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michelle benevento

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Women's rights under Iran's revolution - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...7879797.stm

women oppresion Iran

shared by michelle benevento on 26 Feb 09 - Cached
  • michelle benevento on 26 Feb 09
     
    Discusses the feminist movement in Iran which relatd back to our class discussion about the oppression of women in the middle east.
Ed Webb

Women of the Revolution Discussion - ABC News - 2 views

abcnews.go.com/...san-tahmasebi-politcs-13069559

women revolution feminism #jan25 Egypt Iran US USA

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 08 Mar 11
     
    Amanpour is hilariously nervous faced with discussion of imperialism & neocolonialism. The guests get it, even Tina Brown. Amanpour wants to talk about the scary Muslim Brotherhood. Everyone else knows she's missing the point.
Ed Webb

US media talks a lot about Palestinians - just without Palestinians - +972 Magazine - 0 views

www.972mag.com/us-media-palestinians

US USA media newspapers Palestinians MEPP Rabin opinion analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 31 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • many Americans’ memories of Rabin have long been colored by a relentless media narrative that deprived them of critical perspectives on his life and legacy. In fact, looking back at the Oslo years, the voices of Palestinians — the victims of Rabin’s decades-long career — rarely made it into the pages of influential U.S. publications. Had they been featured, many Americans may have had a more informed opinion about why Palestinians would oppose honoring Rabin.
  • I focused on opinion pieces for two reasons. First, scholarly analysis of major U.S. outlets has already demonstrated that their news coverage is heavily shaped by pro-Israel biases. Second, opinion pieces are playing a stronger role than ever in shaping our understanding of the news. As one newspaper editor explained, “In a 24/7 news environment, many readers already know what happened; opinion pieces help them decide how to think about it.”
  • I had expected to find relatively few opinion pieces by Palestinians, and I was correct. But what surprised me was how much Palestinians have been talked about in major U.S. media outlets over the decades. Editorial boards and columnists seem to have been quite consumed with talking about the Palestinians, often in condescending and even racist ways — yet they somehow did not feel the need to hear much from Palestinians themselves.
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  • In the New York Times, less than 2 percent of the nearly 2,500 opinion pieces that discussed Palestinians since 1970 were actually written by Palestinians. In the Washington Post, the average was just 1 percent.
  • While three of Said’s op-eds discussing Palestinians ran in the New York Times in the 1980s, from the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords until his death in 2003, the newspaper ran only a single letter to the editor authored by him in January 1997, in which Said criticized the Oslo framework. During that time, Said’s opinion pieces explaining Oslo’s fatal flaws appeared in The Guardian, al-Ahram Weekly, and even the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Yet readers of America’s “newspaper of record” were not able to hear from one of the country’s most eloquent and prescient Palestinian critics of the “peace process” narrative.
  • During the 1990s, Thomas Friedman wrote 33 columns discussing Palestinians; William Safire wrote 24, Anthony Lewis wrote 39, and A.M. Rosenthal penned 56. While they differed on various aspects of Oslo, none of them questioned the framing that “peace” was the ultimate goal, that Rabin was “a man of peace,” and that Palestinians who opposed Oslo were in fact opponents of peace.
  • It is unsurprising, then, that most readers of the mainstream U.S. press would not understand that Rabin only recognized the PLO as “the representative of the Palestinian people,” but did not recognize Palestinians’ right to establish a state along the 1967 lines. They would not know that illegal Israeli settlements continued to expand under Rabin’s watch.
  • a month before his assassination, Rabin reassured fellow Knesset members that the state Palestinians desired would be “an entity which is less than a state.” And they would not know that, in those same remarks, Rabin made clear that Israel’s borders would be “beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War,” along with a “united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma’ale Adumim and Givat Ze’ev [West Bank settlements], as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty.” This is the Rabin that Palestinians know all too well.
  • in 1999, Said wrote that the Oslo process “required us to forget and renounce our history of loss, dispossessed by the very people who taught everyone the importance of not forgetting the past.”
  • In 2020 so far, the New York Times has run 39 opinion pieces in its print and online platforms that discuss Palestinians; only three were actually penned by Palestinians
  • It is not just Palestinians: Black, Indigenous, Latin American, Asian American, and other people of color face ongoing racism in the newsroom, making it more difficult for alternative perspectives to make their way into these influential pages
  • Alternative news outlets (including +972 Magazine), along with many Palestinians on Twitter and other social media sites, are providing fresh perspectives that we can follow, engage with, and share. The avalanche of tweets and comments highlighting Rabin’s violent legacy is just one example of this. And as more Americans receive their news from social media (including politicians), those wanting Palestinian perspectives now have a much easier time getting them.
Ed Webb

A New History for a New Turkey: What a 12th-grade textbook has to say about T... - 1 views

www.eliamep.gr/...CE%AF%CE%B1-%CE%B4%CE%B9%CE%B4

Turkey history textbooks imperialism colonialism propaganda ideology US USA EU NATO UN analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Rather than simply serving as crude propaganda for Erdoğan’s regime, Contemporary Turkish and World History aspires to do something more ambitious: embed Turkey’s dominant ideology in a whole new nationalist narrative. Taken in its entirety, the book synthesizes diverse strands of Turkish anti-imperialism to offer an all-too-coherent, which is not to say accurate, account of the last hundred years. It celebrates Atatürk and Erdoğan, a century apart, for their struggles against Western hegemony. It praises Cemal Gürsel and Necmettin Erbakan, on abutting pages, for their efforts to promote Turkish industrial independence. And it explains what the works of both John Steinbeck [Con Şıtaynbek] and 50 Cent [Fifti Sent] have to say about the shortcomings of American society.
  • Turkey has long had competing strains of anti-Western, anti-Imperialist and anti-American thought. In the foreign policy realm, Erdogan’s embrace of the Mavi Vatan doctrine showed how his right-wing religious nationalism could make common cause with the left-wing Ulusalcı variety.[5] This book represents a similar alliance in the historiographic realm, demonstrating how the 20th century can be rewritten as a consistent quest for a fully independent Turkey.
  • Ankara is currently being praised for sending indigenously developed drones to Ukraine and simultaneously criticized for holding up Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership. Contemporary Turkish and World History sheds light on the intellectual origins of both these policies
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  • Among the 1930s cultural and intellectual figures given place of pride are Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso and John Steinbeck. Guernica is reproduced in an inset about Picasso, illustrating the artist’s hatred of war. (47) A lengthy excerpt from the Grapes of Wrath concludes with Steinbeck’s denunciation of depression-era America: “And money that might have gone to wages went for gas, for guns, for agents and spies, for blacklists, for drilling. On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment.”
  • The book places added emphasis on the harsh terms imposed on Germany at Versailles. Prefiguring the later treatment of Al Qaeda terrorism, the intention appears not so much to justify Nazism, but rather to present injustice as the causal force behind violence and cruelty in world politics.
  • the Holocaust instead appears here as one among several examples of Western barbarity
  • The foundation of the UN is immediately followed by a discussion of Israel under the heading “Imperial Powers in the Remaking of the Middle East.” (80-81) The Palestine problem, students learn, is the principal cause of conflict in the region. It began when the Ottoman Empire, “the biggest obstacle to the foundation of a Jewish state,” grew weak, leading to the creation of Israel.
  • Next comes a discussion of the post-war financial order and the International Monetary Fund. Students learn that “the IMF’s standard formula, which recommends austerity policies for countries in economic crises, generally results in failure, chaos and social unrest.” (81-83) An excerpt, which students are then asked to discuss, explains how the IMF prescribes different policies for developed and developing countries.
  • only in the context of the Cold War origins of the EU does the book engage in any explicitly religious clash-of-civilizations style rhetoric. The idea of European unity is traced back to the Crusades, while a quote about the centrality of Christianity to European identity appears under a dramatic picture of Pope Francis standing with European leaders. (112) The next page states that the EU’s treatment of Turkey’s candidacy, coupled with the fact that “all the countries within it were Christian” had “raised questions” about the EU’s identity.
  • Early Cold War era decolonization also provides an opportunity to celebrate Atatürk’s role as an anti-imperialist hero for Muslims and the entire Third World. (122-123) “Turkey’s national struggle against imperialism in Anatolia struck the first great blow against imperialism in the 20th century,” the authors write. “Mustafa Kemal, with his role in the War of Independence and his political, economic, social and cultural revolutions after it, served as an example for underdeveloped and colonized nations.” Atatürk himself is quoted as saying, in 1922, that “what we are defending is the cause of all Eastern nations, of all oppressed nations.” Thus, the book explains that “the success of the national struggle brought joy to the entire colonized Islamic world, and served as a source of inspiration to members of other faiths.” The section ends with quotes from leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and Habib Bourguiba about how Atatürk inspired them in their own anti-imperial struggles or was simply, in Nehru’s words, “my hero.” An accompanying graphic shows Atatürk’s image superimposed over a map with arrows pointing to all the countries, from Algeria to Indonesia, whose revolutions were supposedly influenced by Turkey’s War of Independence.
  • Amidst the polarization of the Erdoğan era, what is striking in this book is the authors’ efforts to weave together the conflicting strands of Turkish political history into a coherent narrative. Illustrating Ernst Renan’s argument about the role of forgetting in nation-building, this account glosses over the depth of the divisions and hostility between rival historical actors, presenting them as all working side by side toward a common national goal
  • The authors also offer a balanced treatment of the fraught domestic politics during the period from 1945 to 1960 when Turkey held its first democratic election and experienced its first coup. (138-142, 144-146) They focus their criticism on the negative impact of U.S. aid, arguing that Washington intentionally sought to make Turkey economically and politically dependent, then sponsored a coup when these efforts were threatened.
  • The narrative of national independence also helps smooth over Turkey’s Cold War domestic divides. Students are introduced to the ‘68 Generation and left-wing leaders likes Deniz Gezmiş as anti-imperialists protesting against the U.S. Sixth Fleet in support of a fully independent Turkey. (185-186)[9] In this context, Baskin Oran’s work is again cited, this time quoting Uğur Mumcu on the role of “dark forces,” presumably the CIA, in laying the groundwork for Turkey’s 1971 coup.
  • The book also offers a relatively neutral treatment of political activism during the ensuing decade, suggesting that rival ideological movements were all good faith responses to the country’s challenges. On this, the authors quote Kemal Karpat: “Both right and left wing ideologies sought to develop an explanation for social phenomena and a perspective on the future. A person’s choice of one of these ideologies was generally the result of chance or circumstance.” (202) Thus the authors imply that while foreign powers provoked or exploited these movements, the individual citizens who participated in them can be given the benefit of the doubt. Interestingly, the book takes a similar approach in discussing the 2013 Gezi protests: “If various financial interests and foreign intelligence agencies had a role in the Gezi Park events, a majority of the activists were unaware of it and joined these protests of their own will.”
  • Turkey’s real struggle in the 21st century, as in the 20th, is against dependence on foreign technology
  • a book which begins with a portrait of Atatürk ends with a photo of the Bayraktar TB2.
  • the book’s biases are less in the realm of wild distortion and more reminiscent of those that plague ideologically infused nationalistic history education in all too many countries
  • its exaggerated critique of European imperialism may be no more misleading than the whitewashing still found in some European textbooks
  • At moments, Contemporary Turkish and World History is better aligned with recent left-leaning scholarship than the patriotic accounts many Americans grew up reading as well
  • Selçuk Bayraktar, the architect of Turkey’s drone program, said that as a student “I was obsessed with Noam Chomsky.” [16] During the 1980s and 90s, America sold Ankara F-16 jets and Sikorsky helicopters that were used to wage a brutal counterinsurgency campaign in southeast Anatolia. No one was more critical of this than left-wing scholars like Chomsky.[17] Now, Ankara is selling Bayraktar drones to Ethiopia, where they are being used to kill civilians and destroy schools in another violent civil war.
  • Turkey’s marriage of power projection and anti-colonial critique have been particularly visible – and effective – in Africa. Ankara has presented itself as an “emancipatory actor,” while providing humanitarian aid, establishing military bases, selling weapons across the continent.[13] In doing so, Turkish leaders have faced some of the same contradictions as previous emancipatory actors. In August 2020, for example, members of Mali’s military overthrew a president with whom Erdoğan enjoyed good relations. Ankara expressed its “sorrow” and “deep concern.”[14] Then, a month later, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu became the first foreign official to meet with the country’s new military leaders. “Like a brother,” he “sincerely shared” his hopes for a smooth “transition process” back to democracy
  • Throughout the 20th century, America defined itself as the world’s premier anti-imperialist power, all while gradually reproducing many of the elements that had defined previous empires.[11] Today, it often seems that Turkey’s aspirations for great power status reflect the facets of 20th century American power it has condemned most vigorously
  • certain themes dominate Contemporary Turkish and World History. At the center of its narrative is the struggle for global hegemony, in military, economic, technological and artistic terms
Ed Webb

Iranian Police Seizing Dissidents Get Aid Of Western Companies - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...-aid-of-western-companies.html

Iran surveillance technology middleeast ICT

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • About half the political prisoners he met in jail told him police had tracked their communications and movements through their cell phones
  • Stockholm-based Ericsson AB, Creativity Software Ltd. of the U.K. and Dublin-based AdaptiveMobile Security Ltd. marketed or provided gear over the past two years that Iran’s law enforcement or state security agencies would have access to, according to more than 100 documents and interviews with more than two dozen technicians and managers who worked on the systems.
  • When Iranian security officers needed to locate a target one night in late 2009, one former Ericsson employee says he got an emergency call to come into the office to fix a glitch in an Ericsson positioning center.
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  • AdaptiveMobile, backed by the investment arm of Intel Corp. (INTC), proposed a system in partnership with Ericsson for Iran’s largest mobile provider in 2010 that would filter, block and store cell phone text messages, according to two people familiar with the discussions. An Ericsson spokesman confirmed the proposal. The Irish company still services commercial gear for a similar system it sold in 2008 to Irancell. Police have access to the system, say two former Irancell managers.
  • Texting has become the predominant means of digital communications because more than 70 percent of Iranian households have a mobile phone -- four-times greater than the percentage with internet access.
  • Hundreds of people have been convicted by Iranian courts for offenses related to election protests, according to New York-based nonprofit group Human Rights Watch.
  • “My mobile phone was my enemy, my laptop was my enemy, my landline was my enemy,” says Shojaee, who turned to using pay phones.
  • Iran is one of many authoritarian countries across the Mideast and North Africa employing Western surveillance tools for political repression. In Bahrain, for instance, communications monitoring centers sold by Siemens AG (SIE), and maintained by Espoo, Finland-based Nokia Siemens Networks and then its divested unit, Trovicor GmbH, have been used to track and arrest activists, according to a Bloomberg News investigation.
  • Much of NSN’s gear in Iran has since been swapped out in favor of China’s Huawei Technologies Co.
  • A rapidly growing global business, the “lawful interception” and information intelligence market now generates more than $3 billion in annual sales
  • The 3.9 million-euro ($5.5 million) system AdaptiveMobile proposed could handle more than 10,000 messages per second and archive them for a period of 180 days, according to a company proposal. The archive would contain 54 terabytes of storage, according to the document. That’s big enough for all the data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope over 20 years.
  • “Ultimately, telecom is a force for good in society,”
  • Police arrested him on the outskirts of a rally that December, beating him with fists and a baton and jailing him for 52 days. Security agents interrogated him 14 times, presenting transcripts of text messages plus an elaborate diagram showing all the people he’d called -- and then everyone they’d called.
  • The system can record a person’s location every 15 seconds -- eight times more frequently than a similar system the company sold in Yemen, according to company documents. A tool called “geofences” triggers an alarm when two targets come in close proximity to each other. The system also stores the data and can generate reports of a person’s movements. A former Creativity Software manager said the Iran system was far more sophisticated than any other systems the company had sold in the Middle East.
  • “A lot of people were not happy they were working on a project in Iran,” he says. “They were worried about how the product was going to be used.” Gokaram says he worked only on commercial products and didn’t share those concerns. He declined to discuss specifics about any technology deployed in Iran. Creativity Software, which is privately-held and partly funded by London-based venture capital firm MMC Ventures, announced last November that it had made four sales in six months in the Middle East for law enforcement purposes without identifying the mobile operator clients. Saul Olivares, market development director at Creativity Software, declined to discuss sales of law enforcement technology, but in an e-mail he pointed to its practical benefits, such as locating individuals during disasters, for ambulance crews and in other emergencies.
  • The European Union took aim at Iran’s growing surveillance capabilities in October 2010, enacting new sanctions that include prohibitions for goods that can be used for “internal repression.” The regulations, however, focused mostly on low- tech items, such as vehicles equipped with water cannons and razor barbed wire. In September, the European Parliament broadened its surveillance concerns beyond Iran, voting for a block on exports of systems if the purchasing country uses the gear “in connection with a violation of human rights.”
  • After his arrest early last year, Pourheydar, the opposition journalist, says police accused him of speaking to foreign media such as BBC and Voice of America. Their evidence: unbroadcast mobile phone calls captured, recorded and transcribed, he says. They also had transcripts of his e-mails and text messages. He never learned which companies provided the technology that made it possible.
  • “All these companies, which sell telecommunications services and listening devices to Iran, directly have roles in keeping this regime in power,”
Ed Webb

Why isn't the tent protest in Israel covered in the global news? | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...-israel-covered-in-global-news

Israel protests analysis opinion media

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • In the post-war period in Britain, and especially in the 1960s, Commonwealth immigrants were often excluded from the social movement for housing rights discussions. This was not because these immigrants lacked housing problems. In fact many immigrants experienced housing difficulties and suffered from the housing shortage, not only because of financial hardship but also because they were denied council housing or because private landlords did not want to let them rent their property. And yet representations of ethnic minorities were never at the centre of this social outcry against the British welfare state. At the heart of the 1960s protest was the symbol of white, working class Cathy, not her West Indies equivalent. Although some groups such as Shelter tried to assist and solve the housing difficulties of recent immigrants, the fact remained that within a very lively discussions about Labour’s failure to find a solution for housing and the result of what they called “homeless families,” the hardship of recent immigrants was barely discussed by the public. Similarly, in Israel of 2011 the protest focuses on young, Jewish (mostly Ashkenazi) citizens and not on any of the other ethnic minorities. The tent movement – which I fully support and respect – can only exist through a clear demarcation of who is part of the imaginary whole and who is not; who deserves housing from the state and who doesn’t; who is part of the national home and who isn’t. And we don’t even have to go to the occupied territories for that. In other words, in both cases this is a protest about a right for citizens and not a universal right to a home. Even within the so-called “social agenda” there are many who are excluded.
  • This is the first time I have felt a glimmer of optimism about Israeli politics since attending the rally where Rabin was shot in 1995.
  • This Israeli protest is on the scale of ordinary (= not 1968) European protests and about European issues.  It just shows how not-Middle East and not-revolutionary Israel is.
Nergiz Kern

Religious Leaders Gather to Discuss Faith in Virtual Worlds - Pixels and Policy - 1 views

www.pixelsandpolicy.com/...eligious-leaders-assembly.html

virtualworlds secondlife religion intercultural

shared by Nergiz Kern on 14 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Nergiz Kern on 14 Nov 09
     
    Religious Leaders Gather to Discuss Faith in Virtual Worlds
Ed Webb

Information minister discussing launch of two new state-run channels | Egypt Independent - 0 views

www.egyptindependent.com/...nch-two-new-state-run-channels

Egypt television TV

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 15 Jan 13
     
    #Egypt information minister we weren't supposed to have announces spending public money we don't have on new channels http://t.co/nzGt75QJ
Ed Webb

Twitter's role in revolutionary Egypt - isolation or connection? - 25 January: Revoluti... - 1 views

english.ahram.org.eg/...32610.aspx

Egypt socialmedia revolution twitter

shared by Ed Webb on 24 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Social media platforms provide a channel for citizens to report events on the ground in a faster way and without the editorial interference of newspapers’ managements and the state. It is the only completely free and independent outlet to spread information.
  • As long as we have a biased, censored media, which is not just in Egypt but any mainstream media, alternative outlets like Twitter and others will be the tools used by the people and activists to expose the truth.
  • The role will be that of support group, the way it always has been. It's where you get hope, where you know you have people...who share similar views, no matter what those views are, all over Egypt. In a society that is bound to be more isolationist due to fear, Twitter provides a safe mechanism to interact and meet like-minded others and find comfort in that. We will need all the comfort we can get.
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  • it is a consultation and consensus-building platform like no other
  • Twitter is more immune to infiltration and/or electronic committees of security apparatus; when someone from them replies to you he/she can't really reach out to others not following him/her, so it's very hard to create a false consensus or dominant opinion as with Facebook comments and the like.
  • The infrastructure of Twitter is only mildly conducive to exchange of ideas with people outside of our immediate list of friends; accessing strangers' ideas on a given topic is only a hashtag click away but how often do we do that click? It's more comfortable to only follow discussions among people we've pre-approved.
  • Since the first revolution we can say that we're seeing more Twitter-conversation than Twitter-organisation. But I predict we'll see more of a reversion to the organisation use at some point, as the battle with the enemies of democracy intensifies.
  • We need to market the revolution and in that we'll need to teach ourselves how to conduct a constructive Twitter conversation, one that doesn't end in people blocking each other.
  • at the end of the day it's a platform for youth who many times find no other alternative
  • It will continue to play an important role in citizen journalism as it has always done, and delivering independent media to counter the official one.
  • The revolution and its revolutionaries were badly portrayed and have been subjected to intensive campaigns of defamation, despite all the efforts on social media to provide another narrative and defy the propaganda.
  • especially after the start of the revolution, media outlets rely on Twitter to stay on top of events on the ground throughout the major cities in Egypt. In fact, almost all newspapers and TV channels will make daily references to news spread through Twitter one way or the other.
  • If many people join Twitter from different classes and groups to represent the Egyptian street, we can discuss for real what the Egyptian people in the street want.
Ed Webb

Israel, Mired in Ideological Battles, Fights on Cultural Fronts - The New York Times - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...fights-on-cultural-fronts.html

Israel culture identity identities ideology politics Zionism censorship propaganda education media

shared by Ed Webb on 30 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Miri Regev, the divisive and conservative minister of culture and sport, who wants to deny state money to institutions that do not express “loyalty” to the state, including those that show disrespect for the flag, incite racism or violence, or subvert Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
  • For one well-known poet, Meir Wieseltier, the law “brings us closer to the rise of fascism and exposes its true face.” But Isi Leibler argued in The Jerusalem Post that the government is “not obliged to subsidize the demonization of the nation” and should instead support “the inculcation of love of Israel.”
  • such conflicts, over what cultural works the state should promote for schoolchildren to read or for citizens to see and hear, is part of a political drama in which the politicians of a new generation are jockeying for position as leader of the so-called nationalist camp
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  • The Israel they represent is more religious and less beholden to the values and inheritances of the old, Europeanized elite and its dwindling left
  • This month, the left-leaning daily Haaretz highlighted internal discussions in the ministry about what artistic works might be considered “politically undesirable” for high-school students. Among the criteria, the newspaper said, were whether artists would perform in West Bank settlements and declare loyalty to the state and to the national anthem, something that is particularly problematic for Israel’s Arab citizens.Internal discussions are not policy, but even this report drew stinging responses, with Oded Kotler, a prominent Israeli actor and director, comparing Israel to the Soviet Union and telling Israel Radio, “There’s a real culture war underway here, but the war from that side of the political map is a harbinger of zealotry, darkness and coercion.”Mr. Kotler infuriated the government and the political right last summer when he compared its supporters to “cud-chewing cattle.” That was in response to Ms. Regev’s effort to freeze state funding for an Arab theater in Haifa because of a play about a Palestinian prisoner who murders an Israeli soldier. The production, “Parallel Time,” had enraged the right and Mr. Bennett banned school trips to see it.
  • Mr. Bennett, for his part, overruled ministry experts to ban from high-school reading lists a novel about a romance between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man, apparently out of fear that it promotes assimilation. The romance takes place abroad; the pair splits up when they return home, to Israel and the West Bank. Mr. Bennett said the novel, “Borderlife,” by Dorit Rabinyan, disparaged the Israeli military, and the head of his ministerial committee said it “could incite hatred and cause emotional storms” in classrooms.The debate about the book actually increased its sales, something Ms. Rabinyan credited in an interview to “the strength of Israeli democracy.”
  • The novel begins with the Israeli woman, who is Sephardic, coming under suspicion of terrorism in New York over her “Arab” appearance and because she writes from right to left. “This is the bond that connects her to the Palestinian,” Ms. Rabinyan explained. “I don’t consider my Israeliness to be hegemonic.”
Ed Webb

'I've taken care of the newspapers, TV is next': Netanyahu's plot to take over the medi... - 0 views

www.haaretz.com/...1.751124

Israel media press politics ownership Netanyahu

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 05 Nov 16
     
    Detailed discussion of Netanyahu's obsession with controlling the media
Ed Webb

Radio Kalima -Tunisie - Transparency Needed: The Media in Tunisia after the Revolution - 4 views

www.kalima-tunisie.info/...r-the-Revolution-item-768.html

Tunisia media analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • maintenance of the pre-revolutionary media landscape: No new TV station has been allowed. Just as no daily newspaper has emerged. New titles are edited by political parties and appear as weeklies, most of which incorporate the standard of the tabloid press. After a 9-days hunger strike by Radio Kalima’s manager, Omar Mistiri, twelve regional radios out of 74 candidates were finally selected in late June by the National Authority for Information and Communication Reform (INRIC), a temporary media advisory board. Now, the selected radios are waiting for the governmental permission. At the institutional level, the disappearance of the Communication Ministry does not lead, right now, to more media autonomy. Pre-revolutionary media managers are mainly the same: CEOs, Editors and Chairmen of Board moved from flattery of the ousted president and his system to a doubtful celebration of the “revolution”. In the state-owned media, the turnover of managers is conducted without any transparency just like under the dictatorship. Changes look more like a consequence of power balance between the different clans in the current government than a nascent process towards a democratic media system.
  • field reporting, which was longtime banned from or depreciated in the official media
  • The legal status of old private media, especially those belonging to the former president family, is still unclear. Some of them are under jurisdictional managers, but INRIC excluded them for the moment from any ethical obligations. Hannibal TV, owned by a relative to Leila Trabelsi, was involved in many ethical infringements to the Ethical Code like slandering or fake news, before and particularly after the revolution. Larbi Nasra, the Hanibal TV owner, seems to play a political role by receiving political leaders and airing many reports about his own charitable actions. Fethi Houidi, Information Minister under Ben Ali, is still Nessma TV’s CEO. Moez Sinaoui, former Nessma PR man, was nominated as the Interim Prime Minister’s spokesman
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  • media reform, like the reform of the police and justice, is not considered a major issue in the democratic transition. Right now, the debate about a media sector reform is polarized between the journalists (the journalists’ syndicate SNJT and some individual initiatives) and the government. Strangely, the question of the journalists’ “responsibility” is debated in the same words as before the revolution. The issue normally comes up when the story of journalists differs from the official version, especially when police and army are concerned.
  • the new law from February 2011, which regulates the establishment and function of the INRIC, is reminiscent of the one that established the High Council of Communication, the advisory body of the former president Ben Ali. There are “private” discussions between INRIC and the High Council of Political Reforms to propose new laws to regulate the media sector before the parliamentary elections. These discussions neither go along with public hearings nor are they reported by the media.
  • In the Press Institute, the unique academic institution for teaching journalism, a tiny reform was decided in April on a two-days meeting. None of the professional bodies or NGOs engaged in the fight for freedom of expression was involved in this reform.
  • the Tunisian Agency of External Communication (ATCE) that had managed the propaganda system outside of, but also inside Tunisia for the last 20 years
  • The fall of the sophisticated system of surveillance and censorship allowed a renewal of the blogosphere and news websites. Even the traditional media are trying to make their websites interactive or to create their electronic versions. Nevertheless, there is no significant shift in terms of production transparency and responsiveness. Critical articles about media often look more like reckoning between journalists than attempts to make media more accountable. In addition, the authoritarian temptation came back with the decision of the military court to ban four websites which were accused of offending the army.
  • Background: MA in Pre-Revolutionary Tunisia Under Ben Ali’s rule most broadcasters and newspapers were owned by one of Ben Ali’s relatives or remained close to the official political agenda either because of press freedom restrictions or for economic reasons. These structures had far reaching consequences for the formation of the journalistic field in general and media accountability practices in particular. Though media accountability recurred in the professional discourse, it did not develop a systematic opposition to the governmental discourse, which mainly focused on responsibility towards the regime. Institutions such as a media council (Conseil Supèrieur de la Communication, CSC) or a Journalists’ Association (Association des Journalists Tunesiens, AJT), that might have played a role in holding the media accountable to ALL media stakeholders, were co-opted by the regime. Yet, some initiatives online like boudourou.blogspot.com took the chance of the Internet as a slightly freer space to remind Tunisian media of their accountability towards the people, though with little impact due to hard Internet censorship and repression of cyber activists
Ed Webb

The New Iron Curtain of Journalism in America: Banning Al Jazeera | BuzzFlash.org - 3 views

blog.buzzflash.com/12342

censorship TV television opinion analysis jazeera al-jazeera

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 13 Feb 11
     
    How apt is this comparison? Does it belittle the experiences of those who lived under Soviet censorship regimes? Or is the type of censorship discussed just as repressive?
Ed Webb

Art Panel Discussion Draws Mixed Reactions from Audience at Ennahdha Congress : Tunisia... - 0 views

www.tunisia-live.net/...-audience-at-ennahdha-congress

Tunisia art revolution politics

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • One man in the audience explained that post-revolutionary art can help solidify Tunisia’s new identity. “Since 1956, people in charge of art and media have been from the secular elite community. We need Ennahdha to provide an alternative.” The audience member also complained about what he considers a lack of Tunisians’ basic knowledge about their own history. “Tunisians know more about Egyptian history than their own [history]. We need new [cultural] programming,” he asserted. The audience member concluded his speech by saying, “We need to stop secular extremism in Tunisia.”
  • contentious topic
Ed Webb

R22 | News - 0 views

raseef22.com/...80%93-The-Elephant-in-The-Room

MENA media sex pornography censorship Arabs internet search data

shared by Ed Webb on 30 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • undeterred by the overwhelming evidence that such policies are always destined to fail, governments continue to announce plans to block access to X-rated websites, often with large scale public support. In 2011, when many thought the days of Ben Ali-style censorship were coming to an end, a Tunisian court decreed that porn sites would henceforth be banned, as they “contravened the values of Arab Islamic society.” And just a few months before its overthrow, the Islamist government of Muhammad Morsi in Egypt thought nothing of dedicating endless hours to discussing a new $3.7 million anti-porn initiative. Clearly they didn’t think their country had bigger priorities
  • Put simply, porn is BIG in the Arab world. According to Google AdWords, the 22 Arab states account for over 10% of the world’s searches for “sex”; A total of 55.4 million unique monthly Google “sex” searchers in the 22 (ignoring a further 24 million searches for “sex” transliterated into Arabic) that matches both the United States and India, two countries often cited as world leaders in porn consumption
  • when these numbers are adjusted to reflect people’s ready access to the Internet (which ranges from 85% of the population in the UAE to just 1.4% in Somalia) Arab Google searches for “sex” outweigh those from almost anywhere else worldwide. As per AdWords, for every 100 Arab Internet users, an average of 52 searches are made each month, compared to 21 in the United States, 36 in India, 45 in France and 47 in Pakistan
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • But how should we interpret these figures? In the West, where the Muslim world is often seen as a place that doesn’t “do” sex, stories that reveal supposedly traditional societies to be hotbeds of depravity gain wide traction in the media as amusing exposes. Religious conservatives in the Arab world meanwhile draw on evidence of a growing porn habit as proof of the “corrupting” influence of Western values, and the need to return to the supposedly pristine morals of the past. For example, the leading Saudi Internet “expert”, Dr Mishal bin Abdullah al-Qadhi, regularly warns that porn sites are part of an insidious Western plot. “The people of the West”, he wrote, in one particularly damning diatribe, “with their corrupt values, reprehensible principles and pernicious sicknesses, are not content to reveal their vices and sins […] to themselves alone, but continuously strive to spread these afflictions and sicknesses to the lands of Islam.”  In reality, both reactions rely on ahistorical ideas about the role of sex in Arab society. Instead, as the writer and academic Shereen El Feki, author of Sex and the Citadel, points out in a discussion with Raseef22, there really is nothing shocking about the revelation that Arabs watch porn. Before the twentieth century and the rise of the modern state, Arab culture had a long tradition of erotic imagery in literature and music. Medieval books such as The Perfumed Garden and the Encyclopaedia of Pleasure may have had a factual purpose, but they were also read for pleasure. “They are meant to arouse,” explains El Feki, “they are pornography. These notions of pornography as some sort of alien entity to Arab culture are completely untrue.”
  • Sexual desires are a universal phenomenon, and when conventional means to fulfilling those desires are restricted – for example through strict rules about pre-marital sex and an accompanying range of socio-economic impediments to getting married – it is hardly surprising, that people turn to their computers for help.
Ed Webb

Why wouldn't people want to reduce inequality? - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...ople-want-to-reduce-inequality

media politics economy opinion publicopinion

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • a fairly simple concept known as “feedback in opinion formation.”
  • There’s lots of evidence that we are deeply social thinkers, engaging in discussions with family, friends, co-workers and neighbors about all sorts of things that help us to form our own opinions. It turns out that this can have a big effect on the incentives of economic elites. Rather than having to reach us all individually, they can work on only some of us. Maybe only a few people will be swayed directly by the media, but those who are will talk to others. And in doing so, these converts will take advantage of interpersonal trust and knowledge of the kind of arguments and appeals that work on friends and family to move their thinking as well.
  • Now — and here’s the feedback — these same people moved by the arguments and appeals will become more susceptible to the media’s message. If they become convinced, they’ll add their voices to discussions among their own friends and family. And so on. Eventually the process can swing public opinion.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • this feedback process is easier to get going when you’re advocating against the status quo
  • Ed Webb on 17 Apr 14
     
    How media can shift public opinion through feedback effects.
Ed Webb

Fostering discussion | TechTicker - 0 views

techticker.net/...fostering-discussion

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Feb 09 - Cached
  • distributed conversations
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 18 Feb 09
       
      Interesting and potentially important concept when considering how the read-write web works or can work, at its best.
Michael Fisher

How Iranians See Their Country - 0 views

www.npr.org/...story.php

Iran Middle East NPR

shared by Michael Fisher on 18 Feb 09 - Cached
Ed Webb liked it
  • Michael Fisher on 18 Feb 09
     
    NPR discussion about Iranian attitudes toward their country. Topics included common American misperceptions about Iran, the role of Iranian youth in domestic politics, and Iran's electoral process as it prepares for presidential elections in June.
Michael Fisher

The Self: Understanding What and Who We Are - 0 views

knol.google.com/...29

identity

shared by Michael Fisher on 14 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Michael Fisher on 14 Feb 09
     
    Although it doesn't pertain to the Middle East, this is an interesting primer on "the self" that relates to our discussions on identity. This writer also has piece on Cognitive Dissonance, which may be of interest to some of you.
michelle benevento

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Quiet revolution in the playground - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...7879505.stm

Jewish Arab Palestine Israel education

shared by michelle benevento on 26 Feb 09 - Cached
  • michelle benevento on 26 Feb 09
     
    I think this article is relevant to our discussion or rather information session on Middle East education and help shed new light on more modern forms of schooling.
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