In the wake of Facebook’s Everybody Draw Mohammed
Day, which outraged Muslims and led to worldwide bans, a group of Muslims has issued an ultimatum: reinstate a handful of pages or lose millions of users. The group, apparently fueled by Facebook-clone Madina.com, are outraged at the removal of several very popular Islamic pages from Facebook.com, purges the group reportedly claim took place after the outcry over Draw Mohammed Day. The pages, such as Facebook.com/Rassoul.Allaah and Facebook.com/Logo.Ramadan each reportedly had hundreds of thousands or even millions of Facebook “likes,” indicating millions of fans.
Unless the popular pages are reinstated by midnight on July 21st, the group plans to leave Facebook for Madina.com. The group’s message is being spread through a comment that decries “irresponsible behavior,” a comment being posted by thousands of users to Facebook posts mainly written by site admins (here’s just one example).
Facebook representatives were not immediately available to comment on the demands.
The post reads:
Facebook Admins, Moderators, Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Sheryl Sandberg, and Matt Cohler;
Although you have attended the world’s best communication skills courses you have been most successful in growing great hatred and hostility between you and Muslims around the world, but seriously this time you have caused an almost unrepairable damage.
Only a few weeks after your irresponsible behavior during the Everybody Draw Mohammed Day events you most aggressively removed four of the largest Islamic Facebook Pages of total fans/likes over 2.5 million Facebook members. That happened on the morning of Thursday 8th July, 2010.
These four Facebook pages were totally peaceful and free of any hate speech, but you removed it ignoring the feelings of more than 2.5 Million Facebook Muslims and disrespecting over 1.5 Billion Muslims worldwide.
And now since that is what it had come down to you, with your irresponsibility and fake preach of freedom of speech, have left us no other choice other than permanently boycotting Facebook. And now we are giving you a 2 weeks notice – ending at midnight of 21st July, 2010 – to fulfill our demands or else we will leave Facebook for http://madina.com/.
Our demands are:
1- Reactivating the four pages that have been disabled
2- Adding a Facebook Term that illegalizes disrespecting Islamic religious symbols
3- Disabling any Facebook Page, Group, or Event that shows direct or indirect disrespect towards Islamic religious symbols
The pages that were unfairly removed are:
Facebook.com/Rassoul.Allaah – About 1,600,000 Likes
Facebook.com/Logo.Ramadan – About 600,000 Likes
Facebook.com/Love.Mohammed- About 200,000 Likes
Facebook.com/Quran.Lovers – About 70,000 Likes