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Ed Webb

Egypt Update: New Media Regulations Enforced Within Days - 0 views

mailchi.mp/...egypt-daily-update-845281

Egypt media censorship newspaper Sisi constitution

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Mar 19 - Cached
  • New Media Regulations Enforced Within Days: On March 21, the Supreme Media Regulatory Council issued its first penalty for violating the new bylaws regulating the media that were introduced last week against Al-Mashhad newspaper. According to Al-Mashhad’s Editor in Chief Magdy Shendy, the newspaper was fined 50,000 Egyptian pounds ($2,890) and will be blocked by Egyptian internet providers for six months for “violations of ‘public morals,’ ‘ethics,’ and ‘written traditions’” for a “pornographic picture” and “offensive comments” related to coverage of a female TV presenter. Shendy argues, however, that “the only reason for the decision is our [Al-Mashhad’s] stance on the constitutional amendments,” which would allow President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to stay in power until at least 2034. According to Mada Masr, Al-Mashhad published [Ar] a report documenting police officers bribing Egyptians with Ramadan meals in exchange for votes in the expected referendum on the amendments. The new media regulations enable the Supreme Media Regulatory Council to block and fine websites and social media accounts it believes has published “offending material” including “anything inciting violating the law, public morals, racism, intolerance, violence, discrimination between citizens or hatred.”
Ed Webb

U.S. Cancels Journalist's Award Over Her Criticism of Trump - Foreign Policy - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...courage-award-state-department

US USA diplomacy idiocy Trump journalist media rights

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • a Finnish investigative journalist, has faced down death threats and harassment over her work exposing Russia’s propaganda machine long before the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. In January, the U.S. State Department took notice, telling Aro she would be honored with the prestigious International Women of Courage Award, to be presented in Washington by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Weeks later, the State Department rescinded the award offer. A State Department spokesperson said it was due to a “regrettable error,” but Aro and U.S. officials familiar with the internal deliberations tell a different story. They say the department revoked her award after U.S. officials went through Aro’s social media posts and found she had also frequently criticized President Donald Trump.
  • There is no indication that the decision to revoke the award came from the secretary of state or the White House. Officials who spoke to FP have suggested the decision came from lower-level State Department officials wary of the optics of Pompeo granting an award to an outspoken critic of the Trump administration.
  • the incident underscores how skittish some officials—career and political alike—have become over government dealings with vocal critics of a notoriously thin-skinned president.
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  • lower-level officials self-censor dealings with critics of the administration abroad
  • “The reality in which political decisions or presidential pettiness directs top U.S. diplomats’ choices over whose human rights work is mentioned in the public sphere and whose is not is a really scary reality.”
  • She often debunks misinformation spread online and comments on major news events related to propaganda and election interference, including Brexit and the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into links between the Russian government and Trump’s campaign. She has regularly tweeted criticism about Trump’s sharp political rhetoric and attacks on the press
  • After first being notified she would get the award, Aro filled out forms and questionnaires at the request of officials and cancelled paid speaking engagements to travel to Washington to attend the March 7 ceremony in Washington. The State Department also sent her an official invitation to accept the award and planned an itinerary for a corresponding tour of the United States, complete with flights and high-profile visits to newspapers and universities across the country.
  • In 2014, Aro pursued reporting on a Russian troll factory in St. Petersburg that aimed to alter western public opinions. Long before the U.S. elections in 2016, which propelled Russian disinformation campaigns to the spotlight, she unearthed evidence of a state-sanctioned propaganda machine trying to shape online discourse and spread disinformation. After she published her investigation, Russian nationalist websites and pro-Moscow outlets in Finland coordinated smear campaigns against her, accusing her at times of being a Western intelligence agent and drug dealer, and bombarding her with anonymous abusive messages. She also received death threats.
  • reserved the right to seek damages, due to Aro having to cancel paid speaking events
Ed Webb

Fox: Middle East streaming service launched with Saudi media group - CNN - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...index.html

KSA Saudi media television satellite MBC TV politics

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • Fox Networks has struck a deal with a Saudi media group to launch a new TV streaming service in the Middle East and North Africa. The subsidiary of 21st Century Fox (FOX) said in a statement that it was partnering with the region's biggest broadcaster, MBC, to bring Fox Plus to viewers. Fox's streaming service, which is already available in southeast Asia and parts of Latin America, will be offered in 24 countries on MBC's Shahid Plus platform.
  • Fox's deal follows a chill in relations between international media companies and Saudi Arabia after Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi agents at the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.
  • The Saudi government took control of MBC earlier this year following a crackdown on corruption that saw the arrest of hundreds of businessmen including MBC Chairman Waleed Al Ibrahim, according to a source familiar with the matter. Al Ibrahim was later released and retains a 40% stake, management control and his title as chairman.
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  • Competition for the regional market of 300 million people is heating up. Netflix (NFLX), Malaysia's Iflix, and Dubai's Starz Play are all vying for dominance
  • Raina said better broadband capabilities in the region has helped streaming services grow, but payment systems remain a challenge. Credit card use in some parts is still "near zero," he told CNN Business.
  • The move by Fox comes just over a year after it added 3 new TV channels to its existing line up, including the first Fox-branded channel to broadcast in Arabic.
Ed Webb

The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer: Turning Qatar into an Island: Saudi cuts off... - 0 views

mideastsoccer.blogspot.sg/...ar-into-island-saudi-cuts.html

KSA Saudi Qatar GCC religion politics media territory

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Apr 18 - No Cached
  • There’s a cutting-off-the-nose-to-spite-the face aspect to a Saudi plan to turn Qatar into an island by digging a 60-kilometre ocean channel through the two countries’ land border that would accommodate a nuclear waste heap as well as a military base. If implemented, the channel would signal the kingdom’s belief that relations between the world’s only two Wahhabi states will not any time soon return to the projection of Gulf brotherhood that was the dominant theme prior to the United Arab Emirates-Saudi-led imposition in June of last year of a diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar.
  • The message that notions of Gulf brotherhood are shallow at best is one that will be heard not only in Doha, but also in other capitals in the region
  • the nuclear waste dump and military base would be on the side of the channel that touches the Qatari border and would effectively constitute a Saudi outpost on the newly created island.
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  • The plan, to be funded by private Saudi and Emirati investors and executed by Egyptian firms that helped broaden the Suez Canal, also envisions the construction of five hotels, two ports and a free trade zone.
  • The $750 million project would have the dump ready for when Saudi Arabia inaugurates the first two of its 16 planned nuclear reactors in 2027. Saudi Arabia is reviewing proposals to build the reactors from US, Chinese, French, South Korean contractors and expects to award the projects in December.
  • Qatar’s more liberal Wahhabism of the sea contrasts starkly with the Wahhabism of the land that Prince Mohammed is seeking to reform. The crown prince made waves last year by lifting a ban on women’s driving, granting women the right to attend male sporting events in stadiums, and introducing modern forms of entertainment like, music, cinema and theatre – all long-standing fixtures of Qatari social life and of the ability to reform while maintaining autocratic rule.
  • A traditional Gulf state and a Wahhabi state to boot, Qatari conservatism was everything but a mirror image of Saudi Arabia’s long-standing puritan way of life. Qatar did not have a powerful religious establishment like the one in Saudi Arabia that Prince Mohammed has recently whipped into subservience, nor did it implement absolute gender segregation. Non-Muslims can practice their faith in their own houses of worship and were exempted from bans on alcohol and pork. Qatar became a sponsor of the arts and hosted the controversial state-owned Al Jazeera television network that revolutionized the region’s controlled media landscape and became one of the world’s foremost global English-language broadcasters.
  • Qatari conservatism is likely what Prince Mohammed would like to achieve even if that is something he is unlikely to acknowledge
  • “I consider myself a good Wahhabi and can still be modern, understanding Islam in an open way. We take into account the changes in the world,” Abdelhameed Al Ansari, the then dean of Qatar University’s College of Sharia, a leader of the paradigm shift, told The Wall Street Journal in 2002.
  • if built, the channel would suggest that geopolitical supremacy has replaced ultra-conservative, supremacist religious doctrine as a driver of the king-in-waiting’s policy
Ed Webb

K-12 Media Literacy No Panacea for Fake News, Report Argues - Digital Education - Educa... - 0 views

blogs.edweek.org/...racy_no_panacea_fake_news.html

media literacy media_literacy MediaLiteracy

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • "Media literacy has long focused on personal responsibility, which can not only imbue individuals with a false sense of confidence in their skills, but also put the onus of monitoring media effects on the audience, rather than media creators, social media platforms, or regulators,"
  • the need to better understand the modern media environment, which is heavily driven by algorithm-based personalization on social-media platforms, and the need to be more systematic about evaluating the impact of various media-literacy strategies and interventions
  • In response, bills to promote media literacy in schools have been introduced or passed in more than a dozen states. A range of nonprofit, corporate, and media organizations have stepped up efforts to promote related curricula and programs. Such efforts should be applauded—but not viewed as a "panacea," the Data & Society researchers argue.
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  • existing efforts "focus on the interpretive responsibilities of the individual,"
  • "if bad actors intentionally dump disinformation online with an aim to distract and overwhelm, is it possible to safeguard against media manipulation?"
  • A 2012 meta-analysis by academic researchers found that media literacy efforts could help boost students' critical awareness of messaging, bias, and representation in the media they consumed. There have been small studies suggesting that media-literacy efforts can change students' behaviors—for example, by making them less likely to seek out violent media for their own consumption. And more recently, a pair of researchers found that media-literacy training was more important than prior political knowledge when it comes to adopting a critical stance to partisan media content.
  • the roles of institutions, technology companies, and governments
Ed Webb

I Went To Turkey To Interview The President And (Almost) All I Got Was A Meeting With A... - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...ek_us_58c7160ee4b0428c7f128537

Turkey AKP Erdogan politics media conspiracy Gulen coup

shared by Ed Webb on 14 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Erdogan rarely makes himself available to the media — especially for foreign reporters who are freer than Turkish journalists to criticize his government. So when Adam Sharon, a Washington-based public relations executive, contacted me and several other reporters last month and offered interviews with Erdogan and other top Turkish officials, it held out a chance, however remote, for American reporters to assess face-to-face whether top Turkish officials had any evidence for their claims about Gulen. If the goal of the trip was to convince reporters that the Turkish government’s case against Gulen was based on facts, rather than innuendo and conspiracy theories, it backfired spectacularly.
  • Gokcek said he gets his information from the Internet. “I have the largest intelligence service in the world: Google,” the mayor said. “You can find anything in Google. In Turkey, I am the person who uses Google the best way … I would like to thank Google.”
Ed Webb

The Uncounted - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...asualties-iraq-airstrikes.html

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Our own reporting, conducted over 18 months, shows that the air war has been significantly less precise than the coalition claims. Between April 2016 and June 2017, we visited the sites of nearly 150 airstrikes across northern Iraq, not long after ISIS was evicted from them. We toured the wreckage; we interviewed hundreds of witnesses, survivors, family members, intelligence informants and local officials; we photographed bomb fragments, scoured local news sources, identified ISIS targets in the vicinity and mapped the destruction through satellite imagery. We also visited the American air base in Qatar where the coalition directs the air campaign. There, we were given access to the main operations floor and interviewed senior commanders, intelligence officials, legal advisers and civilian-casualty assessment experts. We provided their analysts with the coordinates and date ranges of every airstrike — 103 in all — in three ISIS-controlled areas and examined their responses. The result is the first systematic, ground-based sample of airstrikes in Iraq since this latest military action began in 2014.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 19 Nov 17
       
      This is what excellent (and expensive) investigative reporting looks like. Essential in democracies that this kind of work be done to hold governments to account.
  • one in five of the coalition strikes we identified resulted in civilian death, a rate more than 31 times that acknowledged by the coalition
  • a consistent failure by the coalition to investigate claims properly or to keep records that make it possible to investigate the claims at all
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  • the result simply of flawed or outdated intelligence that conflated civilians with combatants
  • “In the middle of the night,” he wrote, “coalition airplanes targeted two houses occupied by innocent civilians. Is this technology? This barbarian attack cost me the lives of my wife, daughter, brother and nephew.”
  • two direct hits. “O.K., this is my house, and this is Mohannad’s house,” he recalled. “One rocket here, and one rocket there. It was not a mistake.”
  • in 2003, the United States invaded. One night just a few months afterward, the Americans showed up at the Woods and took over a huge abandoned military barracks across the street from Basim’s property. The next morning, they started cutting down trees. “They said, ‘This is for our security,’ ” Basim recalled. “I said, ‘Your security doesn’t mean destruction of the forest.’ ” Walls of concrete and concertina wire started to appear amid the pine and chinar stands.
  • When the Americans withdrew in 2011, Basim felt as if almost everyone he knew harbored grievances toward the occupation.
  • “Radical Islamists grew as a result of this war, and many ideas grew out of this war which we have never seen or heard before,”
  • During the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, war planners began to focus more seriously on condolence payments, seeing them as a way to improve relations with locals and forestall revenge attacks. Soon, American forces were disbursing thousands of dollars yearly to civilians who suffered losses because of combat operations, for everything from property damage to the death of a family member.
  • In 2003, an activist from Northern California named Marla Ruzicka showed up in Baghdad determined to overhaul the system. She founded Civic, now known as the Center for Civilians in Conflict, and collected evidence of civilians killed in American military operations. She discovered not only that there were many more than expected but also that the assistance efforts for survivors were remarkably haphazard and arbitrary. Civic championed the cause in Washington and found an ally in Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont. In 2005, Ruzicka was killed by a suicide blast in Baghdad, but her efforts culminated in legislation that established a fund to provide Iraqi victims of American combat operations with nonmonetary assistance — medical care, home reconstruction — that served, in practice, as compensation.
  • not a single person in Iraq or Syria has received a condolence payment for a civilian death since the war began in 2014. “There really isn’t a process,” a senior Central Command official told us. “It’s not that anyone is against it; it just hasn’t been done, so it’s almost an aspirational requirement.”
  • While assisting civilian victims is no longer a military priority, some authorities appear to remain concerned about retaliation. About a year after the strike on Basim’s house, his cousin Hussain Al-Rizzo, a systems-engineering professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, received a visit from an F.B.I. agent. The agent, he said, asked if the deaths of his relatives in an American airstrike made him in his “heart of hearts sympathize with the bad guys.” Hussain, who has lived in the United States since 1987, was stunned by the question. He said no.
  • Because there was no established mechanism for Iraqi victims to meet American officials, his appointment was at the American Citizen Services section. He pressed against the window and showed the consular officer his dossier. One page contained satellite imagery of the Razzo houses, and others contained before-and-after photos of the destruction. Between them were photos of each victim: Mayada sipping tea, Tuqa in the back yard, Najib in a black-and-white self-portrait and a head shot of Mohannad, an engineering professor, his academic credentials filling the rest of the page. The most important issue, Basim had written, was that his family was now “looked at as members of ISIS” by the Iraqi authorities. This threatened to be a problem, especially after the city’s liberation. The consular officer, who spoke to us on the condition of anonymity, was moved. “I have people coming in every day that lie to me, that come with these sob stories,” the officer remembered telling him, “but I believe you.”
  • when Basim’s case was referred to a military attorney, the attorney replied, “There’s no way to prove that the U.S. was involved.”
  • we wrote to the coalition ourselves, explaining that we were reporters working on an article about Basim. We provided details about his family and his efforts to reach someone in authority and included a link to the YouTube video the coalition posted immediately after the strike. A public-affairs officer responded, “There is nothing in the historical log for 20 SEP 2015,” the date the coalition had assigned to the strike video. Not long after, the video disappeared from the coalition’s YouTube channel. We responded by providing the GPS coordinates of Basim’s home, his emails to the State Department and an archived link to the YouTube video, which unlike the videos on the Pentagon’s website allow for comments underneath — including those that Basim’s family members left nearly a year before.
  • Over the coming weeks, one by one, the coalition began removing all the airstrike videos from YouTube.
  • An alarm blares occasional high-temperature alerts, but the buildings themselves are kept so frigid that aviators sometimes wear extra socks as mittens
  • Most of the civilian deaths acknowledged by the coalition emerge from this internal reporting process. Often, though, watchdogs or journalists bring allegations to the coalition, or officials learn about potential civilian deaths through social media. The coalition ultimately rejects a vast majority of such external reports. It will try to match the incident to a strike in its logs to determine whether it was indeed its aircraft that struck the location in question (the Iraqi Air Force also carries out strikes). If so, it then scours its drone footage, pilot videos, internal records and, when they believe it is warranted, social media and other open-source information for corroborating evidence. Each month, the coalition releases a report listing those allegations deemed credible, dismissing most of them on the grounds that coalition aircraft did not strike in the vicinity or that the reporter failed to provide sufficiently precise information about the time and place of the episode.
  • They speak of every one of the acknowledged deaths as tragic but utterly unavoidable. “We’re not happy with it, and we’re never going to be happy with it,” said Thomas, the Central Command spokesman. “But we’re pretty confident we do the best we can to try to limit these things.”
  • Airwars, a nonprofit based in London that monitors news reports, accounts by nongovernmental organizations, social-media posts and the coalition’s own public statements. Airwars tries to triangulate these sources and grade each allegation from “fair” to “disputed.” As of October, it estimates that up to 3,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in coalition airstrikes — six times as many as the coalition has stated in its public summaries. But Chris Woods, the organization’s director, told us that Airwars itself “may be significantly underreporting deaths in Iraq,” because the local reporting there is weaker than in other countries that Airwars monitors.
  • the coalition, the institution best placed to investigate civilian death claims, does not itself routinely dispatch investigators on the ground, citing access and security concerns, meaning there has not been such a rigorous ground investigation of this air war — or any American-led air campaign — since Human Rights Watch analyzed the civilian toll of the NATO bombing in Kosovo, a conflict that ended in 1999
  • we selected three areas in Nineveh Province, traveling to the location of every airstrike that took place during ISIS control in each — 103 sites in all. These areas encompassed the range of ISIS-controlled settlements in size and population makeup: downtown Shura, a small provincial town that was largely abandoned during periods of heavy fighting; downtown Qaiyara, a suburban municipality; and Aden, a densely packed city neighborhood in eastern Mosul. The sample would arguably provide a conservative estimate of the civilian toll: It did not include western Mosul, which may have suffered the highest number of civilian deaths in the entire war. Nor did it include any strikes conducted after December 2016, when a rule change allowed more ground commanders to call in strikes, possibly contributing to a sharp increase in the death toll.
  • In addition to interviewing hundreds of witnesses, we dug through the debris for bomb fragments, tracked down videos of airstrikes in the area and studied before-and-after satellite imagery. We also obtained and analyzed more than 100 coordinate sets for suspected ISIS sites passed on by intelligence informants. We then mapped each neighborhood door to door, identifying houses where ISIS members were known to have lived and locating ISIS facilities that could be considered legitimate targets. We scoured the wreckage of each strike for materials suggesting an ISIS presence, like weapons, literature and decomposed remains of fighters. We verified every allegation with local administrators, security forces or health officials
  • During the two years that ISIS ruled downtown Qaiyara, an area of about one square mile, there were 40 airstrikes, 13 of which killed 43 civilians — 19 men, eight women and 16 children, ages 14 or younger. In the same period, according to the Iraqi federal police, ISIS executed 18 civilians in downtown Qaiyara
  • in about half of the strikes that killed civilians, we could find no discernible ISIS target nearby
  • By the time the information made its way to the coalition and it decided to act, the mortar had been moved. Such intelligence failures suggest that not all civilian casualties are unavoidable tragedies; some deaths could be prevented if the coalition recognizes its past failures and changes its operating assumptions accordingly. But in the course of our investigation, we found that it seldom did either.
  • On the evening of April 20, 2015, aircraft bombed the station, causing a tremendous explosion that engulfed the street. Muthana Ahmed Tuaama, a university student, told us his brother rushed into the blaze to rescue the wounded, when a second blast shook the facility. “I found my brother at the end of the street,” he said. “I carried him.” Body parts littered the alleyway. “You see those puddles of water,” he said. “It was just like that, but full of blood.” We determined that at least 18 civilians died in this one attack and that many more were grievously wounded. News of the strike was picked up by local bloggers, national Iraqi outlets and ISIS propaganda channels and was submitted as an allegation to the coalition by Airwars. Months later, the coalition announced the results of its investigation, stating that there was “insufficient evidence to find that civilians were harmed in this strike.” Yet even a cursory internet search offers significant evidence that civilians were harmed: We found disturbingly graphic videos of the strike’s aftermath on YouTube, showing blood-soaked toddlers and children with their legs ripped off.
  • Human rights organizations have repeatedly found discrepancies between the dates or locations of strikes and those recorded in the logs. In one instance, the coalition deemed an allegation regarding a strike in the Al-Thani neighborhood of Tabqa, Syria, on Dec. 20, 2016, as “not credible,” explaining that the nearest airstrike was more than a kilometer away. After Human Rights Watch dispatched researchers to the ground and discovered evidence to the contrary, the coalition acknowledged the strike as its own
  • The most common justification the coalition gives when denying civilian casualty allegations is that it has no record of carrying out a strike at the time or area in question. If incomplete accounts like these are standard practice, it calls into question the coalition’s ability to determine whether any strike is its own. Still, even using the most conservative rubric and selecting only those 30 airstrikes the Air Force analysts classified as “probable” coalition airstrikes, we found at least 21 civilians had been killed in six strikes. Expanding to the 65 strikes that fell within 600 meters — for example, the strikes on the home of Inas Hamadi in Qaiyara and the electrical substation in Aden — pushed that figure to at least 54 killed in 15 strikes. No matter which threshold we used, though, the results from our sample were consistent: One of every five airstrikes killed a civilian
  • “We deeply regret this unintentional loss of life in an attempt to defeat Da’esh,” Scrocca wrote, using another term for ISIS. “We are prepared to offer you a monetary expression of our sympathy and regret for this unfortunate incident.” He invited Basim to come to Erbil to discuss the matter. Basim was the first person to receive such an offer, in Iraq or Syria, during the entire anti-ISIS war.
  • “This situation of war,” he continued, “big corporations are behind it.” This is where the real power lay, not with individual Americans. He’d come to believe that his family, along with all Iraqis, had been caught in the grinder of grand forces like oil and empire, and that the only refuge lay in something even grander: faith. He had rediscovered his religion. “There was some bond that grew between me and my God. I thanked him for keeping my son alive. I thanked him that my operation was successful. Now I can walk.”
Ed Webb

Online Photo Archive in Amman Is Making Thousands of Images Public, Showing Pluralistic... - 0 views

muftah.org/c-histories-of-the-middle-east

Jordan research history culture heritage images photographs photos archive

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Jan 18 - Cached
  • ACOR Photo Archive’s material is a unique collection due to the diversity of subjects it includes. It currently provides a representative record of Jordan’s archeological and social history spanning from 1955 to the early 2000s. Photos soon-to-be-digitized will feature subjects from the 1970s onwards in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Palestine, and Iran. Its historic photos of important sites are free to use and could be mobilized to support research proposals and grant applications.
  • The ACOR’s archival images are valuable as records of change for both archaeological-cultural heritage sites (more than two-hundred are represented in Jordan alone), as well as daily life in the Middle East over the past seventy years. Indeed, this record of change means that the archive has the potential to impact future heritage preservation projects across the region. They allow visual comparison with the past, thereby illustrating recent damage and helping experts and local communities decide how sites should be managed in the future.
  • NYU Abu Dhabi’s archive has an extensive collection of historic photos featured on its Instagram page (widening its popular appeal through more tongue-in-cheek posts). Darat al-Funun, an art gallery housed in Amman’s fashionable Jabal al-Webdeih district, also hosts an exhaustive online archive of video and images relating to the gallery’s exhibitions. It also features artist talks and musical performances over its almost thirty-year history. On a smaller scale, there are commendable efforts at documenting the modern visual heritage of the region, such as the Sultan-al-Qassemi-managed Instagram dedicated to highlighting the architectural heritage of the Emirate of Sharjah in the UAE. (You can check out ACOR’s instagram here.)
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  • the imperative to document and preserve the heritage of the Middle East, as it goes through another decade of dramatic aesthetic and political change. The stakes involved in these transformations are highlighted by the saddening example of Khaled Assad, director of antiquities at Palmyra Museum in Syria. Assad went to his grave in 2015 protecting the location of priceless artifacts under his care from ISIS
  • The ACOR Photo Archive also depicts the very forces threatening cultural heritage in the region. For example, it includes photographs of the archaeological digs of 1982 and 1983, in which the Ayn Ghazal statues – among the earliest large-scale depictions of human forms in the world (from the mid-7th millennia) – were unearthed in Jordan. As the photographs illustrate, the excavation site lay mere feet from the highway, highlighting the threats to physical cultural heritage posed by routine urbanization. Archeologist Gary Rollefson, a key member of the team that discovered the Ayn Ghazal statues, has participated in the digitization project, providing extensive background information on the digs catalogued in the archive.
  • By encouraging people to see their old family photographs as intimately connected to the public history of Jordan, Palestine, and the rest of the region, the archive aims to encourage citizens to take steps to preserve and digitize their own personal collections.
Ed Webb

Kuwait: Lawyer files lawsuit to block Twitter - Middle East Monitor - 0 views

www.middleeastmonitor.com/files-lawsuit-to-block-twitter

Kuwait censorship twitter

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • A lawyer filed a lawsuit at a Kuwaiti court demanding the closure of the social networking site Twitter.
  • Authorities in the Gulf state have repeatedly cracked down on social media users, arresting those deemed to have “insulted” the state or its officials or “harmed” relations with other countries. In May the Kuwaiti Criminal Court sentenced activist Mosaed Al-Moseilem to five years in prison and a fine of 10,000 dinars ($32,856) after finding him guilty of criticising the UAE on Twitter.
Ed Webb

OTF | The Rise of Digital Authoritarianism in Egypt: Digital Expression Arrests from 20... - 0 views

www.opentech.fund/...l-expression-arrests-2011-2019

Egypt media censorship socialmedia analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Nov 19 - Cached
  • Since 2013, Egypt has seen the worst human rights crackdown in the country’s history. The current regime has imprisoned thousands of political activists, criminalized demonstrations, and seized control over the media landscape in a successful effort to limit genuine political discourse. Today it is nearly impossible for any alternative narrative to penetrate conventional modalities of expression. As the state continues to close physical spaces and exert control over traditional media, alternative political voices have been forced to rely on digital platforms as a means to express themselves. In response, the state has turned its attention to these platforms.
  • Online censorship increased in 2017 when the websites of 21 independent media and political organizations were blocked inside the country in a single day. The number of blocked websites in Egypt has since surpassed 500. Large-scale phishing attacks are also frequently launched against Egyptian civil society, with attacks documented in 2017 and 2019. In 2018, several new laws were passed in Egyptian parliament limiting digital expression and inhibiting the right to privacy.
  • After compiling a dataset of 333 digital expression violations (including arrests, acquittals, prison sentences, investigations, fines, lawsuits, and pretrial detentions) in Egypt from 2011 until mid-2019, this report found the number of Egyptian citizens targeted by the state for digital expression has been steadily rising. Analysis of this data reveals a yearly increase in the number of digital expression violations, with a surge in the occurrence of these violations beginning in 2016 and continuing until mid-2019, when the data collection for this report ended.
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  • Egyptian security authorities routinely surveil and target social media posts—particularly Facebook content—as a basis for the arrest and detention of Egyptian citizens. The state relies on provisions such as “spreading false news,” “joining a banned group” and “misuse of social media” to detain citizens for digital expression. These charges are found in the Penal Code, the Counterterrorism Law, and the Telecommunications Law, rather than new and highly publicized laws such as the Cybercrime Law and the Media Regulation Law.
  • Detainees held for digital expression violations by the SSP spend long periods in pretrial detention due to the unique procedural rules governing this body; many of these cases are never even brought to court
  • a dramatic increase in the use of a special prosecutorial body, the State Security Prosecution, to investigate digital expression cases.
  • The SSP is a special prosecutorial body which investigates and prosecutes cases related to national security and terrorism; it is notoriously subject to extraordinary procedural rules.
  • Egypt’s Prosecutor General issued a decree in 2018 directing prosecutors to focus on cases concerning the spread of false news. A “rumour collection network” was established for citizens to send in reports of false news and rumours to a WhatsApp number—effectively crowdsourcing surveillance to the civilian population.
  • Egyptian security authorities surveil online expression through technically unsophisticated strategies such as device seizures, observation of social media platforms, and informant networks. Demonstration events on Facebook, particularly during periods of heightened political tension, are routinely targeted by security authorities. Videos are also frequently targeted, as they are easily shared and accessed. Analysis of the dataset found three main types of arrests: mass arrests during periods of increased political tension; high profile figures targeted for their cumulative body of work; and individual posts that cause a citizen to be targeted.
Ed Webb

Why this TV series causes high drama between Cairo, Ankara - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...tes-tensions-egypt-turkey.html

Egypt Turkey Ottomans Mamluk history TV television series politics

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Nov 19 - Cached
  • Turkish series, including shows about Ottoman sagas, have enticed audiences in the Middle East and beyond for the last decade. Particularly “The Magnificent Century,” a hundred-episode series of love and intrigue at the Palace of Suleiman the Magnificent, created a strong audience in the first half of the 2010
  • “Kingdoms of Fire” ("Mamlakaat al-Nar") tackles the struggle between the Mamluks and the Ottomans over the control of the Middle East, particularly in Syria and Egypt. Produced by the Emirati production company Genomedia, it is shown both on Saudi channel MBC and Netflix. However, it is not being streamed in Turkey.
  • The historical drama revolves around two central figures: Sultan Selim I, the Ottoman ruler (r. 1512-1520) known as Selim the Grim, who is played by young Syrian actor Mahmoud Nasr. Toman Bay, the Mamluk sultan, is played by Khaled Nabawy, an Egyptian actor known for his leads in historical drama ever since his discovery by award-winning director Youssef Chahine in 1994.
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  • The series revolves around how Selim I, who is trying to extend the empire he forcefully took from his father, is faced with the opposition of the people of Cairo led by the fighter-turned-leader Toman Bay as he fights to conquer Egypt.
  • The $40 million series caused still another tension in Turkey’s strained relations with Egypt, due to Ankara's support of the banned Muslim Brotherhood and late President Mohammed Morsi. Ankara’s ties are also tense with Saudi Arabia — whose channel broadcasts the series — over the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Moreover, the launch of the series is also believed to be strategically timed, to precede another Turkish production on the Ottoman Empire and the life and times of Osman, who gave the empire his name.
  • ome challenged his description of the Ottomans as “occupiers” and the Mamluks as the locals, whereas the Mamluks were also an occupying force in Egypt. Faisal bin Fahad bin Jasim Al Thani, chairman of one of Qatar’s biggest conglomerates, tweeted that this sentence was “ignorance” coupled with hate. “Toman Bay and the Mamluks are Turks [not Egyptians], and the Ottomans are also Turks. So, if you consider the Ottomans to be an occupier, you need to concede that the Mamluks were, too,” he tweeted.
  • In recent years, there have been requests in Egypt to remove the name of this violent sultan from streets and squares in the country. The first attempt was in February 2018 when the Egyptian authorities decided to remove Selim’s name from a street in the Zeitoun neighborhood in the east of Cairo.
Ed Webb

Jeffrey Goldberg Doesn't Speak for the Jews - 0 views

jewishcurrents.org/berg-doesnt-speak-for-the-jews

USA US media journalist Jews Jewishness Zionism opinion analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 11 Dec 20 - Cached
  • For some members of the tribe, Sanders’ commitment to social justice, his family’s experience with the Holocaust, his distinctive old-Brooklyn accent, his childhood memories of stickball and Ebbets Field, and even his visits to a kibbutz are all insufficient proofs of Jewishness. Why doesn’t he belong to a synagogue? Why did he marry a Catholic? Why is he so critical of the mainstream consensus on Israel? Why isn’t he a Jew the way Goldberg wants him to be a Jew?
  • Goldberg continues to edit one of the most important magazines in the country, and is a fixture of its star-studded annual Aspen Ideas Festival. As such, he is easily one of the most powerful arbiters of elite opinion, and representative of the establishment that has led the country to the brink of ruin.
  • If you’re a Jew who matters inside the Beltway, there’s a decent chance you hang out with Goldberg.
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  • He gets to decide, for instance, that Peter Beinart (J Street-aligned liberal Zionists) and David Frum (respectable #NeverTrump neoconservatives) should represent the poles of acceptable Jewish discourse. Meanwhile, the emerging generation of American Jews who supported Sanders, and who in many cases feel totally alienated from Zionism, are shut out. Goldberg’s project is to define the center, both for politics in general and for Jews specifically. And as that center buckles and shifts leftward, it’s worth reevaluating the macher who for so long has set the terms of debate.
  • The story of Jeffrey Goldberg is one of hypermasculinity, nationalism, and careerism, a steady ascension facilitated by the right friendships and the right positions at the right times. Along the way he has drawn many harsh critics, none of whom have successfully held him back. But his disproportionate influence on the conversation and his vigorous policing of Jewish communal politics merit a closer look.
  • After enduring antisemitic bullying as a suburban child, he fell in love with Israel on his first visit at age 13.
  • At 20, he dropped out of Penn and made aliyah. As an Israel Defense Force volunteer during the First Intifada, he worked as a guard (or “prisoner counselor,” as he later insisted) at the overcrowded Ketziot prison camp, which was condemned by human rights groups at the time for violating the Geneva Conventions. There, he witnessed a fellow guard beating a Palestinian prisoner for talking back. In Goldberg’s account, he tried to stop his friend but then helped cover the incident up (“‘He fell,’ I lied”).
  • The odd human rights violation, pointless imperial war, or botched hire notwithstanding, no one can deny that he has done well for himself, and it seems likely he’ll be shaping the national conversation for years to come. But in the Jewish world, Goldberg wields perhaps even more influence than outside of it, and by patrolling its borders he defines a narrow center of opinion antithetical to dissent.
  • If there is any justice, Goldberg’s career will be remembered primarily for a long, award-winning reported piece from Iraq that ran in The New Yorker in March 2002, at the height of the post-9/11 jingoistic fervor, which informed that magazine’s readership that Saddam Hussein had both an active WMD program and ties to Al-Qaeda. Goldberg endorsed George W. Bush’s catastrophic war of choice in an article for Slate later that year, in which he wrote, “I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.” He was hardly the only high-profile journalist to help launder what turned out to be false intelligence into the mainstream media, but whereas Judith Miller was pushed out by the New York Times in 2005 and has since become persona non grata in liberal elite circles, Goldberg’s status and influence have only grown.
  • palpable distaste for Diaspora Jewry features frequently in Goldberg’s writing
  • a conservative minority of us has accepted a faustian bargain with Trump’s white supremacist base in order to support the right-wing coalition in Israel
  • Goldberg is not part of the ascendant right. Rather, he is perhaps the single most representative figure of the liberal Zionist establishment in all of media, voicing the anxieties of a rapidly collapsing order. And with at least the passive approval of an elite network, Goldberg has spent years passing harsh, biblical judgment on both Jews and gentiles who dare to weigh in on issues related to Israel, from authors to organizations to U.S. presidents.
  • Goldberg started out as a police reporter but achieved greater renown as a national security correspondent, with dispatches from Gaza, Cairo, and Iraqi Kurdistan in the months before and after 9/11. This period is crucial to understanding Goldberg’s influence—he had already become one of the most widely read reporters on the Middle East at precisely the moment when the Washington establishment became single-mindedly focused on terrorist and extremist threats from the region. This gave him an outsized role in shaping liberal elite discourse, with outsized consequences.
  • it fit in perfectly with Goldberg’s longstanding project to deny the very obvious influence of pro-Israel advocates over U.S. politics.
  • Obama successfully pandered to Goldberg, who noted, “speaking in a kind of code Jews readily understand, Obama also made sure to mention that he was fond of the writer Leon Uris, the author of [the 1958 Zionist pulp bestseller] Exodus.”
  • In 2009, Goldberg referred to “the rather circumscribed universe of anti-Zionists-with-Jewish parents”, neatly ostracizing Jews he disagrees with from the tribe
  • For Goldberg and the tribe he leads, a reactionary gentile who unapologetically supports Israel is preferable to a progressive Jew who expresses hesitation, discomfort, or outrage.
  • an epically sleazy hit job
  • Goldberg has spent most of his adult life in affluent Northwest DC, so it would be absurd for him to directly question the legitimacy of American Jews, but he has had no such reservations about European Jews, and especially the largest such community, the Jews of France. In 2015, he wrote a long reported essay in The Atlantic entitled, “Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?”, accompanied by a 20-minute video conversation with Leon Wieseltier and James Bennet, in which he concluded, “I am predisposed to believe that there is no great future for the Jews in Europe, because evidence to support this belief is accumulating so quickly.”
  • Goldberg represents what, at least until recently, was an influential set of attitudes among mainstream Jewish liberals. But his approach seems exhausted, unable to respond to the scale of the disaster Jewish liberals now confront, from the ultra-orthodox, pro-settlement coalition firmly in charge of Israel to White House-approved antisemitism in the U.S.
  • superficially curious and open-minded about big ideas, yet forever bound within a narrow establishment consensus averse to channeling any kind of populist anger
  • to whatever extent my own Jewish identity has been stunted, I blame Jews like Goldberg. Of course I don’t blame him personally or exclusively, but he’s representative of, and has worked hard to reinforce, a set of attitudes that have made institutional Judaism and Jewish communal identity seem unattractive or unattainable. I’m certain I’m not alone in feeling this way. Membership in non-Orthodox synagogues is in steady decline, as is American Jews’ attachment to Israel, especially among millennials. Jewishness as defined by Goldberg is not our community’s future; it isn’t even our present
  • Goldberg embodies the worst contradictions of American Zionism: on the one hand, the phony machismo, the insistence that Israel is the bedrock of a meaningful Jewish identity, and the morally bankrupt defense of Israel’s routine violence against its Arab subjects; and on the other hand, the smug, comfortable, coddled daily existence of the Beltway elite
  • It’s taken me well into my thirties to grasp that there is a Jewishness to be located between the synagogue-attending, aggressively Zionist establishment that Goldberg presents to the most powerful people on Earth as definitive, and the superficial bagels-and-Seinfeld gloss on basic American whiteness that often seems like the only alternative. Jewishness can be righteous, confrontational, progressive, maybe even cool. It doesn’t have to be defined as a religion, a nationality, or a vaguely embarrassing set of quirks; it can be a way of asserting one’s humanity and moral fervor as America, Israel, and the world descend into a crude parody of fascism.
Ed Webb

NEIL MACKAY'S BIG READ: 'Scotland didn't have empire done to it, Scotland did empire to... - 0 views

www.heraldscotland.com/...pt-fighting-decolonise-history

UK Britain history museum heritage Egypt orientalism empire

shared by Ed Webb on 04 May 22 - No Cached
  • Glasgow’s Dr Campbell Price is British TV’s go-to guy when it comes to ancient Egypt. But the study is riddled with racism and he wants to drag the world of mummies into the 21st century … and he doesn’t care if you call him ‘woke’.
  • Price is at the forefront of the fight to ‘decolonise’ the study of Ancient Egypt and drag it into the 21st century. He wants the discipline to confront its history of racism and empire, and he’s not shy about apportioning a fair amount of blame on Scotland and its own role in Britain’s colonial adventures.
  • the study of Ancient Egypt was founded by colonialists from Britain and France in the early 1800s and it still hasn’t shaken off the baggage of the past. There’s a lingering sense that Egyptians are considered unable or incapable of studying their own history without the assistance of white, western academics who are really the people best suited to the discipline. The whiff of racism and a “white saviour narrative” still hangs in the air, he feels.
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  • “There’s this conceit,” he says, “that archaeologists - gung-ho western, bearded, white, elite, cis-gendered, ostensibly heterosexual - go to Egypt and ‘discover’ Ancient Egypt because the people, ordinary Egyptians, are too stupid.” He adds: “Ancient Egypt was never ‘lost’.”
  • The “standard colonial narrative”, he says, portrays Egypt as “brilliant - a proto-British empire”. Egyptologists used terms like ‘empire’ and ‘viceroy’ to describe the government of the Pharaohs. Students were taught that “the Ancient Egyptians had a ‘Viceroy of Nubia’ - where the hell is the term ‘viceroy’ coming from?” Price asks. “It’s from the British experience of empire”. This explains why many British academics put Egypt on a pedestal as the greatest of all ancient civilisations.
  • in the imperial age when Britons were travelling to India they would go through the Suez Canal. “You might take a few days and go and visit Egypt. So it’s colonial high noon,”
  • British archaeologist Howard Carter led the dig that opened Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 - an event which turbo-charged interest in Egyptology and had a huge cultural impact on world, even leading to the creation of movies like The Mummy starring Boris Karloff in 1932. “Some early exhibitions quite literally feel like the spoils of empire,” says Price. “In some cases, it’s literally the spoils - like the Rosetta Stone which was seized from the French.”
  • Price is chair of the board of trustees with the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) - an organisation, he says, which is “doing a lot of work of self-criticism, self-reflection and self-critique”. The EES, which was established in 1882 at the height of empire and just prior to the British invasion, is now “attempting to unpack colonialism in Egypt”.
  • “the British and French cooked up a system” called ‘finds-division’ or ‘partage’. “Notionally,” he says, “the best 50% of things that come out of the ground go to the National Collection in Cairo, but then up to 50% of what is thought to be ‘surplus to requirements’ or duplicate can leave with archaeologists. So that’s how Manchester has 18,000 objects from Egypt and Sudan - mostly through finds-division.
  • It was legal between the 1880s and 1970s, but it was at a time when mostly the Egyptian government was controlled by the British and French, and the Egyptian government had to repay the massive debt of building the Suez Canal.
  • “some people will tell you, some well known Egyptologists, that you should burn copies of ‘A Thousand Miles Up the Nile’ because it contains racist material. But the society is actually working on a critical re-edition, where there’s a new introduction to put the book in context. I firmly believe, and the trustees firmly believe, you can’t just bury the past. You’ve got to try and face it and constructively critique it. I’m not arguing for cancelling anyone. I’m not arguing for trying to ignore it. I’m saying ‘let’s have a conversation’.”
  • Unlike many nations which had art looted by western powers, Egypt “isn’t particularly interested” in the repatriation debate except when it comes to “a few very exceptional objects like Nefertiti’s Bust and the Rosetta Stone”. Price adds: “Repatriation can sometimes be a bit of an echo chamber for western [people]. It doesn’t necessarily relate always to the concerns of indigenous groups, or people who live in places like Egypt.”
  • There’s a funny attitude, where Scots kind of distance themselves and say, ‘oh well, you know, we were colonised first. The English came in, and we’re the victims’. Based on my work on the history of colonialism in Egypt, Scottish people are more than well-represented. They are disproportionately represented in the cogs of the imperial project with Scottish diplomats, engineers and soldiers … There’s a sense that empire was ‘done to’ Scotland, when in fact Scotland ‘did’ empire to other people … We put this stuff on the English and say it was the English … Scots appear surprisingly commonly in the imperial machinery in Egypt.
  • Price has little time for the use of the word ‘woke’ as an insult, as to him it simply means trying to do the right thing professionally. He adds that he feels “fortunate” that Manchester Museum, where he works, is also having the same “conversations” about confronting the legacy of the past.
  • British egyptology is “more open” to change, Price says than most other western nations with a history of the discipline. “We’re on the winning side of the argument. The tide has turned. You cannot pretend you can enjoy your secluded cocktail terrace in the middle of Cairo and not expect to hear critical evaluation of colonial experiences.”
  • Most of the workers who built the pyramids weren’t slaves - they were paid for their efforts, he points out. The slave stories of the Bible, though, lead to “another form of colonialism - Orientalism”, which depicts the rulers of the east as either exotic and mysterious or brutal and cruel. The notion of “the Oriental despot comes from the Bible: Pharaoh as a despot … The way in the Bible, that the pharaoh is cast as a baddie, reverberates”.
  • Price is also incensed by the current pseudo-science trend for conspiracy theories claiming that aliens built the pyramids - the type of unfounded material aired on over-the-top documentaries like ‘Ancient Aliens’. “It’s racist,” he says, “very racist.” He notes that there’s a hashtag on Twitter called ‘CancelAncientAliens’. The wild alien theory is “based on the assumption that ancient people were too stupid to have [built the pyramids] themselves and so it had to be some outside force. So to be clear in the interests of global parity and justice: the ancient Egyptians were an African people who built absolutely stunning monuments. Get over it.”
  • There is no simple answer, or history - and I think we insult museum audiences if we assume they want an overly simplified story. ‘Ancient Egypt’ is undoubtedly one of the most popular parts of a museum. By asking questions about how colonialism formed our idea of what ‘Ancient Egypt’ was, not just how it got to be in cities like Glasgow and Manchester, I think we can begin to address questions of global inequality.
  • “Egypt more than Greece, Rome or other parts of the world, has existed as both ‘Oriental other’ and ‘western ancestor’ - that is why the colonial dialogue is so intense - and Egyptology is, in a sense, the exemplary ‘colonial discipline’, just as the British Consul Lord Cromer [consul-general in Egypt from 1883] said Egypt should be the exemplary colony.
Ed Webb

Source: Qatari authorities ask 100 Egyptian nationals affiliated to Muslim Brotherhood,... - 0 views

www.madamasr.com/...alafist-front-to-leave-country

Qatar Egypt Turkey Islamists opposition media authoritarianism

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • About 100 Egyptian nationals living in Qatar have been asked by Doha authorities to leave the country within a few weeks time, according to an Egyptian opposition figure based abroad who spoke to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity.  The move by Qatar comes after Egypt requested that the figures — all of whom are affiliated with Islamist groups — be delivered to Egyptian authorities, said the source.
  • Qatar has given the Egyptian nationals notice to leave the country amid a diplomatic rapprochement between Doha and Cairo that has blossomed over the past year. 
  • Helping bridge the distance between Doha and Cairo are the increasingly strained relations between the current Egyptian administration and its long-standing Gulf backers in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as well as a number of economic investment opportunities, with potential for Egypt’s need for foreign direct investment to soothe its distressed balance of payments to align with Qatari interest in a number of key strategic economic sectors, including agriculture and telecommunications. 
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  • Qatari authorities requested 250 Egyptian nationals, including Islamist opposition figure Abdallah al-Sherif, who ran a series of satirical programs on YouTube and Al Jazeera, to leave the country when diplomatic ties were first being established in 2022
  • With Cairo and Ankara establishing closer ties in 2021, the Turkish government instructed opposition media channels broadcasting from Turkish soil to stop criticizing Sisi and his government.
Ed Webb

Gulf States' Efforts to Deploy Soft Power of Soccer Runs Through South America, Messi - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...tar-saudi-arabia-gulf-politics

Qatar LatinAmerica softpower football soccer sport

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • Earlier this year, Messi signed a deal with the kingdom to promote tourism there as it reportedly mulls a candidacy to host the 2030 World Cup. The terms and length of the deal were not made public, but The Athletic reported Messi may be receiving as much as $30 million per year. A potential Saudi Arabian bid would pit the country against Argentina’s own proposal to host the tournament together with Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay.
  • Embracing international sports icons is just one way that Gulf countries have worked in recent years to boost their international influence. Qatar sits on the world’s third-largest natural gas reserves and has found itself in a powerful position in the age of energy supply strains. Since the start of the World Cup just two weeks ago, Qatar has signed a 15-year deal with Germany to supply it with natural gas, and the United States—whose largest military base in the Middle East is already near Doha—greenlit a $1 billion arms sale to the country. Washington considers Qatar a major non-NATO ally critical to stability in the Persian Gulf and beyond.
  • when Brazil hosted the World Cup in 2014, FIFA successfully pressured the country to change its legislation to permit alcohol sales in stadiums. But Qatar was able to impose its own laws on FIFA, in this case prohibiting alcohol sales to regular fans in the stands (though alcohol is freely available to VIP guests in luxury suites). It was one sign of the varying degrees of power held by recent World Cup host nations
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  • in Latin America, one of the ways Gulf states’ rising profiles have been most evident is their forays into the soft power of soccer. Gulf countries are not among the top trading partners of Latin America’s largest economies, but sports fans know that both Messi and Brazilian star Neymar play for a club team that is owned by a subsidiary of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, Paris Saint-Germain.
  • Latin American audiences are intimately familiar with the use of the World Cup for political aims, such as when Argentina sought international legitimacy for its bloody dictatorship when it hosted the tournament in 1978. Like the European and U.S. press, the show has discussed the human rights and labor rights complaints surrounding the Qatari-hosted event. Still, Wall told Foreign Policy that, overall, “in South America, perhaps we see [the World Cup] with different eyes.” Latin American coverage of the event has focused more on how soccer culture in both Latin America and the Middle East developed in the context of colonization. It’s been striking to encounter so many Brazil and Argentina fans from the Middle East and Asia at the World Cup, Wall added. “There is something that we see in each other.”
  • It has also prompted some to wonder if Latin American countries could better capitalize on their own soccer power. “The value of Argentine soft power” remains “much more potential than real,” former Argentine foreign ministry official Tomás Kroyer told Forbes Argentina this week. In Brazil, the Workers’ Party governments of 2003 to 2016 designed several policies to use the appeal of Brazilian soccer as a diplomatic tool, even taking the national team to play in Haiti to herald the arrival of Brazilian peacekeepers in 2004, Veiga de Almeida University international relations professor Tanguy Baghdadi told Foreign Policy in an interview.
Ed Webb

Iran Says Face Recognition Will ID Women Breaking Hijab Laws | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...l-id-women-breaking-hijab-laws

surveillance Iran technology authoritarianism women protests veiling

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Jan 23 - No Cached
  • After Iranian lawmakers suggested last year that face recognition should be used to police hijab law, the head of an Iranian government agency that enforces morality law said in a September interview that the technology would be used “to identify inappropriate and unusual movements,” including “failure to observe hijab laws.” Individuals could be identified by checking faces against a national identity database to levy fines and make arrests, he said.
  • Iran’s government has monitored social media to identify opponents of the regime for years, Grothe says, but if government claims about the use of face recognition are true, it’s the first instance she knows of a government using the technology to enforce gender-related dress law.
  • Mahsa Alimardani, who researches freedom of expression in Iran at the University of Oxford, has recently heard reports of women in Iran receiving citations in the mail for hijab law violations despite not having had an interaction with a law enforcement officer. Iran’s government has spent years building a digital surveillance apparatus, Alimardani says. The country’s national identity database, built in 2015, includes biometric data like face scans and is used for national ID cards and to identify people considered dissidents by authorities.
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  • Decades ago, Iranian law required women to take off headscarves in line with modernization plans, with police sometimes forcing women to do so. But hijab wearing became compulsory in 1979 when the country became a theocracy.
  • Shajarizadeh and others monitoring the ongoing outcry have noticed that some people involved in the protests are confronted by police days after an alleged incident—including women cited for not wearing a hijab. “Many people haven't been arrested in the streets,” she says. “They were arrested at their homes one or two days later.”
  • Some face recognition in use in Iran today comes from Chinese camera and artificial intelligence company Tiandy. Its dealings in Iran were featured in a December 2021 report from IPVM, a company that tracks the surveillance and security industry.
  • US Department of Commerce placed sanctions on Tiandy, citing its role in the repression of Uyghur Muslims in China and the provision of technology originating in the US to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. The company previously used components from Intel, but the US chipmaker told NBC last month that it had ceased working with the Chinese company.
  • When Steven Feldstein, a former US State Department surveillance expert, surveyed 179 countries between 2012 and 2020, he found that 77 now use some form of AI-driven surveillance. Face recognition is used in 61 countries, more than any other form of digital surveillance technology, he says.
Ed Webb

Saudi snitching app appears to have been used against jailed Leeds student | Saudi Arab... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-leeds-student-salma-al-shehab

twitter censorship KSA Saudi rights authoritarianism repression student UK Britain

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Aug 22 - Cached
  • The Saudi woman who was sentenced to 34 years in prison for using Twitter appears to have been denounced to Saudi authorities through a crime-reporting app that users in the kingdom can download to Apple and Android phones.
  • The user told Shehab that he had reported her on the Saudi app, which is called Kollona Amn, or All Are Safe. It is not clear whether the Saudi officials responded directly to the report, but the 34-year-old mother was arrested two months later.
  • Her alleged crimes including using a website to “cause public unrest” and “assisting those who seek to cause public unrest and destabilise civil and national security by following their Twitter accounts” and by retweeting their tweets.
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  • on 8 October 2019, Shehab responded to a tweet by a verified Saudi account that reports on developments in the kingdom’s infrastructure projects. When the account tweeted about the launch of a new network of buses, she tweeted the word “finally!”.
  • Recalling her own experience in Syria, Aljizawi described the phenomenon of citizens being unable to trust their own neighbours.“Sometimes people find themselves in trouble. They need a promotion or need to prove their loyalty to the state, so they do something like this. It’s enough to just take a screenshot and report it,”
  • On official Saudi websites, Kollona Amn – which also has a Twitter account – is described as an app that allows citizens and expatriates to submit security and criminal reports related to personal life attacks, threats, impersonation, extortion, penetration of social media accounts, defamation, fraud and other criminal offences and security reports.
  • “It is very concerning because people who post something cannot predict the risk or who is going to report them, and who is going to go back and search their feed for posts that don’t align with government propaganda,”
  • “new phase of digital authoritarianism”.
  • in the hands of a dictatorship targeting human rights defenders, technology transforms into a terrifying tool which fast tracks repression
  • Shehab would regularly tweet to support the rights of others but believed it went unnoticed because she did not have many Twitter followers.“She [would] always stand with all human rights in Saudi or outside of Saudi
  • Shehab, who has been studying in the UK since 2017, was not especially critical of the government and was a supporter of Vision 2030, Prince Mohammed’s plan to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil and towards services such as health and tourism.
Ed Webb

Neom: Saudi Arabia jails tribesmen for 50 years for rejecting displacement | Middle Eas... - 2 views

www.middleeasteye.net/...risoned-rejecting-displacement

KSA Saudi cities MBS repression prison land rights speech expression

shared by Ed Webb on 14 Sep 22 - No Cached
  • Two members of the Howeitat, a tribe in Saudi Arabia forcibly displaced to make way for the $500bn Neom megacity, have received lengthy sentences over their protests against the project
  • Two women - Salma al-Shehab, a Leeds University student and mother of two, and Nourah bint Saeed al-Qahtani, a mother of five - were given 34 years and 45 years respectively over tweets critical of the Saudi government. Osama Khaled, a writer, translator and computer programmer, was sentenced to 32 years over "allegations relating to the right of free speech",
  • since US President Joe Biden's visit to Saudi Arabia in July, there had been a "more repressive approach by the Saudi state security and judicial authorities against individuals exercising their right to freedom of speech". 
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  • a dangerous pattern
  • little has been constructed, but large sums have been paid to consultants and increasingly outlandish plans revealed. Yet Saudi authorities have sought to clear areas along 170km of Tabuk province of its residents, many of whom belong to the Howeitat tribe.
  • Since December, Howeitat tribespeople have reported the Saudi authorities' campaign to drive them from their land has escalated. New measures include cutting water and electricity supplies, and deploying surveillance drones above residences
  • among 150 Howeitat who have been imprisoned over their resistance to the Neom project
  • Abdul Rahim al-Howeiti, a 43-year-old Tabuk resident who was shot dead by Saudi special forces in April 2020 after protesting the government's eviction orders
  • drones are being flown regularly over Tabuk province, and that they believe their mobile phone and social media accounts are closely monitored.
  • water and electricity has been cut off from an estimated 15,000 people in an attempt to force them from the region
  • The new Saudi megacity - which organisers claim will be 33 times the size of New York City - is planned to include a 170km straight line city, an eight-sided city that floats on water, and a ski resort with a folded vertical village, among other grandiose and architecturally challenging projects.
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
  • Turkey’s real struggle in the 21st century, as in the 20th, is against dependence on foreign technology
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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

IRGC warns Saudi Arabia it must 'control' media 'provoking our youth' | Amwaj.media - 0 views

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Iran Saudi KSA UK Britain media protests IRGC television networks

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Oct 22 - Cached
  • The commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has warned the Saudi royal family that it will “pay the price” unless it reins in the media outlets it allegedly funds. The warning comes as Tehran accuses foreign-based Persian-language networks—and especially the TV channel Iran International—of spreading fake news and inciting unrest.
  • the IRGC-linked Tasnim News Agency reported hours after his speech that the main target was Iran International. Tasnim maintained that there is "no doubt" that London-based Iran International "is linked to the crown prince," referring to Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud (MbS). Tasnim also named Dubai-based Al-Arabiya and Al-Hadath as other news networks funded by the Kingdom and targeted by Salami in his speech.
  • MP Mohammad Ali Naqdali—the secretary of the parliament’s legal and judicial commission—urged Iranian authorities on Oct. 8 to file a complaint against Iran International with the UK media regulator, Ofcom. The lawmaker called on the foreign ministry and judiciary to complain about Iran International over its alleged role in "encouraging further protests” in Iran. Naqdali also criticized other Persian-language outlets based in the UK, describing them as "lie-producing factories."
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Tehran has previously lodged a complaint against Iran International over its programming, but Ofcom ruled that the London-based television network had not broken any rules.
  • British newspaper The Guardian reported in Oct. 2018 that Iran International had financial ties to MbS. The Guardian charged that the TV network was "being funded through a secretive offshore entity and a company whose director is a Saudi Arabian businessman with close links to the Saudi crown prince." A month later, Iran International issued a statement denying any links to any governments, including Saudi Arabia, and insisted that it "does not advocate any movement or party or government." Some of Iran International's high-profile staff have stirred controversy for often expressing opinions on social media that may be in contravention of the outlet's editorial guidelines.
  • Iranian authorities have long taken issued with foreign-based Persian-language news networks, accusing them of being tasked with attacking the Islamic Republic. Salami's warning to the Saudi royal family comes as Tehran and Riyadh are working toward mending relations and re-establishing diplomatic ties. The IRGC commander's apparent criticism of Saudi media indicates that it will be brought up in the anticipated next round of talks between the two sides in Iraq.
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