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As Jim Hedger and I discussed on our weekly radio show on Webmaster Radio today, Abdel Kareem Nabil has just been sentenced to 4 year in prison, 3 of these years are for insulting Islam and inciting sectarian strife and one year for insulting President Mubarak.

As Jim mentioned on the SiteProNews blog, here is what he was charged for:

Nabil wrote about riots in which a Coptic Christian church was attacked by Muslim worshipers over a play deemed offensive to Islam. "Muslims revealed their true ugly face and appeared to all the world that they are full of brutality, barbarism and inhumanity," he wrote, calling Muhammad and his early followers, “spillers of blood” for their teachings on the use of violence.

Now, I'm definitely not going to step in and make this any sort of religious post, we've all been less than perfect at one time or another and there are enough "spillers of blood" to go around BUT what's a key issue here is the man's right to be heard (or read as the case may be).

As we noted on the show, I would call on any and all bloggers to bring this point up and, as Jim asked, to avoid vacations to Egypt until such time as these sorts of things don't occur and there is freedom of speech applied to those who may disagree with the status-quo. Right or wrong, every voice deserves the right to be heard.

Labels: abdel kareem nabil, freedom of speech, jim hedger, sitepronews, webmaster radio