A couple of months ago, when self-styled 'security analyst' Zaid Hamid's anti-India vitriol started getting out of hand, a group of Pakistanis got together on Facebook to condemn his hate speech and calls for war against "Hindu Zionists". There were jokes about 'Jihad-e-Facebook' and 'Ghazwa-e-YouTube' because, like former dictator General (retd) Pervez Musharraf, that's where an overwhelming majority of Hamid's supporters were anyway. No one could have thought at that point that an organ of the state would declare jihad against Facebook, but that is what has happened. On 19 May 2010, on a petition filed by a group calling itself the Islamic Lawyers Movement, the Lahore High Court ordered the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to block Facebook in response to the perceived blasphemy of a single page for 'Draw Muhammad Day'.
It all started in April, when the creators of the animated TV series South Park decided to take a stand in favour of free speech in their 200th episode, which showed, among other things, Jesus watching porn, the Buddha smoking pot, and the Prophet Muhammad in a teddy-bear costume. Comedy Central, the series' broadcaster, censured the bits with Muhammad and bleeped-out parts that mentioned his name; but unedited versions of the episode quickly made their way around the internet. The creators were not happy with the additional censoring when they had, in their opinion, taken care not to depict any picture of Muhammad per se – only the teddy-bear costume.
In the opinion of jihadis, however, the South Park team wasn't 'careful' enough. RevolutionMuslim.com (an American jihadi website, which, incidentally, is still accessible in Pakistan, as is almost every other webpage of the same genre) reacted by issuing dire threats to the creators and producers of the series. "We have to warn Matt [Stone] and Trey [Parker] that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show," a post on the website claimed. Gogh was a Dutch filmmaker who was killed in 2004 by a Muslim for a movie that he had made that said that Islam condoned violence against women. As if the warning post weren't bad enough, it was also accompanied by a graphic photo of Gogh, along with a link to a news article with details of a mansion in Colorado that Parker and Stone are said to own – in 'we know where to find you' style.
RevolutionMuslim's Younus Abdullah Muhammad, however, is quick to defend himself, basing his innocence on the claim that he did not "send anyone" to the Colorado mansion to "conduct violence", and that he was not worried that his post would incite violence against the South Park team. "How is that a threat? Showing a case study right there of what happened to another individual who conducted himself in a very similar manner? It's just evidence," he claimed in an interview with Reuters.