Entries associated with the tag "Egypt":

Ed Brayton at Positive Liberty takes up the cause of Egyptian blogger Abdelkareem Nabil Soliman, now sentenced to a total of four years in prison for "insulting Islam" and "defaming the president of Egypt." The Cato Institute's Tom Palmer and Raja Kamal of the University of Chicago Harris School publicized his plight in the February 21 Washington Post. More at Free Kareem!

Brayton adds an important point in case this gets you all self-righteous. If you think it's wrong to lock up a blogger for slagging a religion, but you also think it's OK to outlaw "hate speech" or speech denying that the Holocaust happened, then you've got a whole lot of explaining to do.

John Boctor, a Coptic Orthodox Christian, was living in Eygpt when his friend and boss, also a Coptic Christian, married a Muslim woman, who then converted to Christianity. The couple was threatened by Muslim fundamentalists, for whom such a conversion is a capital crime, and when the police offered no help they went into hiding. Boctor then "began receiving telephone threats from people who demanded to know [his friends'] whereabouts and threatened to cut his throat if he did not tell them.... One night on his way home from work Boctor was attacked by three men. His assailants called him an 'infidel,' tore his crucifix necklace from his neck, beat him, accused him of 'covering up for an infidel and a prostitute,' and told him they would kill him if he made a report to any 'human rights committees.'" He moved to his uncle's house, but they tracked him down, beat him again, and promised to kill him next time if he wouldn't tell where the couple was hiding. Boctor fled to the U.S.

Believe it or not, a federal immigration judge ruled that Boctor wasn't being persecuted because of his religion and therefore could be deported back to Egypt. Last week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit wrote in Boctor v. Gonzales that the judge's ruling "completely ignores the factual context" and "is not supported by substantial evidence and must be reversed," which I take to be judicial-speak for "preposterous nonsense that would be funny if someone's life weren't at stake."

Read the whole thing (PDF).