Besides producing oil, Saudi Arabia is a leader in internet censorship. The Guardian reports that Saudi Arabia has the dubious honor of leading the pack of Arab nations that censor the internet [all of them expect Lebanon].

The extremely conservative and repressive Kingdom employs a two-tire system of censorship. The first tire consists of blocking “immoral” content. This is mostly pornographic sites. Though in Saudi Arabia, a Pussycats video is deemed “immoral.” The Saudi authorities encourage citizens - how nice! - to report immoral websites that the authorities have yet to block.

Why is this dude not censored?

Question: if a citizen reports on a pornographic website that isn’t blocked and then innocently asks for it to be blocked does that not raise the question as to why the citizen was looking at the site in the first place? And is not looking at such immoral content punishable by lashes in this backward Kingdom?

The irony is that even though authorities spend a lot of time blocking pornographic sites and websites critical of the Kingdom [from both the Left and jihadi angle], it is such “immoral” sites that are most accessed via proxy servers in this sexually repressed Kingdom.

The second tire works to block access to websites critical of the government and of radical Islamist sites, not always mutually exclusive. Although Saudi Arabia is right in blocking Bin Ladinesque websites, the nation would do one better by banning radical clerics. The ideology of Bin Ladin is not some bastard deviation from the state-endorsed Wahhabi ideology. Bin Ladin, rather, is actually the principled Wahhabi who is working to uphold the Kingdom’s own espoused doctrine. That is why it is ridiculous that while Saudi authorities work to block extremist Islamic content online, the Kingdom’s clerics are preaching the same hateful filth that the authorities are working to censor. Jews are routinely mocked in sermons and Christians almost always referred to as “il-salabeen” [Crusaders].

If Saudi Arabia is to censor anyone, it should start with the ilk of Bin Baaz.