I Received a Take Down Notice For Mohammed Cartoons

On Friday, June 26, 2009 I received a take down notice from a police group in Mumbai, India. I reproduce the email in full here:

O.W.No.1680/Sr.PI/CCIC/09
Office of the
Sr. Inspector of Police
Cyber Crime Investigation Cell
Crime Branch,CID, Mumbai
Date :- 26/06/09
To,
Website Administator,
Musing mind.com

Subject :- Block / delete suspected links about muslim communities.

Dear Sir,

This office is enquiring a complaint wherein cartoon articles on alhaa and islamic religious personalities for eg. Mohammed and wife aisha are created and posted. They are making insulting remarks against muslim prophet and other personalities of muslim communities. You are requested to delete/remove block below mentioned suspected and malicious link and articles on your websites.

http://musing-minds.com/[…]/2008/02/jyllands-posten-mohammed.jpg

Regards,

(Mukund Pawar)
Police Inspector
Cyber Crime Investigation Cell
Crime Branch, CID, Mumbai.

This is exactly what I received, with all spelling, grammatical, and capitalization mistakes intact. The only change I made was in the url for the image. Entering it as given in the email was returning a 404 error anyway so I have replaced part of the url with […].

The email was sent from officer at cybercellmumbai dot com. That site states that it is the Cyber Crime Investigation Cell, C.I.D., Mumbai.

The picture that is so offensive is this one:
jyllands-posten mohammed

 

from this post in February 2008: No Surrender.  The image was linked to Human Events’ article Muhammed Cartoon Gallery of 2/2/2006 where all the full size cartoons can be found.

Needless to say I am not going to take this down. I contacted a few people about it and was advised to report it to the Chilling Effects website, which I did. I was told that perhaps the worst case scenario of not complying with the request would be that I could never travel to India. The other worst case scenario was that I would become the next Salman Rushdie. I really doubt that one since others, far more prominent than I, have published these images as well.

I do hope I won’t have to go into hiding.

I’d like to know if anyone else received one of these notices. Please let me know, either in comments or by email to kimsch at this domain.

Thanks Howie for the link!

Founding Bloggers linked. Thanks!

Kyros from Report on Arrakis linked. Thanks!

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