Egypt Blocks YouTube Over Notorious Anti-Islam Flick
An Egyptian court ordered the suspension of online video service YouTube for a month on Saturday for broadcasting a film insulting the Prophet Mohammad, state media reported.
The country’s administrative court ordered the ministries of communication and investment to block YouTube, owned by Google , inside Egypt because it had carried the film “Innocence of Muslims”, said state news agency MENA.
The 13-minute video, billed as a film trailer and made in the United States, provoked a torrent of anti-American unrest in Egypt, Libya and dozens of other Muslim countries in September.
The video depicts the Prophet as a fool and a sexual deviant. For most Muslims, any portrayal of the Prophet is considered blasphemous.
The court said it was ruling on a case brought about the film several months ago, without going into further detail.
YouTube had “insisted on broadcasting the film insulting Islam and the Prophet, disrespecting the beliefs of millions of Egyptians and disregarding the anger of all Muslims” the court said, according to MENA.
Egypt’s National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority said it would abide by the ruling as soon as it received a copy of the verdict.
No one was immediately available for comment from Google or YouTube.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
