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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Abdel Fattah al-Sisi last week urged parliament to review the country’s blasphemy laws, which critics have denounced as outdated and harmful.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.

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

the government intends to implement an "insular nationwide intranet" isolated from the global internet and heavily regulated by the government. If successful, Iran will have accomplished something few other nations could: full control over its citizens' modern communications

If Iran were to insist on censoring obscenity, it could take different measures - like those employed by Saudi Arabia, which installed a sophisticated keyword filtering system. Though the kingdom's restrictions are severe and infringe on freedom of expression, its filtering system is at least more transparent than Iran’s. Or better yet, it would offer free home-filtering software free of charge to every family, as Jordan's Ministry of Information and Communications Technology recently did. Instead, the government seeks to tear its citizens away not only from the global internet, but from communicating with their families and friends abroad. Such a move will be damaging not only to citizens, but to the country's economy, unsustainable without global connectivity. Those with doubts need only look to Egypt: When that country cut off access to the internet in January 2011, the economy lost an estimated $18 million each day. 

From West to East, dozens of nations have found some reason or another to implement new restrictions. In the United States and Europe, it's copyright. In India, the world's largest democracy, the impetus is religious insults. Across Southeast Asia, the justifications vary, but, as in most of the world, the underlying reasoning appears to have more to do with controlling a nation's populace than with excuses given on the surface. Will Iran succeed in sequestering itself from the online world? For a time, perhaps. But as most authoritarian leaders eventually learn, there are red lines - some which may not seem so apparent at first - that the population won't let them cross. For Iranians, access to the internet may be that line.

low-cost organizational structure and no durable organizational mechanisms are put in place

political evanescence is the inconvenient accompaniment of the open and meritocratic character of social media

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.

public insults to reporters from CNN, the Economist and the BBC, notably when the 2013 Gezi Park protests provided media outlets with gripping images of tear-gassed protesters

While TRT World has hired expensive expatriate talent and technical staff, other Turkish journalists have been jailed, their newspapers closed and their careers ended over material the government deems offensive. In 2015 Reporters without Borders ranked Turkey 149th in the world for press freedom, behind South Sudan and Palestine

most of the foreign employees contacted by the FT privately expressed concern they had signed up to a project that would become halfway between state propaganda and an expression of Turkish soft power. “If we’re not careful, we end up a joke,” says a senior news staffer who is already considering quitting

Mr van Meek, a veteran of Fox News and Al Jazeera, rejects such criticism and says the channel’s coverage will be a measure of its independence: “Watch the content. I think we are fair and objective and credible.”

live broadcasts that are available online and as part of Turkish cable bundles. Yet almost nobody outside the country can yet watch it on television.

The benefits of being under the public broadcaster’s umbrella are apparent. During two recent high-profile terrorism incidents, TRT World was able to break a nationwide ban and broadcast live from the scene, while others had to rely on studio interviews.

its headcount has swelled to at least 220 in Istanbul, with additional centers in London, Singapore and Washington

Industry analysts estimate annual running costs at £50m-£100m, rising further if the channel develops a large network of correspondents. RT’s annual budget is about £125m.

“If you had $100m to improve the state of Turkish media, would you spend it on a glasshouse in the middle of Istanbul?” says Andrew Finkel, founder of P24, an organisation that aims to strengthen independent reporting in Turkey. “Why are public funds being used this way?”

in the anti-terrorism law adopted in August. Under article 33, the media are now obliged to limit themselves to the government’s version of terrorist attacks

Rajab appears to be missing the mark by taking aim at social media outlets as a source of false news. The state-controlled and pro-government media disseminated its own false reports during the unrest

reign in

Journalists who are worried that their reporting may lead to arrest find it hard to write unbiased reports

Rajab should spend more time attempting to reform mass media outlets and relaxing censorship, rather than enacting legislation to criminalise reports on social media. Given the dominance of the government position in television, radio and newspapers, a move against social media outlets appears designed to simply shut down a vehicle of free expression.

The best rap and metal in the region succeeds because it manages to avoid both the kind of “extreme consciousness of doom” that leads to aesthetic nihilism, hyper-stylized violence and other forms of artistic “idle chatter,” while also avoiding the kind of surrender to the culture industry which leads even the most well-intentioned of mainstream artists to “collaborate with culture as its salaried and honoured nuisance” rather than challenge it directly from the margins.

the ultimate function of immanent criticism: to enable a positive synthesis, or irreducible hybridization of identities. Such identities can not be subsumed under any dominant ideology or political and economic narrative and therefore cannot serve to reinforce them

in the Middle East and North Africa region, in the years leading up to the current revolutionary moment, the growing popularity of metal and rap music represents a return of the aura to local music scenes. Both Benjamin and Adorno believed that a remnant, or perhaps better, specter of the original aura remained within works of art even in the mechanical/industrial age. This spector becomes visible in the kind of critical art represented by the groups discussed here, contributing to the continued “excessiveness”, “aesthetic deviance”, and “pointing elsewhere” towards cultural difference and a different future that characterize the best exemplars of the music

As Moe Hamzeh, leader of one of the most talented and successful Arab rock/metal groups, Beriut's The Kordz6, explains, while Arab rock or rap artists obviously want to be successful, the relative lack of interest in the two genres by Rotana and other Arab media conglomerates has been a blessing from an aesthetic perspective. It has saved them from the inevitable fate of all commercialized popular music, whether American hiphop and hair metal to Arab video-clip driven pop. At the same time, the lack of commercialization has made the public performance of the music, usually in small group settings or festivals geared specifically to fans of the genres, the crucial means of creating audiences and building solidarity among their communities of fans.

singers and rappers were actually smiling as they performed their music. And so were the crowds surrounding them. This is likely not the vibe Adorno imagined would surround the kind of immanently critical music he felt was necessary to wake people up to the false consciousness they had been mindlessly inhabiting. But it points to a crucial problem with Adorno’s musical aesthetic, at least form the standpoint of reception. The more abstract, atonal, and devoid of recognizable harmonies or rhythmic pulse a piece of music is, the harder it will be for it to inspire a large number of people. Once people are actually on the streets protesting rather than in their smaller subcultural gatherings, they need something catchier and more uplifting to sing along to than brutal vocals and rapid fire rhymes

Adorno did not think much of the aesthetic and political potential of folk music, which he tied both to nationalist and fascist sentiments. In its then present-day form (rather than traditional-historical form), he believed it to foster little more than a “pseudo-folk community,” particularly in its cultural and aesthetic historical trajectory in Germany. But in Egypt as in the United States, the music has played a more critical political role in struggles for political freedom and social justice.

the band’s popularity is inseparable from its dual role as a voice of protest and a regenerator of traditional styles of music that recently were in danger of disappearing completely because of a combination of market forces and government censorship

What the kind of joyful hybridity exemplified by the production style of Armada Bizerta and myriad other rap groups around the Arab and larger Muslim worlds (and across Africa) reveal is that even within one genre of music, such as hip hop, talented artists can create innumerable sonic tapestries to match, and help shape, the national mood—from dissonant anger to joyful creativity—as the political and cultural situation on the ground changes. Their flexibility is key to their function as the kind immanent critique Adorno and other critical theorists hoped would be able to “reliquify” the “congealed” ideologically bounded identities imposed by authoritarian regimes on their citizens

The joyful aesthetics of groups such as Amarda Bizerta, Emel Mathlouthi, Ramy Essam, and other artists at the heart of youth-inspired revolutions challenges Adorno’s belief that critical music in the age of mass reproduction and consumption has to be, essentially, hard to listen to in order to make the listener think and perhaps even motivated to take some form of action. It seems that while in the pre-Revolutionary period, when cultural expression was still heavily policed, this indeed was the case—thus the power and popularity of genres like metal and hardcore rap. But with the explosion of political, cultural, and artistic energy of the protests a new aesthetic dynamic was born that, at least as of the time of this writing, remains quite powerful. As important, by drawing people literally closer together, the music brings them closer to its critical and transformational aura, closing a circle that was broken, according to Benjamin, with the mechanical reproduction and commodification of musi a century ago

It remains to be seen whether Americans and Europeans, so used to providing the “original” music and culture which others have long sampled, will prove as adept as the “new generation” of Arab revolutionaries in adapting the tools and ideas of others to create their own cultural, political, and economic hybrids. But if the experience of the last year is any indication, without doing so there is little chance of the current wave of protests across the West producing the kind of large-scale transformation now underway, however problematically, in the Arab world.

filtering at the keyword level results in overblocking, as banning the use of certain keywords to search for Web sites, not just images, prevents users from accessing—based on Microsoft’s definition of objectionable content—legitimate content such as sex education and encyclopedic information about homosexuality.

The current approach uses a region-wide standard for filtering content as opposed to the more targeted, granular, and country-specific policy. A more targeted approach—either country-based or preferably, defined by the user—is more generally consistent with minimizing the impact on freedom of speech. Through its involvement in the Global Network Initiative, Microsoft has signaled its willingness to be at the forefront in protecting freedom of expression around the world. It is difficult to reconcile this position with Bing’s current filtering standards.

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.

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.

A rapidly growing global business, the “lawful interception” and information intelligence market now generates more than $3 billion in annual sales

“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,”

Tajikistan on Saturday closed all crossing points on the border with Afghanistan. Tajik activists have sent a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin asking him to help resolve the conflict.

social media and mainstream media tend to be mutually reinforcing, so the dearth of one affects the other

for the average observer, the Syrian uprising lacks a clear and consistent narrative. The Assad regime's brutal repression is plain to see, but other aspects of the 11-month uprising are less clear. Some ask: Who exactly is the opposition, and what do the majority of Syrians actually want? Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says that this confusion and lack of context spreads to the Twittersphere. With some exceptions, the Syrian tweeps who "are tweeting in English are not tweeting in the same way as Egyptians. They are not providing accuracy and context, nor is it really specific or retweetable."

there is no clear or easy solution to Syria's suffering

What struck me about Shukrallah's column last week was his explicit and critical reference to Gamal Mubarak and the succession issue, contrasted with the referendum coverage which was wishy-washy, with critiques preceded with "the opposition claims."

My sources were people who work for Al Ahram, not Al Osboa, but I can imagine how these rumors could easily fly around.

what was published this morning in El-Esboa

The referendum coverage was bad simply because of the people who were reporting it. The reporting on attacking the women was done by the weekly's interior ministry correspondant who is pro-government by default, this is part of the Weekly's diversity

I agree that the Weekly has one of the best political parties and parliamentary coverage in town, largely because of Gamal Essam Eddin who is awesome. (At the Cairo Times we lamented over how better their coverage of parliament was than ours, as we relied on a stringer fromAl Gomhouriya since we couldn't get parliamentary press passes.)

I find it particularly annoying that when Egypt is going through one of the biggest upheavals in decades, it almost systematically leads with a Graham Usher story about Palestine. The other thing I find a shame is that the layout doesn't make its longer articles attractive -- those New York Review of Books length essays and articles would look much better in a magazine format (which the Hebdo does in a somewhat better way, although its pictures are horrible. Actually I find the Hebdo generally better on Egypt than the Weekly, which is a quasi-regional paper.

I apologize for being so naive.Hani Shukrallah was fired this morning.The new editor of Ahram, Osama Saraya has a new policy regarding the Weekly which is "full of communists" and is the "source of corruption" in Ahram. The Weekly's editorial policy it seems, does not fit the new Ahram.

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.

Just as Mr Rohani faces opposition to his recent diplomatic overtures toward the West, his social agenda, led in part by the seemingly reform-friendly culture minister, Ali Jannati, is raising the ire of conservatives.

Farhad Fakhreddini (pictured), the founder of the national symphony orchestra, quit his job in 2009 to protest against growing interference by Mr Ahmadinejad’s government. On March 4th the 76-year-old conducted his first concert in five years, fronting the privately funded Mehrnavazan Orchestra. In the first of four sold-out concerts in Tehran, Mr Fakhreddini felt emboldened enough to perform a muscular rendition of the old national anthem from the time of the Shah. As he spun around to conduct his audience’s singing, he was met with standing ovation.

censorship is more often a matter of personal judgment than government decrees. Such was the case in January when Pallett, a fusion band that mixes folk music with jazz and Western pop influences, performed on national television. For 35 years the state broadcasting monopoly has forbidden musical instruments to be shown on TV. To circumvent the rule the band performed in pantomime, pretending to play their instruments in the air

The video quickly went viral. “We had not expected this reaction from so many people who found it controversial,” says Rouzbeh Esfandarmaz, the band’s clarinettist. “Our music is not political.”Viewers on both sides saw it differently. While some lauded what they saw as a brave political statement, the producer of the show got a rap over the knuckles for allowing such an open mockery of a state institution.

there are signs of tightened censorship in other areas

Distance has no meaning with Internet

Laws are constructed to firmly place the citizen in either a constant state of fear through uncertainties, or in a bubble of complacency.

The equation may have been much simpler 10 or 20 years ago, when limiting free speech contributed to maintaining some political stability. But in this day and age I think the state has yet to recognize that these variables now sit in opposition to one another, and the limitations placed on media in the information age will undoubtedly create long term instability. The sooner this is recognized, the sooner we’ll be better off

Khaled opened his set at Bobigny with a religious song, "Sallou 'ala al-Nabi" (Blessings on the Prophet). This is also how he typically opened concerts in Algeria. This is important to underscore because standard accounts of rai music (like Eyre's) typically give the impression that there is a kind of inherent antagonism between rai artists and Islam.

Because rai was a badge of cultural pride for young Beurs, the French state determined that its interests lay in promoting North African Arab culture in France, rather than being an antagonist. Not just Khaled, but an array of top Algerian rai artists performed at Bobigny in 1986. Clearly the tab for transporting and putting up these stars was an expensive proposition for the French government. Moreover, because Khaled had been avoiding his military service, Col. Snoussi had to intervene with the Algerian military authorities in order to secure him a passport to travel to France.

That liberal elements of the Algerian state played a major role in initiating and underwriting the process whereby rai music became known around the world, and whereby Khaled became the world's best-known Arab singer, deserves to be much more widely known. (Government sponsorship and subsidies for rai came to an end, after the bloody riots of October 1988 and the state's launching of a movement toward reform and democratization.) It is remarkable success story, with significant political and cultural implications, in both France and Algeria. Col. Snoussi and his liberal associates deserve credit, as do key French actors like Martin Meissonier and Jack Lang.

Khaled met some criticism after recording the John Lennon song "Imagine" with Israeli artist Noa (for the European release of his 1999 album Kenza) and after performing the song with Noa at a "peace" concert called "Time for Life" in Rome in May, 2002. Khaled subsequently toured the Middle East with Palestinian-American 'ud and violin maestro Simon Shaheen and Egyptian shaabi singer Hakim. In Lebanon and Jordan he encountered campaigns to boycott his concert, on the grounds that he had engaged in "normalization" with Israel by performing with an Israeli artist and in the presence of Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. Khaled responded that Palestinian singer Nabil Khouri had also performed at the concert and that Yasir Arafat's adviser Mohammed Rashid was in attendance. The Lebanon and Jordan concerts were well-attended, despite the protests. Khaled also recorded with the Algerian Jewish pianist Maurice El Medioni on his 2004 album Ya-Rayi, but I'm not aware that any criticism was leveled against him for working with Medioni or with U.S. musicians

It makes more sense to speak of Khaled as a European artist who has done much to promote Arab culture in the West, rather than to frame him as an Algerian artist, the thrust of whose work is against Islamic intolerance.