Free Kareem

Kareem Amer is a young Egyptian blogger.  Much like other young people, Kareem is unhappy with certain parts of the society in which he lives.  Like many young people, Kareem posted these thoughts to his blog.

For this crime of self-expression, Kareem has now been imprisoned for 1,470 days.

Here’s how Kareem described himself on his blog:

I am down to earth Law student; I look forward to help humanity against all form of discriminations… I am looking forward to open up my own human rights activists Law firm, which will include other lawyers who share the same views. Our main goal is to defend the rights of Muslim and Arabic women against all form of discrimination and to stop violent crimes committed on a daily basis in these countries.

You can read many of Kareem’s posts which have been translated to English at What Kareem Said, on the Free Kareem web site.

The Egyptian government has resisted all international pressure to free Kareem and domestic sentiment is against him.  Students and security police at the university from which he was expelled for blogging teamed up in an attempt to beat him to death and he barely escaped with his life.  Egypt has no social history which supports freedom of speech.  His own father publicly announced that Kareem should be murdered for insulting Islam.

I don’t think that the Egyptians have any idea just how bad this sort of behavior makes Islam look.  When someone accuses you of being intolerant and violent, it doesn’t generally help your reputation to respond by threating to murder them.

We probably can’t do anything to help Kareem, but what we can do is make sure that the Egyptian government’s attempt to censor him generates the exact opposite effect.  If we make sure that every attempt to censor a human being results in that persons writing becoming well-known globally, governments will eventually understand that censorship doesn’t work.

It’s important to remember that this isn’t just a global problem from which Americans are exempt.  The Obama administration has threatened Americans with actions from the FCC and the Justice Department for exercising the rights guaranteed to them under the First Amendment.  The America of tomorrow could very well be the Egypt of today.