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Ed Webb

Despite Limits on Freedom, Foreign Campuses Retain Value, Speakers Say - Global - The C... - 0 views

  • Dubai, one of the seven principalities that make up the small, oil-rich United Arab Emirates, is a growing destination for students from the Middle East, India, and China, making it a logical host for the Going Global conference, said the British Council, the British government's cultural and educational arm and the event's organizer. But recently the Emirates have been better known as the site of an academic controversy.
  • countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, of which the U.A.E. is a member, are at the "cutting edge" of efforts to internationalize higher education, and that holding the conference in Dubai "contributes to the sterling efforts being made in countries like the U.A.E. and Qatar to open their societies to international debates."
  • Foreign universities are guests in the United Arab Emirates and need to be "aware of the environment they're entering," said Warren Fox, executive director for higher education at the Knowledge and Human Development Authority, a Dubai government agency that accredits and regulates foreign higher-education institutions. "If universities decided they could only go to countries with the same cultural and political values, they wouldn't go abroad at all," said Mr. Fox. "And I think they should, because of the benefits to students and to universities."
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  • The United Arab Emirates is home to 37 international branch campuses, which serve its large expatriate population. The government of Abu Dhabi, part of the U.A.E., is also financing lavish new campuses for New York University and the Sorbonne.
  • universities here must also obtain security clearances to hire academics, organize conferences, and invite speakers. In the wake of the Arab Spring, authorities have tightened restrictions on freedom of expression and arrested nearly a hundred human-rights activists and Islamists they accuse of plotting to overthrow the state
  • Dubai International Academic City, a "free zone" that is home to dozens of foreign universities
  • our subject is engineering. We don't teach politics
Ed Webb

Driven down by debt, Dubai expats give new meaning to long-stay car park - Times Online - 0 views

  • Dubai is emptying out
  • Heading home 3.62 million expatriates in Dubai 864,000 nationals 8% population decline predicted this year, as expatriates leave 1,500 visas cancelled every day in Dubai 62% of homes occupied by expatriates 60% fall in property values predicted 50% slump in the price of luxury apartments on Palm Jumeirah 25% reduction in luxury spending among UAE expatriates
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    Sign of the times.
Ed Webb

Israeli supermarket parodies Dubai assassination in TV advert - Times Online - 0 views

  • a television commercial inspired by the assassination of a Hamas commander in Dubai
  • an actress wearing a wide-brimmed floppy hat mimics Israel's policy of neither confirming nor denying involvement in the assassination, saying she “couldn't admit to anything”.
  • He denied that the advertisement was in bad taste, saying that the company hoped to capitalise on the huge amount of media attention generated by the Dubai killing.
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  • Mossad has become popular again in Israel, with stores selling out of the agency’s memorabilia and a growing number of people visiting its official website to get information on how to become agents.
  • Interpol issued arrest notices for a further 16 suspects wanted by Dubai in connection with the killing, in addition to the 11 already issued
Ed Webb

Qatar World Cup set to be major windfall for tourist-ready Dubai | Middle East Eye - 1 views

  • With little investment the UAE, and in particular Dubai, stands to gain if, as expected, supporters opt to stay in the tourism hotspot instead of tiny Gulf neighbour Qatar during the November-December tournament.
  • Dubai's more permissive environment - including a wider availability of alcohol - could entice fans
  • Budget airline flydubai will run at least 30 return flights a day to Doha, just an hour away, part of a daily airlift of 160 shuttle services from cities in the resource-rich Gulf.
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  • Any economic windfall, and reflected glory from the first World Cup on Arab soil, will come less than two years after Doha and the UAE were at odds over a regional blockade that isolated Qatar from its neighbours.
  • The UAE is also offering multiple-entry visas at the nominal fee of 100 dirhams ($27) to people with tickets for World Cup matches.
  • One Dubai hotel, on the man-made, frond-shaped Palm island, will be given over entirely to football fans.
  • Shuttle flights will also run from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Oman to relieve pressure on accommodation in Doha, a city of 2.4 million. But "relative to other Gulf states, Dubai does hold an advantage with its standing as a major tourist destination already",
Ed Webb

New Magazine Aims to Improve Education in the Arab World - Global - The Chronicle of Hi... - 0 views

  • On Wednesday, Mr. Khalil canceled a higher-education conference that was to launch the new online publication because of concerns about academic freedom in the United Arab Emirates, where the event was to be held this weekend. That step came less than a week after a similar move by the London School of Economics and Political Science, which canceled a conference it had planned in Dubai after Emirati authorities requested that a presentation on Bahrain, which is facing political upheaval, be dropped from the program. A scholar on Arab politics from the London institution who was to speak at the event was briefly detained at the Dubai airport and barred from entering the country
  • "We can't talk about upholding academic freedom and launch in Dubai. I don't think it sends the right message."
  • Al Fanar will start as planned on March 3. It is the first major project of the Alexandria Trust, the charity Mr. Khalil founded in 2012 to improve education in the Middle East and North Africa
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  • In addition to starting the magazine, the charity, which is based in London, is helping ministries of education in Arab nations work with top consultants to provide advice on teaching, the use of educational technology, and other topics. It also plans to translate some 5,000 textbooks into Arabic and make them available free online. The collection, Mr. Khalil said, contains the "seminal works" in economics, sociology, and 12 other academic disciplines. He estimates it will cost more than $50-million to obtain copyrights and translate the books.
  • The magazine will feature original articles by reporters in the region and aggregated content from other news media. Stories will be in both English and Arabic, and it will offer a biweekly electronic newsletter. In the future, Mr. Wheeler hopes the publication won't have to depend on grants and donations, but will survive largely on money earned from job and other advertisements.
  • I don't think a publication about higher education can really be neutral about academic freedom
Ed Webb

BBC News - DotShabaka top-level internet domain goes live - 0 views

  • An Arabic net address ending has become the first to go live as part of the rollout of more than 1,000 new generic top-level domain (gTLD) name suffixes. The first websites ending in شبكة. - pronounced dot shabaka, and meaning web - went online a day ahead of schedule.
  • The DotShabaka Registry - the Dubai-based business running the شبكة. gTLD - announced that both its own homepage and that of the United Arab Emirates telecoms provider Etisalat had started using its new suffix, at a conference in Dubai.
  • "It's monumental, in my opinion, because it means the internet finally speaks in Arabic," Yasmin Omer, general manager of the DotShabaka Registry told the BBC.
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  • Although this is the first generic top-level domain in Arabic, there were already country code top-level domains in the script, including .الاردن for Jordan and .السعودية for Saudi Arabia, which went live in 2010.
  • Other non-Latin script gTLDs expected to launch over the coming days include 游戏, Mandarin for game; сайт, Russian for site; and онлайн, Russian for online.
  • "The constraints that we had in the past with top-level domains were purely artificial, which is one reason that the very popular ones - for example .com - can be so expensive," explained Dr Ian Brown from the Oxford Internet Institute. "But how far people actually use them to access sites is an important question. In reality these days most people tend to go to a search engine rather than try to remember a company's domain name that they have seen on an advert, for example.
Ed Webb

BBC News - Dubai jails Indian pair for 'sexy texts' - 0 views

  • a British couple said they would appeal a one-month jail sentence for exchanging a passionate kiss in a restaurant
Jim Franklin

illuminarcy: The Narcicyst on VladTV about "Arab Money" - 0 views

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    The Narcicyst is an Iraqi born, raised in Dubai, based in Canada, rapper who has a new album coming out in May I think. This is an interview response to Busta Rhymes "Arab Money." Below is the song response, to me the picture doesn't move but you can hear the music http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0E3BhHkblE
Terri Soifer

The Axis of Stability: Why Qatar and the UAE Are So Calm - Blake Hounshell - Internatio... - 1 views

  • and many residents of the five northern emirates -- the ones not named Abu Dhabi or Dubai -- often feel they've been left out of the sweepstakes.
  • . Political filtering of the Internet is nowhere near as comprehensive as, say, China, but both governments have the capacity to censor websites and occasionally use it. A recent petition for political reform, signed by 130 Emirati activists and scholars, was met with stony silence by the government and next to no coverage in the local press.
  • e UAE
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  • deed, while Arab satellite channels Al Jazeera (hosted in Qatar) and Al Arabiya (hosted in Dubai) tend to refrain from raking muck on their home turf, they regularly ask tough questions and
  • goes so far as to mandate that Muslim preachers across the country all read the same moderate sermon each Friday, written by a committee of moderate government sheikhs. And in Abu Dhabi, a phone bank of moderate scholars stands by, ready to provide an acceptable answer to such questions as, "Is it OK to go fight jihad in Afghanistan?"
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    he UAE even goes so far as to mandate that Muslim preachers across the country all read the same moderate sermon each Friday, written by a committee of moderate government sheikhs. And in Abu Dhabi, a phone bank of moderate scholars stands by, ready to provide an acceptable answer to such questions as, "Is it OK to go fight jihad in Afghanistan?"
Ed Webb

Is interest in African art on the rise in the Middle East? | The Art Newspaper - 0 views

  • a budding taste among Middle Eastern collectors for Modern and contemporary African art—and not only by artists from North Africa, which has historically identified with the Middle East
  • “There is a growing interest overall in African art and this seems relatively strong in the Middle East,” he says. He notes that while there are far fewer active collectors and museums than in the United States, they are often better funded.
  • Rakeb Sile, the co-founder of Addis Fine Art, the first Ethiopian gallery to exhibit at Art Dubai, agrees that there has been a “huge swell” in Middle Eastern interest in sub-Saharan art, and that demand is growing. Being so near the Gulf, the Horn of Africa has long-standing cultural and economic links with the United Arab Emirates, putting Addis Fine Art in a strong position to attract new buyers. (The UAE has invested heavily in Ethiopia in recent years in an effort to strengthen bilateral ties.) Sile estimates that around 20% of her collectors are from the Middle East.
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  • A recent spate of exhibitions at institutions such as the Sharjah Art Foundation has contributed to a growth in demand for contemporary African art
  • So, who is acquiring African art in the Middle East? Pablo del Val says buyers’ tastes are increasingly catholic. “Middle Eastern collectors don’t tend to focus exclusively on African art, but regional collecting is becoming more international,” he says. With less of a “white, Western-centric focus” than other fairs, Art Dubai is the perfect crucible of cultures, Del Val adds.
  • Rakeb Sile argues that the label “African art” is dated, but sees it as probably necessary for this “bridging time”. She adds: “African art might be the last frontier in terms of discovery and value, but, quite soon, we would like our artists to simply be considered mainstream contemporary artists.”
Ed Webb

Egyptian Chronicles: #WeWillSpeak : Egyptian Tweeps speak up about Twitter Middle East ... - 0 views

  • Hundreds of Egyptian tweeps began on Monday a new campaign on Twitter against Twitter MENA policies after a wide suspension of opposition and activists’ accounts in the popular social media network. The Egyptian tweeps launched  #WeWillSpeak” and #هنتكلم hashtags to reach out for Twitter in the United States.
  • several opposition and political activists' accounts were either permanently or temporarily suspended allegedly for violating Twitter policies
  • Twitter MENA is paying attention only to the bad language of the tweeps including activists opposing the government only in that crackdown.
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  • right-wing Arab fascists and ISIS accounts as well as spammers are left untouched
  • There are Pro-regime supporters who got several accounts and are involved in actions like harassment, trolling and spamming as well as spreading hate and racism on the same level of right-wing figures in the West. They are left untouched I reported dozens of accounts spreading lies, hatred and racism against Syrians and Sudanese people but there were not closed down.
  • Needless to say, the fact that Twitter MENA is currently in Dubai made many Tweeps not only in Egypt but in other countries wonder if the Emirati government has got some kind of deal with Twitter to target dissident voice in the Arab world.
  • Already there are calls to force Twitter to transfer its Twitter MENA Headquarter form the United Arab Emirates to Tunisia as the cradle of the Arab Spring enjoys more freedom of speech.
  • Twitter has been the alternative forum for people to let their voices heard especially when mainstream media fails to do its job. Unfortunately, it has been hacked internationally and not only in the Middle East by political and social powers that are actually against freedom of speech in the first place. Yet some people believe it is worth to fight for including those Egyptian tweeps.
Ed Webb

Right-Wing Media Outlets Duped by a Middle East Propaganda Campaign - 0 views

  • Badani is part of a network of at least 19 fake personas that has spent the past year placing more than 90 opinion pieces in 46 different publications. The articles heaped praise on the United Arab Emirates and advocated for a tougher approach to Qatar, Turkey, Iran and its proxy groups in Iraq and Lebanon. 
  • “This vast influence operation highlights the ease with which malicious actors can exploit the identity of real people, dupe international news outlets, and have propaganda of unknown provenance legitimized through reputable media,” Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar who first noticed suspicious posts by members of the network, told The Daily Beast. “It’s not just fake news we need to be wary of, but fake journalists.”
  • placed articles critical of Qatar and supportive of tougher sanctions on Iran in conservative North American outlets like Human Events and conservative writer Andy Ngo’s The Post Millennial, as well as Israeli and Middle Eastern newspapers like The Jerusalem Post and Al Arabiya, and Asian newspapers like the South China Morning Post.
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  • a series of shared behavioral patterns. The personas identified by The Daily Beast were generally contributors to two linked sites, The Arab Eye and Persia Now; had Twitter accounts created in March or April 2020; presented themselves as political consultants and freelance journalists mostly based in European capitals; lied about their academic or professional credentials in phony LinkedIn accounts; used fake or stolen avatars manipulated to defeat reverse image searches; and linked to or amplified each others’ work. 
  • In February, two websites, The Arab Eye and Persia Now, were registered on the same day and began to acquire a host of contributors. 
  • both sites share the same Google Analytics account, are hosted at the same IP address, and are linked through a series of shared encryption certificates
  • Persia Now lists a non-existent London mailing address and an unanswered phone number on its contact form. The apparent editors of the outlets, Sharif O'Neill and Taimur Hall, have virtually no online footprints or records in journalism.
  • They’re critical of Qatar and, in particular, its state-funded news outlet Al Jazeera. They’re no big fans of Turkey’s role backing one of the factions in Libya’s civil war
  • constant editorial lines like arguing for more sanctions on Iran or using international leverage to weaken Iran’s proxy groups in Lebanon and Iraq. The personas are also big fans of the United Arab Emirates and have heaped praise on the Gulf nation for its “exemplary resilience” to the COVID-19 pandemic, its “strong diplomatic ties” to the European Union, and supposedly supporting gender equality through the Expo 2020 in Dubai.
  • criticizing Facebook for its decision to appoint Tawakkol Karman, a 2011 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, to its oversight board. Media outlets in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates have criicized the appointment of Karman, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Islah Party in Yemen, for her association with the group.
  • None of the Twitter accounts associated with the network ever passed more than a few dozen followers, but a few still managed to garner high profile endorsements for their work. An article by “Joyce Toledano” in Human Events about how Qatar is “destabilizing the Middle East” got a shout-out from Students for Trump co-founder Ryan Fournier’s nearly million-follower Twitter account and French senator Nathalie Goulet high-fived Lin Nguyen’s broadside about Facebook and Tawakkol Karman.
  • All of the stolen avatars were mirror image reversed and cropped from their originals, making them difficult to find through common Google reverse image searches
  • On her LinkedIn page, “Salma Mohamed” claimed to be a former reporter for the AP based in London, though no public record of an AP journalist matching Salma Mohamed’s description is available.
  • Another persona, Amani Shahan, described herself in bios for Global Villages and Persia Now as being a contributor to and “ghostwriting articles” for The Daily Beast. No one by that name has ever written for The Daily Beast and The Daily Beast does not employ ghostwriters. (Shahan also referred to herself with both male and female pronouns in different author bios.) 
Ed Webb

Murdoch targets Abu Dhabi as international media hub - Blog Post - 1 views

  • Abu Dhabi Media Summit is thought to have set the stage for a major transformation of that United Arab Emirate from a more reclusive presidency of the Gulf federation to an international media player. Although flashy neighboring Dubai has to date been the undisputed leader in the region with its Media City (http://www.dubaimediacity.com) hosting countless news and entertainment organizations, Abu Dhabi's low-key approach is slowly turning it into a news hub for the likes of CNN (www.cnn.com), which began broadcasting from studios there in recent months. An Arab media analyst credits UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdallah bin Zayed Al Nahyan for the beefed up media presence. Sheikh Abdallah, the late ruler's son, was his country's information minister and as a young man interned at the headquarters of an international news agency, where he is thought to have acquired a taste for the industry. Google, represented by CEO Eric Schmidt, is seeing its fastest revenue and user growth in the Middle East/North Africa region, Gulf News quoted the company chief as telling summit participants, although he apparently declined to provide specific numbers. Schmidt also said there was a shortage of Arabic content, and that Arabic websites were slow to be developed. The media summit drew almost 500 global media leaders and delegates, including AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, incoming Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg, Turkey's Dogan Media Group Vice Chairman Mehmet Ali Yalçindag, and Murdoch partner Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, to name a few. But critics dubbed it a summit for CEOs and geeks that excluded journalists from covering it first-hand.
Ed Webb

The Built-In Obsolescence of the Facebook Leader - 1 views

  • With great rapidity new groups and figures have been projected into the political limelight thanks to the springboard of popular social media channels, only often to disappear with the same speed, with which they had first appeared. Social media have proven to be a stage in which creativity and spirit of initiative of different radicalized sectors of the Egyptian urban middle class have found a powerful outlet of expression. One might say that they have to a large extent delivered on the techno-libertarian promise of being a meritocratic space, in which dedication and charisma could find the outlet that was not available in formal parties and NGOs and in the traditional intellectual public sphere. At the same time, activist' enthusiastic adoption of social media as a ready-made means of short-term mobilization has produced serious problems of organizational sustainability. Short-termist over-reliance on the power of social media has contributed to a neglect for the question of long-term organization, ultimately leading to the incapacity in constructing  a credible leadership for the revolutionary youth.
  • the image of the Egyptian political web as a sort of magmatic space: a space in which campaigns, groups, and personalities come and go, without managing to solidify into more durable organizational structures
  • political evanescence is the inconvenient accompaniment of the open and meritocratic character of social media
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  • low-cost organizational structure and no durable organizational mechanisms are put in place
  • he political evanescence of social media activism raises issues of accountability and democratic control on the new emerging leaders of social movements, because of a certain opacity that accompanies the fluidity and partial anonymity of online interactions
  • The political evanescence of digital activism in the Egyptian revolution needs to be understood in connection with the libertarian ideology of “leaderlessness” and “horizontality” that has provided a cultural framing for social media use among activists
  • it is apparent that the Egyptian revolution, as any great upheaval in history, was not completely spontaneous and leaderless. Rather it bore the mark of complex direction exercised in concert by multiple leaders, from grassroots groups on the ground as the April 6 Youth Movement, to organized forces such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Left opposition parties and NGOs, to end with digital activists responsible for spreading revolutionary information, recruiting online communities of supporters and publicizing protest events
  • While Ghonim had some basic activist experience, having done some digital campaigning in support of the presidential campaign of Mohammed el-Baradei in 2010, he was little known within activist circles. From the distance and safety of Dubai where he was working for Google, he collaborated with activists on the ground including Mohammed AbdelRahman Mansour who acted as co-admin on the page, and Ahmed Maher of the April 6 Youth Movement, the group that pioneered digital activism in Egypt. It was only after he was released from prison in the midst of the eighteen-day insurrection, that he suddenly became a famous and respected figure. Yet, Ghonim did not manage, neither he tried, to turn the great influence he had exercised during the revolution into any form of structured political leadership during the transitional phase. Ironically the Facebook fanpage he founded has discontinued its communications with a status message celebrating “the power of the people” on 3 July 2013, the day of the anti-Morsi coup. Ghonim has recently left the country for voluntary exile after a streak of attacks on the news media.
  • The case of Tamarrod demonstrates how the fluidity in the field of social media in the activist field, dominated by flexible groupings coordinated through social network sites can open space for opportunist groups. Both Wael Ghonim and the main leaders of Tamarrod were secondary figures in the activist scene in Cairo, despite the fact that some of them, had been previously involved in pro-democracy campaigns and in the Elbaradei presidential campaigns. Similarly to what happened with previous political groups it was a great extent this outsider aura that managed to gather so much enthusiasm from Egyptian youth. The group managed to build an extensive network across the country, collecting millions of signature (the exact quantity will remain unverified) to withdraw confidence from Morsi. However, it progressively became clear that Tamarrod was far from being simply a disingenuous and spontaneous citizens groups. It has been publicly confirmed that the campaign received substantial funding from a number of Egyptian entrepreneurs, including Naguib Sawiris. It is also reasonably suspected that the group received financial and operational support from the Egyptian army, and the so-called deep state, which saw in Tamarrod a sort of useful idiot to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood and create a favorable climate for the coup d'etat. Since the campaign of repression orchestrated by al-Sisi and the new post-coup government, the group has been marred by intestine fight between different factions, and seems to have lost much of its “street cred” among Egyptian youth. It was yet another group falling victim of its own precipitous rise.
Ed Webb

U.A.E. Moves to Block BlackBerry Services - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • the southeastern corner
    • Ed Webb
       
      Make that 'northeastern'
  • the latest high-stakes clash between governments and communications providers over the flow of digital information.
  • the BlackBerry’s highly encrypted data system, which offers security to users but makes it more difficult for governments to monitor communications.
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  • Saudi Arabia has been closely studying the issue and may follow suit. Other countries, including Kuwait and Bahrain, have also raised concerns.
  • “The U.A.E. has never been a place that offered much in the way of electronic privacy,” said Jim Krane, author of “City of Gold,” a history of Dubai. “The government makes no secret that it monitors electronic communication, including text messages, phone calls and e-mail. The revelation that secure BlackBerry data is frustratingly out of the government’s reach only confirms this.”
  • Analysts and telecommunications experts also believe that security concerns delayed the arrival of BlackBerry service in China. It is unclear what actions the company took, if any, to alleviate those worries.
  • southeastern
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