Turkish man arrested over posting photo to Reddit with alcohol in mosque | Hacker News Reader

Turkish man arrested over posting photo to Reddit with alcohol in mosque

duvarenglish.com

I don't see anything remarkable here, for Turkey's norms. He was detained on charges of insulting religious values ("Halkı Kin ve Düşmanlığa Alenen Tahrik Etme", cf. https://av-saimincekas.com/en/tck/turk-ceza-kanunu-madde-216...).

His grandmother went on TV to defend him: https://video.haber7.com/video-galeri/249628-camide-icki-ici...

The original thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/MineIslam/comments/16hlxyl/allah_il...

edit: Why is this flagged?

This could happen in Poland too. Offending religious feelings or a place of cult can get you up to 2 years in jail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offending_religious_feelings_(...

Yeah, US is pretty much the only country where this stuff is unlikely to happen. Most European countries will happily punish you for your speech if it offends the prevailing sensibilities, religious or secular.

>US is pretty much the only country where this stuff is unlikely to happen

Not really, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law

Edit: reading the replies, some users seem to have lost their reading comprehension skills, the US is not the only country where this would be unlucky to happen.

Not really, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_Unite...

Can you name even one case?

Your link indicates the US has no blasphemy laws, btw.

I think GP point is that it's not the only country where this could not happen.

Better to link directly to [0], which lists a few cases from a long time ago, but overall the situation in the US looks pretty good. In the rest of the world however...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law_in_the_United_St...

Your link only refers to religious sensibilities, and I specifically mentioned secular sensibilities as well, precisely to preempt this sort of retort. For example, France is marked green in your link, but it very much does exactly what I said in my original comment: prosecutes and punishes people for their literal speech. Here's an example high-profile case from last year.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60022996

Can you name a single country in the world which has similarly liberal free speech norms to US? Something close to the Brandenburg v Ohio standard? I'll wait.

>Your link only refers to religious sensibilities

Yes because that's the topic and "US is pretty much the only country where this stuff is unlikely to happen" is simply wrong, about the rest of your comment you could be right or wrong but I honestly don't really care.

> Most European countries will happily punish you for your speech if it offends the prevailing sensibilities, religious or secular.

O.o Europe is a pretty big place. Most countries will let you speak your mind freely because free speech is a thing. As long as you don’t break any laws (hate speech etc)

"You can say anything you want as long as it doesn't break the law" is rather weak standard for free speech, in fact it makes the mockery of the concept. By this token, Soviet Union and North Korea also have free speech: criticizing the Juche is an illegal "hate speech" after all.

It's literally the definition of it, though. The law is what creates freedom of speech, and one way or another, it sets the scope.

This is not so:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

That's just fluff.

>The court also rejected the plaintiffs’ arguments that foreign national visa applicants have any First Amendment rights when initially applying for visas from abroad

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/federal-judge-upholds-....

That's law, too.

So you're telling me that if I bring, for example, a pig into a synagogue I won't face any legal repercussions?

I'm guessing you could be cited for trespassing if you were asked to leave and didn't.

If you are found guilty of trespassing and you were trespassing with intent to harm the religion then it might be a hate crime charge too.

>will happily punish you for your speech

getting drunk in a mosque/house of worship which is probably not this guys property is a very creative definition of 'speech'.

I'm not sure why speech in modern American discourse seems to have moved from actual, literal speech, to behaving like a crazy person in places that aren't actually yours. It's more like an 'in your face'-ism, like a license to pester people.

Oh my. How does this not get abused all the time?

It does apparently.

> The article has been used by pro-Church politicians and activists on numerous occasions, whenever they felt their religious feelings had been offended in any way.

It does get abused a bit. OTOH the courts are not that eager to side against civil liberties.

There are a lot of places with blasphemy laws. It's much more common to Islamic majority countries.[1]

Blasphemy is punishable by death in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Brunei, Mauritania and Saudi Arabia. Among non-Muslim-majority countries, the harshest blasphemy laws are in Italy, where the maximum penalty is two years in prison.[2]

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/01/25/four-in-t...

[2]: https://theconversation.com/the-politics-of-blasphemy-why-pa...

The original post: https://old.reddit.com/r/MineIslam/comments/16hlxyl/allah_il...

Google Translate: https://old-reddit-com.translate.goog/r/MineIslam/comments/1...

Maybe this will start a fun alcohol-in-mosques-pics trend. F the Mullahs.

What was he thinking, exactly? They were going to gumshoe this and walk over to all 3200 mosques and conduct interviews? Was he in a coma for the past 10 years, or missed everything on data sharing and geolocation? Or crowdsouring information? Even if you don't take a picture with a camera phone, he was possibly found because someone recognized the area (maybe the police shared the image online), and all the police had to do was visit that one area and conduct interviews.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Could have been a well calculated move. "how can I get back to prison without hurting anyone"

Someone should gift him a VHS copy of Midnight Express.

Why is this flagged? I started to see a lot of good discussion topic get flagged recently. I thought HN is more matured than reddit...

Bold move. Never assume your photos on the Internet are immune to visual geolocation.

I think they caught him on camera, not from the image on Reddit.

Odd choice, given the venue - and that's even before we get onto the guy drinking in a mosque. Stirrers gonna stir, I suppose.

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