Saudi Arabia, a country where every blogger gets a flogger - and not in the fun sense of the Folsom Street Fair.
Having been an arm's length, well, an arm and a half for you 'cause my extremity is a bit ape like - away from the ruler, let me assure you, the ruler is not a bad guy.
Really.
Yet, they are slowly killing a blogger with 1000 lashes.
But the more surveillance & harsher blasphemy law part is not about the Saudis, it is about Germany's very own Gaudi Bavaria. Gaudi is their dialect term for "fun". So, subsequent use of the word Gaudis is only meant to mean "fun loving Bavarian politicians", not a cheap pun on Saudi.
The Gaudis want harsher surveillance laws in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks. They have really wanted more surveillance for as long as they exist, but the Paris murders are put forward as reason that Germany very much needs it.
The Gaudis also want a wider definition and harsher sentences for blasphemy.
Yes, there is a blasphemy felony law (3 years max.) in Germany. If you had read our post about why TV show South Park could not have been produced in Germany, you'd know that.
The thing about the German blasphemy law is those who love it and want to up penalties only use the term in quotation marks and will claim with a straight face that it is not a blasphemy law because it does not criminalize insulting God. It criminalizes insulting a religion or world view and disturbing the peace in doing so.
While the hard ass** atheist author of this post understands that criminalizing insulting a guy who is known under at least three aliases has fallen out of fashion, said author feels insulted by the fact that the history of the German law is brushed aside. Because it did start out as an "insult of God" paragraph in the late1800s and was expanded to include religion plus world view and then again expanded during the great student revolts of the late 1960s to include "and disturbing the peace". The latter was meant to limit application of the law.
If you feel like slamming the Jesus or his followers while not disturbing the peace, you are welcome to give it a try. But make sure to send us the address of your German prison so we can send you a bible once you are sentenced and duly locked up.
Because the problem with the softened law is that the notion of disturbing the peace is infinitely stretchable.
According to this newspaper article, "Maria, if you had had an abortion, we'd have been spared this Pope" was worthy of a felony conviction in Germany in the 1970s. Ditto for calling the church a "criminal organization" in the 1980s.
In 2012, calling the Catholic church a "sect of child f****s" did not result in a conviction.
Those who claim that doing away with the blasphemy law is a good and reasonable thing to undertake are also told their cause is becoming a non-issue. We are told the number of cases under the law in 2013 was down to a mere 60, with only "a few" resulting in a conviction.
No matter how few convictions, that's still a lot higher than the number of convictions in 2013 for terrorism charges in Germany.
Interestingly enough, the big Christian churches in Germany do not want to see a harsher law, they are happy with the status quo.
Calls for harsher sentences and for removing the obstacle "disturbing the peace" come from the conservative parties CDU and CSU (the latter being the Bavarians). To make the initiative more acceptable, they emphasize that the protection of this law applies to all religions, not just Christians.
** If you wanna cop a feel, that can be arranged. Under certain conditions.
[Update] Typos
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