtime Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, the government moved to block the entire Internet for several days in an attempt to disrupt communications among activists. The measure failed to curb huge street protests against the regime.
Egypt court orders YouTube blocked over anti-Islam film
Egypt court orders YouTube blocked over anti-Islam film
High-level Turkish team to visit Damascus on Monday for talks on SDF integration
- The visit by Turkiye’s foreign and defense ministers and its intelligence chief comes amid efforts by Syrian, Kurdish and US officials to show some progress with the deal
ANKARA: A high-level Turkish delegation will visit Damascus on Monday to discuss bilateral ties and the implementation of a deal for integrating the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) into Syria’s state apparatus, a Turkish Foreign Ministry source said.
The visit by Turkiye’s foreign and defense ministers and its intelligence chief comes amid efforts by Syrian, Kurdish and US officials to show some progress with the deal. But Ankara accuses the SDF of stalling ahead of a year-end deadline.
Turkiye views the US-backed SDF, which controls swathes of northeastern Syria, as a terrorist organization and has warned of military action if the group does not honor the agreement.
Last week Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said Ankara hoped to avoid resorting to military action against the SDF but that its patience was running out.
The Foreign Ministry source said Fidan, Defense Minister Yasar Guler and the head of Turkiye’s MIT intelligence agency, Ibrahim Kalin, would attend the talks in Damascus, a year after the fall of former President Bashar Assad.
TURKEY SAYS ITS NATIONAL SECURITY IS AT STAKE
The source said the integration deal “closely concerned Turkiye’s national security priorities” and the delegation would discuss its implementation. Turkiye has said integration must ensure that the SDF’s chain of command is broken.
Sources have previously told Reuters that Damascus sent a proposal to the SDF expressing openness to reorganizing the group’s roughly 50,000 fighters into three main divisions and smaller brigades as long as it cedes some chains of command and opens its territory to other Syrian army units.
Turkiye sees the SDF as an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant group and says it too must disarm and dissolve itself, in line with a disarmament process now underway between the Turkish state and the PKK.
Ankara has conducted cross-border military operations against the SDF in the past. It accuses the group of wanting to circumvent the integration deal and says this poses a threat to both Turkiye and the unity of Syria.
