Facebook blocked over Prophet cartoons

Lahore:

Pak court orders ban until May 31

In Unison: students protest against caricatures of the prophet on Facebook in Lahore on Wednesday

A Pakistani court ordered the government on Wednesday to block Facebook after press reported a competition being held to draw the Prophet Mohammad. Pakistani media recently reported that a caricature competition is being held on May 20 about Mohammad on Facebook.

"The court has ordered the government to immediately block Facebook until May 31 because of this blasphemous competition," Azhar Siddique, a representative of the Islamic Lawyers Forum who filed a petition in the Lahore High Court, said.

"The court has also ordered the foreign ministry to investigate why such a competition is being held."

A spokesman for the official telecommunications watchdog, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, said the government on Tuesday ordered Internet service providers to block websites showing these caricatures, but that they had not received the court orders as yet.

Any representation of the Prophet Mohammad is deemed un-Islamic and blasphemous by Muslims. But some warned the court's response could backfire. "Blocking the entire website would anger users, especially young and adults, because the social networking website is so popular among them," said the CEO of Nayatel, Wahaj-us-Siraj. "Basically, our judges aren't technically sound. They have just ordered it, but it should have been done in a better way by just blocking a particular URL or link."

On the information page of Facebook, the organisers described it as a "snarky" response to Muslim bloggers who "warned" the creators of the comedy television show South Park over a recent depiction of the Prophet in a bear suit .

"we are not trying to slander the average Muslim," the Facebook page creators wrote. "We simply want to show the extremists that threaten to harm people because of their Mohammad depictions that we're not afraid of them.