I don’t know what zone-h.org is. Someone pointed me to the site saying that he could not access it from India and believes that the government of India has banned it. He said that he has “heard (from a reliable source) a rumour that the Government of India has a fairly regular habit of issuing fiats to ISPs to block various websites that it feels are objectionable for some reason.”

Malavika Patil asked in a comment to the post “My Position on MF Husain”: “Does obscenity/pornography deserve free speech rights?” As a free speech fundamentalists, I can only answer, “Yes, yes, and yes!” I am enough of a realist to believe that no individual or group is so wise as to be a judge of what speech deserves the protection of law and what doesn’t. The only way forward is to allow all speech, regardless of how someone feels about it.

I find two items interesting today. One is an online petition titled “Demand for withdrawal of a flawed book on Hindu History published by PENGUIN” is making the rounds. Addressed to the presidents of the Penguin Group and Penguin India Pvt Ltd, it says, “The Hindus: An Alternative History” by Wendy Doniger “is rife with numerous errors in its historical facts and Sanskrit translations. These errors and misrepresentations are bound and perhaps intended to mislead students of Indian and Hindu history.” The other item is the story about M F …

I came across this story on a mailing list. Let me retell the story first and then the source of the story.

You know that you have arrived when you find that your writing has been banned in some place. Nihar, when he was traveling in Iran, found that some blog posts of mine are banned there. He sent me a screen capture which you will find below the fold. Now at least I hope you are impressed. Or will you be impressed only after the Indian government bans this blog?
PS: I don’t think it will be long before the government of India bans this blog. There are too many things here …

YouTube has banned the James Randi Educational Foundation channel.

The reason is not yet known. I fear that it did so because of some religious group was offended by the JREF’s rational argument. Can’t really blame them since even governments are bending over. Recently the UN was the site of an unsightly scene where it was decided that any expression that offends the followers of one particular religion was to be banned. In India, they jailed a newspaper editor because thousands of violent thugs demanded his death for offending …

The UK is on the fast track to becoming a closed society in its hurry to emulate Saudi Arabia. Last week, it denied entry to Geert Wilders of the Netherlands. “Dutch populist politician and controversial anti-Islam campaigner Geert Wilders has been refused entry to the United Kingdom despite being invited to visit by a member of the House of Lords, the British parliament’s upper chamber. . . Geert Wilders, perhaps best known outside the Netherlands for having made the video Fitna, in which the religion Islam and its holy book …

Item: Chyetanya Kunte wrote a blog post “Shoddy Journalism” on Nov 27th, 2008. I cannot give you a link because he has since removed it from his blog (although you may be able to read it on google cache). He posted an apology to NDTV and Barkha Dutt on Jan 26th:
I hereby repudiate and withdraw my post dated November 27, 2008 titled “Shoddy Journalism” and, more specifically, the following allegations / statements made in the post titled “Shoddy Journalism” namely:
* a lack of ethics, responsibility and professionalism by Ms. …

I have it on good authority that Satyameva Jayate is India’s national motto. The English translation of the Sanskrit is “Truth Alone Prevails.” Is that claim itself true? Can it really prevail in a land where some people are afraid to speak what they perceive to be the truth because some others confront that expression with violence?
Thomas Jefferson claimed over 200 years ago that “it is error alone that needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.” I agree only partly. I don’t think that without courageous people …

Religious insanity should be ridiculed as strenuously and as frequently as one can. Here I am talking about the recent demand by the Pastafarians that since their religion forbids the eating of pasta without meatballs, all vegetarian pasta dishes be banned. It offends the Pastafarians that people can even contemplate the eating of pasta without the required half a dozen meatballs.

A recently released movie called “Jodaa Akbar” appears to have started a movement to boycott the movie. I don’t know what the problem is with the movie and frankly I don’t care. Boycott whatever does or does not strike your fancy, I say. I just pray that they don’t press the government to ban the movie. If the movie is inaccurate, then the response should be to counter it with the accurate version, or to write and speak about it in the press, radio and television. By all means, refuse …

If your government is manipulated into disregarding the law of the land by rioting murderous mobs, you might be a third-world country.
{Continued from part 1.}
Taslima Nasreen got hounded out of Kolkata by rioting Muslims. The state of West Bengal displayed its spinelessness and instead of providing protection to a visitor, gave in to intimidation and violence. She was packed off to Jaipur. The fear of murderous mobs compelled the Rajasthani government to kick her out. She is now hiding somewhere in New Delhi, the capital of India. One …

The question that faces West Bengal, a state in eastern India [1], appears to be whether a Bangladeshi author named Taslima Nasreen should be allowed to stay. The recent news is that “a minority fringe group” has demanded that Taslima be deported.
The answer is absolutely clear to me: she may stay or go depending on what the law of the land says. Rule of law is something that I consider non-negotiable. So the deeper question is whether India at large, and West Bengal more specifically, is a nation that …

Why support free speech, asked Gaurav in a comment on a previous post here. The short answer is: because we are not infinitely wise, our rationality is bounded; because we are not equally wise; because ideas matter, and because markets work.

“CAESAR: Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.”
–George Bernard Shaw in “Caesar and Cleopatra”
I titled my two previous pieces exploring the freedom of expression as “The Freedom to be Offended” deliberately. Everyone is free to take offense, which is the flip side of the individual right to free speech. If the speech of one has to be restricted because someone else is offended, then taken to its logical conclusion we would arrive at the absurd …

In a comment on my previous post, Nath declares that the “tough part is choosing where exactly to draw the line between legal and illegal.”
It is tough only if that line is arbitrarily drawn according to the whims and fancies of mobs. In most societies, it is drawn after due consideration and enshrined in some institution often called the constitution.

“If a nation or an individual values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony is that if it is comfort or money it values more, it will lose that too.”
- W. Somerset Maugham
The story is pretty simple. A Danish newspaper, Jylland-Posten, published in September 2005 a dozen cartoons depicting Muhammad after a writer complained that nobody dared illustrate a book he was writing on Muhammad. The newspaper pointed out “that the drawings illustrated an article on the self-censorship which rules large parts of …