Bassem Youssef back on the waves, but not on everyone's wavelength | Mada Masr - 2 views
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Careful, stopping is recurrent. This is typically the warning you see at the back of a school bus that is bound to stop intermittently, but in Youssef’s case, it’s a pun on the possibility of censorship on the uncompromised content of the show
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CBC, alongside Egypt’s contested media practice, would quickly become one of the main subjects of Youssef’s satire in his comeback. The episode, aired this time on MBC Masr, was full-on general satire of the condition of censorship Youssef and others face. It was also mocking prevalent and flawed media practices that do more subservience than relaying truths. The show started with Youssef hesitantly presenting the script of the new season to the channel, as the disgruntled channel manager tries to convince him to shift to something else - presenting a show on women, for example, and essentially “eating bread”, an Arabic expression denoting the need to toe the line in order to survive. “I don’t like dialectics. I don’t like dialectics!” is the channel’s response, which resonates with a broader headline on today’s Egypt, where little criticism to the ruling authority is tolerated.
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MBC Masr is a satellite channel for Egypt owned by the long-established, Saudi-backed pan-Arab MBC group.
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Here is some information on the founder and CEO of MBC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waleed_bin_Ibrahim_al_Ibrahim Although the channel was based in London and then moved to Dubai, it is closely connected to the Saudi Royal family via shareholders such as Ibrahim.
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Youssef responds in his interview published on February 2 by the German Deutshe Welle by saying, “It’s important that people hear a different view. People can’t keep hearing the same thing all the time. That’s why there has to be some political mobility. I understand there is some fear… it’s hard to talk with logic then. But then imagine humor!”
Exporting Jihad - The New Yorker - 0 views
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A friend of Mohamed’s, an unemployed telecommunications engineer named Nabil Selliti, left Douar Hicher to fight in Syria. Oussama Romdhani, who edits the Arab Weekly in Tunis, told me that in the Arab world the most likely radicals are people in technical or scientific fields who lack the kind of humanities education that fosters critical thought. Before Selliti left, Mohamed asked him why he was going off to fight. Selliti replied, “I can’t build anything in this country. But the Islamic State gives us the chance to create, to build bombs, to use technology.” In July, 2013, Selliti blew himself up in a suicide bombing in Iraq.
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Tourism, one of Tunisia’s major industries, dropped by nearly fifty per cent after June 26th last year, when, on a beach near the resort town of Sousse, a twenty-three-year-old student and break-dancing enthusiast pulled an automatic weapon out of his umbrella and began shooting foreigners; he spared Tunisian workers, who tried to stop him. The terrorist, who had trained at an Islamic State camp in Libya, killed thirty-eight people, thirty of them British tourists, before being shot dead by police.
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“The youth are lost,” Kamal told me. “There’s no justice.” Douar Hicher, he said, “is the key to Tunisia.” He continued, “If you want to stop terrorism, then bring good schools, bring transportation—because the roads are terrible—and bring jobs for young people, so that Douar Hicher becomes like the parts of Tunisia where you Westerners come to have fun.”
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How a diplomatic crisis among Gulf nations led to fake news campaign in the United States - 0 views
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it’s not just Kremlin-produced disinformation that Americans may have stumbled upon recently. Browsing Facebook and Twitter — and even just perusing the magazine rack at their local Walmart — they may have also been exposed to propaganda supporting the ambitious goals of two oil-rich Arab Gulf countries
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when Saudi Arabia and the UAE launched a boycott and blockade of the tiny peninsula state of Qatar last year, organizations with ties to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi tried something new: They worked to sway American public opinion through online and social media campaigns, bringing a complicated, distant conflict among three Washington allies to US shores
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As they took steps against Doha, Saudi Arabia and the UAE also initiated propaganda efforts in the US aimed at weakening Washington’s alliance with Qatar — which hosts the largest American military base in the Middle East — while also enhancing their own images.
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Lessons from an ex-British MP who stood on a street corner in Beirut | Middle East Eye - 0 views
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Matthew Parris - South African-British columnist and former Conservative member of the British Parliament - treats us to an account of “What you learn standing on a street corner in Beirut.” The corner in question is located on Rue Qobaiyat in the trendy Mar Mikhael neighbourhood, which Parris incorrectly identifies as Beirut’s “Armenian quarter”. So much for learning things.
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the role of spontaneous sociocultural analyst
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To be sure, the trope of the unpredictable and irrationally violent Arab is a mainstay of Orientalist discourse, and visitors to Lebanon from the oh-so-civilised West often can’t resist the temptation to detect in every trivial occurrence a potential throwback to the brutal civil war of 1975-90 - an affair which, it bears mentioning, took place with plenty of outside interference, including from the West itself.
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'CairoScene' is Now Blocked in Egypt For Violating the New Media Law | Egyptian Streets - 0 views
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The Complaints Committee of the Supreme Council for Media Regulation blocked CairoScene’s website in Egypt because it did not obtain a license from the Council. The media monitoring unit of the Council found “foul images” on CairoScene’s website which include a series of paintings of nude women. CairoScene’s mother company ‘MO4’ has also been operating without a license, which also provoked the Council’s decision.
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In October, the Supreme Council for Media Regulation in Egypt opened application process for media outlets to obtain authorized licenses to operate online in a move to implement Law 180. This law media websites to receive a license in Egypt for the first time.
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Some critics were concerned that this is a tactic to hinder media platforms and journalists. According to an official source at the Supreme Council, the Council will monitor any violations of the new media law and will block unauthorized sites immediately once they commit any violations.
The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer: Turning Qatar into an Island: Saudi cuts off... - 0 views
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There’s a cutting-off-the-nose-to-spite-the face aspect to a Saudi plan to turn Qatar into an island by digging a 60-kilometre ocean channel through the two countries’ land border that would accommodate a nuclear waste heap as well as a military base. If implemented, the channel would signal the kingdom’s belief that relations between the world’s only two Wahhabi states will not any time soon return to the projection of Gulf brotherhood that was the dominant theme prior to the United Arab Emirates-Saudi-led imposition in June of last year of a diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar.
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The message that notions of Gulf brotherhood are shallow at best is one that will be heard not only in Doha, but also in other capitals in the region
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the nuclear waste dump and military base would be on the side of the channel that touches the Qatari border and would effectively constitute a Saudi outpost on the newly created island.
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RSF launches Tracker 19 to track Covid-19's impact on press freedom | RSF - 0 views
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Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is launching Tracker-19 to monitor and evaluate the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on journalism and to offer recommendations on how to defend the right to information.
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Called “Tracker 19” in reference not only to Covid-19 but also article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this project aims to evaluate the pandemic’s impacts on journalism. It will document state censorship and deliberate disinformation, and their impact on the right to reliable news and information. It will also make recommendations on how to defend journalism.
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without journalism, humankind could not address any of the major global challenges, including the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, discrimination against women and corruption.
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The Uncounted - The New York Times - 0 views
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Our own reporting, conducted over 18 months, shows that the air war has been significantly less precise than the coalition claims. Between April 2016 and June 2017, we visited the sites of nearly 150 airstrikes across northern Iraq, not long after ISIS was evicted from them. We toured the wreckage; we interviewed hundreds of witnesses, survivors, family members, intelligence informants and local officials; we photographed bomb fragments, scoured local news sources, identified ISIS targets in the vicinity and mapped the destruction through satellite imagery. We also visited the American air base in Qatar where the coalition directs the air campaign. There, we were given access to the main operations floor and interviewed senior commanders, intelligence officials, legal advisers and civilian-casualty assessment experts. We provided their analysts with the coordinates and date ranges of every airstrike — 103 in all — in three ISIS-controlled areas and examined their responses. The result is the first systematic, ground-based sample of airstrikes in Iraq since this latest military action began in 2014.
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one in five of the coalition strikes we identified resulted in civilian death, a rate more than 31 times that acknowledged by the coalition
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a consistent failure by the coalition to investigate claims properly or to keep records that make it possible to investigate the claims at all
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The Wall Street Journal's Trump problem | Media | The Guardian - 0 views
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“The Journal has done a lot of good work in covering the Trump administration, but not nearly as much as it should have,” another recent departee said. “I lay almost all of that at Gerry’s doorstep. Political editors and reporters find themselves either directly stymied by Gerry’s interference or shave the edges off their stories in advance to try to please him (and, by extension, Murdoch).”
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“This is the most access he has had to a sitting president ever – that is something he’s tried to do and has done in other countries particularly with British prime ministers,” Ellison said. “He’s choosing his own personal access over having any journalistic clout.” Murdoch bought the newspaper in 2007, but initially it was thought to be one of the few outlets in his portfolio impervious to his political influence. In the Trump era, some staff fear that seems to be changing fast.
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Throughout the campaign, Ivanka was a trustee of the $300m fortune allocated to Murdoch’s daughters with Deng, stepping down only after the financial connection became public.
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'Lone wolf' or 'terrorist'? How bias can shape news coverage | Poynter - 0 views
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take a moment to remember U.S. history (or even a few seconds to do an internet search) and it’s easy to find many examples of far deadlier shootings. It’s a sad reality that most victims of the worst massacres that don’t rate a mention were people of color: Native Americans and African-Americans
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there have been much worse atrocities and mass shootings committed against Native peoples going back to the beginnings of our country’s history
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The unwelcome title of largest massacre might belong to Bear River, Utah, where at least 250 Native Americans were slaughtered in 1863; Native American historical accounts put the number at more than 450. In 1890, Native American men, women and children were massacred at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, with estimates of the death toll ranging from 150 to 300.
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The Death of the Palestinian Cause Has Been Greatly Exaggerated | Newlines Magazine - 0 views
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For the last 10 years, Western (and even Arab) pundits have repeatedly questioned the place of Palestine in the pan-Arab psyche. They surmised that the Arab Spring had refocused Arab minds on their problems at home. They assumed that battling tyrannical regimes and their security apparatuses, reforming corrupt polities and decrepit health care and education systems, combating terrorism and religious extremism, whittling back the power of the military, and overcoming economic challenges like corruption and unemployment would take precedence over an unsolved and apparently unsolvable cause.
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reforming the Arab world’s political systems and the security and patronage networks that keep them in power and allow them to dominate their populations appears to be just as arduous a task as resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
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The difference now is not that Arab populaces have abandoned Palestine. Western and regional observers say the muted outrage over affronts like American support for the annexation of the Golan Heights or recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, or even the Abraham Accords and the subsequent sycophantic embrace of Israel in the Gulf is an indicator of Arab public opinion, that it signals a loss of interest in the cause.It is not. Arabs are of course not of a single mind on any particular issue, nor is it possible to gauge public opinion under tyrannical regimes. But it is indicative of the fact that these authoritarians no longer see the pan-Arab Palestinian cause and supporting it as vital to their survival. They have discovered that inward-looking, nationalistic pride is the key to enduring in perpetuity. It is the final step in the dismantling of pan-Arabism as a political force, one that will shape the region’s fortunes and its states’ alliances in the years and decades to come.
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Translation project offers Israelis look into Palestinian literature - 0 views
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Only 0.4% of Israeli Jews under the age of 70 can read the stories in the original Arabic language, he says. He also points to the fact that according to Israel’s National Library, less than 1% of all literature translated into Hebrew was written in Arabic, and 90% of the translators were Jews
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The stories of “Amputated Tongue," which all deal in various ways with language deprivation, is written by 57 Palestinian writers from Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and abroad. The impressive compilation of contemporary Palestinian prose was translated into Hebrew according to a unique model by 36 translators, where one Arab and one Jewish translator collaborated. One-third of them were Palestinians. The short stories by some of the best Palestinian writers provide Israeli readers with more than a glimpse of entire lives lived in this land, and of this land.
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The project lasted three years. Its goal was to give a voice to Palestinian Arabic society in the hostile climate created by Israel’s right-wing regime that views Arabic as an enemy language — as made abundantly clear in the 2018 Nationality Law, which downgraded the status of Arabic as an official language. The anthology targeted those few Israelis who want to know more about Palestinians but have had little exposure to them until now.
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Mati Diop's 'Atlantics' Is a Startling Study of Power | The Nation - 0 views
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Because these films are set in America, race and gender sometimes conceal the class tensions.
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Because of its title, American viewers will likely assume that Atlantics, the new film from the French Senegalese director Mati Diop, is about either slavery or refugees. Even after seeing it, they may assume it is about love or ghosts or exoticized life on the west coast of Africa. But Atlantics is fundamentally about class. Despite the familiar trappings of esteem—like Parasite, it won a prestigious award at Cannes, and Diop’s family background suggests that she is the epitome of an Afropolitan elite—the way it reckons with capital and labor is far more interesting than this recent spate of class warfare films. Atlantics cannot overthrow film as an institution, but it does overthrow many of film’s formal conventions. In so doing, it wreaks havoc with the interlocking hierarchy of class, race, and gender that most of these other films assume, leaving in its wake a startling study of power in the raw.
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Labor drama, love story, surrealist film, crime thriller, zombie flick—these shifts are both smooth and unsettling, just like that train in sudden reverse. They keep us on edge but never just for the sake of it. And they continually bring us back to the central question of class, even as they keep us from mapping it onto a single hero or plot or genre.
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A life in Jaffa, shared through dance - 0 views
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“I know everything about Israeli culture, about the customs and holidays, but the other side knows nothing about me,”
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Garabli’s act is titled “HaKovshim,” Hebrew for “The Conquerors” or “The Occupiers.” The inspiration for the name came to her when she passed a street of the same name on her way to college in Tel Aviv. “I could not believe my eyes,” she exclaimed. “There is actually a street with this name.”
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Though Garabli tackles the political weight of her identity in her work, she does not see her participation in Israeli institutions as a problem. She has previously been involved with projects at the Suzanne Dellal Center, a leading cultural center in Tel Aviv; following her success with “The Occupiers” in Acre, Tmu-na, a community theater in Tel Aviv, invited Garabli to perform on its stage. “I pay taxes like everyone else, and so I deserve to enjoy budgets as every artist does,” she said.
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