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A former military intelligence officer, who was also an armed forces spokesman, took charge of Al Asema TV in January.

ONTV, a popular TV channel that supported the government while occasionally broadcasting critical comments, was taken over in May 2016 by Ahmed Abu Hashima, a powerful multi-millionaire steel magnate said to be close to military intelligence and to President Abdel- Fattah al-Sisi. A month after the acquisition, the authorities expelled Liliane Daoud, a well-known ONTV programme presenter with a reputation for journalistic integrity. She was deportable because she has British and Lebanese dual nationality.

Hashima bought two other TV channels, Al Nahar and CBC, and four newspapers, Sout Al Omma, Ain, Dot Masr and Al Youm al Sabea, in 2016.

the editor had told that that “President Sisi is the newspaper’s new owner” and that it could therefore not continue to employ critical journalists

the government’s influence over the broadcast media landscape was also significantly enhanced in 2016 by the creation of a DMC, a major new TV network with a range of news, sports and entertainment channels. Dubbed “the mouthpiece of the intelligence services” by some journalists and launched with a patriotic anthem and Koranic chants, DMC gets permission to film where other privately-owned TV channels are denied access. It is also known to broadcast interviews that are presented as exclusives but just reiterate the regime’s pro-security, anti-Muslim Brotherhood dogma

Two Tunisian television stations critical of the president, Nessma and Al-Quran al-Kareem, were taken off the air on October 11, over alleged licensing issues.

“Shiite channels have been operating for years and have not caused strife or crises that Salafist channels ignite. This is because Shiite channels do not incite to violence and bloodshed and do not declare others to be infidels.”

Human rights activist and lawyer at the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, Ahmed Ezzat, told Deutsche Welle in 2012 that the law does not criminalize embracing or promoting the Shiite faith. Shutting down any Shiite channel or prosecuting any promoter of the Shiite ideology would be based on a broad application of the law against blasphemy of religions, he said.

“The legal criteria in shutting down any station would be based on its content and on whether or not it is viewed as blasphemy or incitement against any religion or belief."

“some Salafist channels, such as al-Hafez and al-Nas, were shut down in 2013.”

“What is happening is a part of the chaotic media and religious discourse. There are 121 religious channels broadcasting via Nilesat, including more than 60 Shiite channels, some of which explain Shiite ideas in a moderate way," he said. "Others are extremist and incite against the Sunni sect. Sunni channels respond also to such incitement with counterincitement. Thus, all extremist channels — be they Shiite or Sunni — need to be taken down.”

many Shiite channels are not at loggerheads with the state institutions, but rather with some Salafist parties.

In his address to the Syrian People’s Assembly on June 3, the dictator tried to hammer the theme home by using the term “terrorists” or “terrorism” a whopping 43 times. That is a full ten times more than George W. Bush during his speech to Congress in the immediate aftermath of 9/11

Like the neocon chickenhawks who cheered on America’s invasion of Iraq from the offices of Washington’s American Enterprise Institute, none of Assad’s apologists appear to have done any journalistic fieldwork to support their opinions. Ghorayeb and Narwani seem to have confined themselves to Beirut, where Ghorayeb consults the writings of V.I. Lenin and Paulo Freire to back up her hallucinatory portrayal of Assad as a subaltern freedom fighter, while Narwani cobbles together a scattershot of YouTube clips and hearsay from journalists she hangs out with to justify the regime’s very own “war on terror.”

As a Christian who fiercely rejected sectarianism, Shehadeh’s very presence shook the Syrian regime. After he was killed, the army shelled the Christian neighborhood of Hamidyeh to prevent his funeral, then a gang of shabiha attacked a memorial service for him in Damascus that would have presented a rare display of Christian-Sunni solidarity. It was this sense of solidarity that appeared to threaten the regime the most. As Shehadeh’s mother reportedly said, “They feared him in life, and they feared him in death.”

A few years ago, while visiting the offices of the Nation Magazine, a publication I frequently write for, I reflected on what it might have been like to be working there during the 1930’s when its editorial leadership supported Stalin and willfully ignored his crimes. What were the internal debates like, I wondered, and how would I have reacted? The past few weeks at Al Akhbar have brought those questions back into my thoughts, and they are no longer hypothetical. The paper’s opinion pages have become a playpen for dictator enablers, but unlike the 1930’s-era Nation Magazine, there is less excuse for their apologia. Indeed, given the easy accessibility of online media produced by Syrian activists and journalists, there is no way for Assad’s apologists to claim they did not know about the regime’s crimes

It’s like 1979. The Arab Spring has changed the situation entirely in the region all at once. … It looks like a mess … but if some of this can be successful, … it will change the chessboard. … So let’s hold out hope that some of this will work.

In his article that was supposed to appear in the print issue, Abd El Fattah compares the revolution to an autistic child losing his ability to engage with reality.

In his book, al-Jazari explained the construction of his devices and automatons, from water-raising machines to fountains, complete with illustrations and instructions that gave engineers the opportunity to reuse them. 

“The impact of al-Jazari's inventions is still felt in modern contemporary mechanical engineering,” wrote 20th-century English engineer and historian Donald Hill in his book Studies in Medieval Islamic Technology.

The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices,  was the most important work of engineering written before the Renaissance centuries later. 

“The idea of having robots to do humans work - or simply automation - was developed by al-Jazari 250 years before Leonardo Da Vinci, with some excellent examples."

in the 21st century Muslim countries see relatively less scientific activity. According to the World Bank, in 2016 the United States and the European Union respectively published 426,165 and 613,774 articles in scientific and technical journals. That compares to 40,974 in Iran and 33,902 in Turkey, although the number of articles is rising.

Breaking the Silence is being picked on for cynical political reasons. For Israeli Jews, there is no cow more sacred than the IDF. A clear majority, including this writer, served, are serving or will serve in the armed forces, just like their parents, children and even their grandchildren. When Defense Minister Lt. Gen.  (res.) Moshe Ya'alon declares that the members of Breaking the Silence are traitors, he means that they betrayed all Israelis. This is not an argument about occupation, ethics or Israel’s international standing. It's about our lives. Ya'alon was the commander-in-chief of the military, a respected authority on the matter.

The tacit conventional wisdom since the start of the so-called “knife intifada” is based on Talmudic teachings: “If a man comes to kill you, rise early and kill him first.” Or in common parlance, neutralize him first. Israeli politicians have called for people to do just this when confronted with a possible terrorist. There are even Jews who have already ascribed a broad interpretation to this order. Anyone coming to kill you, in their interpretation, may be a Jew willing to hand over territory to non-Jews. Assassin Yigal Amir, for instance, shot Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin after rabbis and politicians incited against him and his peace policy. Netanyahu himself took part in a demonstration at which a Rabin cutout dressed in a Nazi SS uniform was held aloft. Today, in his dressing down of the organization, he is dressing Breaking the Silence in the uniform of a kapo.

“Patriots” who beat up Palestinians for kicks on city streets and set a bilingual school on fire have already started sending threats to Breaking the Silence activists and their families, including their elderly grandparents. If, God forbid, anyone is hurt, Netanyahu, Ya'alon and Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid will rush to issue “sharp condemnations” of the criminals. They will surely not forget to attack those spreading incitement, but they might forget or ignore their own past contributions.

he hoped that his prosecution would “throw the spotlight on the cases of others unjustly detained in Egypt, especially the jailed journalists." Since the military takeover of the country in July 2013, tens of thousands of political opposition figures have been arrested and detained as part of a sweeping security crackdown on dissent that has targeted Muslim Brotherhood members and supporters as well as secular activists, researchers, journalists and intellectuals

Balshy on April 4 published a list of some 40 journalists in Egypt who were either imprisoned or under threat of being detained

While there has hardly been any noise over the jailing of journalists with alleged links to the Muslim Brotherhood, the verdicts against Naaot and Nagy and the arrest warrant against Balshy provoked outrage in Egypt. After an outcry in Egyptian media over the conviction of Naaot, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi last week urged parliament to review the country’s blasphemy laws, which critics have denounced as outdated and harmful. Meanwhile, in an outpouring of anger on social media over Nagy’s conviction, activists have campaigned for the novelist’s release using the Arabic hashtag that translates into #CreativityOnTrial.

Twenty-two rights organizations, six political parties and nearly 100 individuals signed a strongly worded petition condemning the warrant for Balshy’s arrest as “an attack on the media.”

Until recently, much of the Egyptian media and the majority of Egyptians had also rejected international criticism of the restrictions on the media in Egypt, perceiving the criticism as “part of the foreign conspiracy to destroy Egypt.” Lately however, there has been an almost abrupt turnabout with more journalists — including regime loyalists and those who had previously practiced self-censorship — becoming increasingly vocal in their criticism of “the muzzling of journalists through intimidation tactics” and “the unfair detention of writers and researchers.”

The regime clearly has not learned the lesson from Mubarak’s unplugging of the Internet during the 2011 uprising — a move that fueled the anger against the former dictator, leading to his ultimate overthrow. The government must acknowledge that the right to information and freedom of expression are basic human rights.

it wasn't until the TV broadcast that things really blew up

If Egyptian prosecutors can accuse a filmmaker in the United States of "threatening national unity" or "assaulting Islam," crimes that carry the death penalty, surely they can actually arrest the men in Cairo who propagated the video

In presenting the video, the broadcasters explained that they spread offensive speech because the public needed to be informed of in injustice.

Al Nas was using the freedom of speech in the same way it is exercised in other countries, including those in the West. Exposing outrages is a central role of the free media, after all. Informing the public is a vital part of democracy, and will be essential in the Arab world as democracy spreads

Some public questioning of Al Nas has begun, and the TV station is on the defensive. "We did not mean... to harm the national unity," insisted Essam Ramy, the editor of the program, in an interview with NPR. He said the program merely "monitors what happens on the Egyptian street," and that if Al Nas really wanted to incite riots, the station would have played even more of the video than it did

Film producers who were salivating to smear Muslims must have been thrilled when Al Nas became a distributor for their product. If they're going to have a democracy, Egyptians are stuck with free speech -- and also with the responsibility to use it better than Al Nas did this month

Visitors to Huffington's website last May could have seen  this page (preserved here by the Wayback Machine) which lists Narwani's articles. Look at the same page today and they have all been deleted except for one which she co-authored with someone else. It's as if the other articles never existed.

concern about Facebook's deletion of various pages connected with the Syrian opposition, possibly at the behest of pro-Assad elements. Some of them have been listed by Felim McMahon of Storyful and the blogger, Brown Moses. McMahon points out that some of these have helped Storyful to corroborate (or not) various claims about the Syrian conflict, while Brown Moses notes that "nearly every Facebook page" reporting on the chemical attacks in Damascus last August has now gone. Alongside the fighting on the ground, there's also a propaganda war being fought over Syria – mostly via the internet. At first sight this might seem like a sideshow but, as in all wars, it's an integral part of the conflict. One individual heavily involved in the Syrian propaganda war on the pro-Assad side, through Twitter and various websites, is Sharmine Narwani (who I have written about previously, here,  here, here, and here). Among other things, Narwani wrote a dozen highly contentious articles for Huffington Post, some of them about Syria. Whether you like them or agree with them is beside the point. Whatever their merits or de-merits, they were examples of the sort of arguments being used by Assad supporters and the fact that Huffington, a major American website, saw fit to publish them at the time is also interesting and relevant. 

I'm not suggesting that articles on the internet should never be deleted or changed but that it should not be done lightly, and when it does happen, publishers should be prepared to justify their decisions in public.

Meanwhile, the Syrian government's daily Al-Thawrah sees the situation as chickens coming home to roost for US President Barack Obama's foreign policy. "Perhaps it has not crossed America's mind that the terrorism it manufactures and exports to the rest of the world, including to Syria as is the case today, will in the end bounce back. But lately, this fact started to rob Obama's administration's sleep," they write. "Amid the feverish US -Western race to target Syria, developments in Ukraine have started to steal attention as the eyes of the world turn to the Russian Caesar and wait for his final decision on the issue."

In Turkey's Hurriyet Daily News, Verda Ozer notes comparisons between the Ukrainian uprising and her nation's Gezi protests, but she contends that there are "many differences". She calls Ukraine an "authoritarian democracy" without Turkey's record of recent stability. Turkey's government, she writes, has been in an ongoing dialogue with protesters, which has prevented the sort of escalation that happened in Kiev.

Newspapers backing the army's version of events this week – such as al-Dustour and al-Watan – were only a fortnight ago attacking Morsi every day.

The private TV stations don't tell the story. With the closure of the Islamist stations you really have to turn to CNN or al-Jazeera to see what the Islamists are saying and doing – except the footage of them committing atrocities

The series revolves around how Selim I, who is trying to extend the empire he forcefully took from his father, is faced with the opposition of the people of Cairo led by the fighter-turned-leader Toman Bay as he fights to conquer Egypt.

The $40 million series caused still another tension in Turkey’s strained relations with Egypt, due to Ankara's support of the banned Muslim Brotherhood and late President Mohammed Morsi. Ankara’s ties are also tense with Saudi Arabia — whose channel broadcasts the series — over the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Moreover, the launch of the series is also believed to be strategically timed, to precede another Turkish production on the Ottoman Empire and the life and times of Osman, who gave the empire his name.

ome challenged his description of the Ottomans as “occupiers” and the Mamluks as the locals, whereas the Mamluks were also an occupying force in Egypt. Faisal bin Fahad bin Jasim Al Thani, chairman of one of Qatar’s biggest conglomerates, tweeted that this sentence was “ignorance” coupled with hate. “Toman Bay and the Mamluks are Turks [not Egyptians], and the Ottomans are also Turks. So, if you consider the Ottomans to be an occupier, you need to concede that the Mamluks were, too,” he tweeted.

In recent years, there have been requests in Egypt to remove the name of this violent sultan from streets and squares in the country. The first attempt was in February 2018 when the Egyptian authorities decided to remove Selim’s name from a street in the Zeitoun neighborhood in the east of Cairo.

The day after Mursi's removal, Nile TV and state radio suddenly hosted studio guests who railed against the Brotherhood as "enemies of the people" and cast Islamist supporters of the elected president as instigators of violence.

"Every editor-in-chief at national newspapers is treading water, waiting for the new regime and its policies to crystallise and taking into account that the armed forces have a stance to be reckoned with," Attiya Eissawi, managing editor at state-run Al-Ahram told Reuters.

"Many of them expect to be replaced if their new editorial policies are not to the satisfaction of the new regime."

52 senior executives and editors at Al-Ahram, including the chairman of the company, which is also a publisher and houses a policy think-tank, have been axed since the fall of Mubarak and the election of Mursi

rights activists and journalists say the toppled leader tried to use government-owned channels and papers to his own advantage as his predecessors had done, only less successfully

State-employed journalists went on strike to demand the removal of Mursi's information minister, Salah Abdel-Maqsoud.In May, radio journalists stopped work in protest when the top editor of state radio was transferred to a small station covering youth affairs and sports, after the minister deemed a Radio Misr broadcast insulting to the president.

Al-Akhbar, one of the biggest, accused the Brotherhood of meddling and incompetence in a front-page editorial by the editor-in-chief the week before the mass anti-Mursi protests that gave popular support for the army's action.A journalist at al-Ahram told Reuters that phone calls from the military and the security services regarding news coverage had been the norm before Mubarak's fall."This time, they don't need to," the journalist said, citing huge popular support for the military's toppling of Mursi.

Since the Islamist channels were silenced, coverage of large protests by Mursi supporters against his removal have been scarce on state TV and at times completely absent on private satellite channels that fiercely opposed the Brotherhood.

"Unfortunately, the Egyptian media is only presenting one picture of what's happening now. It's the picture of those who want the military government," said Abdel Aziz Mujaahed, one of 29 Mubasher Misr staff members, including the station's general manager, who were arrested on Wednesday.

The Muslim Brotherhood's political arm said the state-owned printing press refused to print its newspaper - Freedom and Justice - for two days after Mursi's removal, but the paper was back on some newsstands on Saturday.A military source acknowledged restricting publication because the paper planned to splash an article, which he said was untrue, alleging that the army was split and a major unit remained loyal to Mursi.

On Nov. 24, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Google, YouTube and some other social networks agreed to fight incitement posted on their pages.

Israel uses a number of measures to counter the postings, most notably by creating around 5,000 fake Facebook accounts, Quds Press reported Oct. 29. Those who operate these accounts are fluent in English and Arabic, and their mission is to hack into and shut down Palestinian pages by submitting reports to the Facebook administration. Israel also has arrested of a number of Palestinians during the past three months on charges of inciting to kill Israelis in their Facebook posts.

the Authority for Palestinian Prisoners' Affairs reported the Israeli army has detained 27 Palestinians on charges of incitement since October, due to their activities on social networks

there are Israeli pages in Hebrew that call Palestinians terrorists, among other bad names, but they are not being closed down

Tunisia’s Minister of Culture al-Mahdi Mabrouk told the conference. “You cannot expect to go from a media of propaganda to an independent media in just a few months, such a transition takes time,”

In Syria we resorted to a network of stringers who we trained over the phone

72 percent of those participating thought satellite news channels had contributed to the Arab Spring

“All the Arab regimes wanted to control the media, to impose restrictions on us and even to prevent us from working, as in Syria, which forced us to take positions,” said al-Jazeera presenter Jamil Azar

“The fact that there are a variety of means to get information does not necessarily mean quality journalism,”