Iran considers death penalty for bloggers that promote "corruption, prostitution and apostasy"

Hey jawnybnsc,

Those links were good, better than I expected after taking a cursory look at the domain they are posted on.

At this point I would tend to agree Ahmedinejad is guilty of incitement to genocide.

Peace,
BentFranklin

The problem is with such narrowed mind and intransigent point of view, typical of this kind of government, about how life and the world should be, who is going to judge what is right or wrong?

why do i have the distinct feeling that those words: 'corruption, prostitution and apostasy' will be loosely defined by that regIme to include just about everyone?

Way to take their culture back to the stone age....you write bad things...me kill you!

Hey jawny I'll read those links.

But my point was if Ahmedinejad is so bad, then his ideas will fail own their own merits and there is no need to mistranslate him. And if he is actually as bad as you say, then the NY Times purposely mistranslating him is counterproductive to your cause.

I don't think Ahmedinejad is a good man, in fact he's quite the jackass, in my opinion. But the cause of opposing him does not justify people in my government and news organizations lying to me to make him look worse.

I choose knowledge over ignorance EVERY TIME. Win through making people smarter, not dumber.

PS - Those links are pretty long. It'll take at least a week to get through them, but I will let you know what I think.

Somebody please yank this spammer's account!

Quite right. Hang us all.

There's a graphic novel called Persepolis that I read and highly recommend. It's about a woman growing up in Iran during the revolution. It depicts a nice cross-section of Iranian society that helped me imagine life there in more detail than I might otherwise have and introduced me to a few of the types of people one might find there.

Any country that governs with religion will crumble. As anyone can see the United States is slowly but surely eroding.

Wow, pretty scary stuff. I would love to know how they are defining: corruption, prostitution and apostasy? We are so spoiled here in the states, spoiled and very lucky.

Iran, yet another screwed up Country. This is actually good for us, people will eventually crack and take this to another level.

yeah thats gonna work

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a mad man, and he is brain washing the entire population of Iran.
Did anybody see his speech at Columbia University in 2007? What a load of rhetoric.
He spews out the most outrageous crap, and the people of Iran fall for it, hook, line and sinker.

I have tried my hardest to stay out of anything to do with Iran. But if they're going to control their citizens who use the internet for communication through fear-I mean death-do we really want them to have nuclear capability as well? It's obvious Iran's crazed, fanatical leaders are a danger to their own citizens, as well as the rest of the world. I have to vote NO on nuclear capability until the existing gov't is overthrown from within. It's happened before & will happen again.

Their citizens are quite aware of how they are perceived by the rest of the world & their predicament because of the internet, which is fueling the growing internal movement for a revolution. It really is just a matter of time now, which is the reason for this proposal. How about 1st offense: jogging for blogging, 2nd offense: logging for blogging & 3rd offense: flogging for blogging, to start? Death seems a bit extreme for using the internet. Insane people are running their country too, they just might go for it!

reminds me of the legislation that joe leiberman introduced here in the states. ....only a matter of time til the internet as we know it is dead and gone.

thatll show those internet savvy prostitues

This is absolutely absurd. I fear for what the world may be coming to.

Oh shit crazy how internet and politics are mixing so comfortably now.

This important bit of philology from Juan Cole a few weeks ago;

Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul continue to show themselves among the few in Congress with any integrity and backbone. They declined to go along with a resolution charging Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad with incitement to genocide, given his alleged call for Israel to be 'wiped off the face of the map.'

As most of my readers know, Ahmadinejad did not use that phrase in Persian. He quoted an old saying of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for 'this occupation regime over Jerusalem" to "vanish from the page of time.' Calling for a regime to vanish is not the same as calling for people to be killed. Ahmadinejad has not to my knowledge called for anyone to be killed. (Wampum has more; as does the American Street).

If Ahmadinejad is a genocidal maniac who just wants to kill Jews, then why are there 20,000 Jews in Iran with a member of parliament in Tehran? Couldn't he start at home if that was what he is really about?

I was talking to two otherwise well-informed Israeli historians a couple of weeks ago, and they expressed the conviction that Ahmadinejad had threatened to nuke Israel. I was taken aback. First of all, Iran doesn't have a nuke. Second, there is no proof that Iran even has a nuclear weapons program. Third, Ahmadinejad has denied wanting a bomb. Fourth, Ahmadinejad has never threatened any sort of direct Iranian military action against Israel. In other words, that is a pretty dramatic fear for educated persons to feel, on the basis of . . . nothing.

I renew my call to readers to write protest letters to newspapers and other media every time they hear it alleged that Ahmadinejad (or "Iran"!) has threatened to "wipe Israel off the map." There is no such idiom in Persian and it is not what he said, and the mistranslation gives entirely the wrong impression. Wars can start over bad translations.

It was apparently some Western wire service that mistranslated the phrase as 'wipe Israel off the map', which sounds rather more violent than calling for regime change. Since then, Iranian media working in English have themselves depended on that translation. One of the tricks of Right-Zionist propagandists is to substitute these English texts for Ahmadinejad's own Persian text. (Ethan Bronner at the New York Times tried to pull this, and more recently Michael Rubin at the American Enterprise Institute.) But good scholarship requires that you go to the original Persian text in search of the meaning of a phrase. Bronner and Rubin are guilty disregarding philological scholarship in favor of mere propagandizing.

Iran needs to be overthrown, but from the inside. What a sick nation, I hope somebody assassinates that Iranian president guy.

I agree with Diode, glad to be in America. Even with all the bull here, we can at least still express ourselves.

According to Seymour Hersch, there are marginal groups running around in Iran blowing people up with CIA funding in attempts at de-stabilizing the government.
You can figure that action like that is only going to drive the people in power to get more repressive and paranoid.

Geez, if we executed everyone who was corrupt, lewd, or non-religious, who would be left??? The only reason gays escaped this new bill is that Iran has been denying that they have any gays in their country...

I thought the law was to punish those who are caught promoting corruption ,prostitution and apostasy . not just for blogging. granted the interpretation of what is corruption ,prostitution and apostasy is left to the Iranian governments interpretation, just like who is a terrorist is left to interpretation by the U.S. government.

J_Jammer, it's not that there is no bigger news source, the problem here is that the news source that is supposedly quoted never actually ran the story.

It's difficult to keep my faith in people, let alone government, these days, and now we know why.

Hopefully SOMETHING will happen that will stop this from passing. Anything.

i only blogged twice sorry

you know how many sources first started talking about Watergate?

I understand that everyone wants every article backed by a bigger news source just so they can believe it, but sometimes that's just not going to be the case.

Looks like Iranian MySpace users are facing imminent death.

I see people are upset that IRAN is going to kill people for their opinion, aside from being selfish and making it about America.

Good for paying attention.

chalk another one up for freedom. thank you constitution, glad to be in america

Isn't it more for those who are using blogs and other online means to spread hate crime and preach their extremist views, rather than 'bloggers' as a whole?