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Ed Webb

With the world on fire, a cowardly, timid news media is a threat to U.S. democracy - 0 views

www.inquirer.com/...s-gaza-extremism-20231105.html

US USA media opinion Israel israelpalestine Palestine Gaza war democracy

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Jan 24 - Cached
  • In one of the most perilous moments of crisis the world has seen in 75 years, and with the basic notions of free speech under assault, most newsrooms aren’t fighting back. They are, instead, pulling their punches in a defensive, “rope-a-dope” crouch, and thus failing to truly inform — when democracy itself is at risk.
  • the push not to offend with Middle East news coverage is emblematic of a bigger trend of newsroom timidity and even rank cowardice that also permeates domestic news coverage, at a moment when right-wing extremists are controlling the U.S. House and are on track to regain the White House and full governmental control in a chaotic election year
  • deference to authority is already bleeding into serious policy coverage. Far too many news outlets uncritically repeated Johnson’s first major pronouncement — that $14 billion for Israel could be paid for by cutting the number of IRS agents (who audit the GOP’s millionaire donors) when even a third-grade math student would know that reducing revenue agents would cost the government money. Getting it right isn’t only important because Johnson is now the most powerful Republican in Washington, but also because he’s a kind of a John the Baptist prophecy of an even more dangerous Trump 47 in 14-plus months
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  • Growing threats to press freedom in America have metastasized in the weeks since Oct. 7, with pressure not to make any controversial comments about Israel or Palestine causing some editors and reporters to get fired or resign, which has a chilling effect on others. And my bigger fear is that this growing climate of fear is bleeding into coverage of the 2024 election and the threat to democracy.
  • The world is staring into an abyss, much as it did in the 1930s. Now, as then, the global rise of right-wing authoritarians like Vladimir Putin in Russia and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel is linked to aggressive militarism that targets civilians and risks a world war. Here at home, the growing sense of chaos abroad and a broken government on Capitol Hill, with Republican Johnson poised to make matters worse, has imperiled the flawed small-d democratic government of President Joe Biden and has primed too many voters to fall into the waiting arms of a wannabe dictator.
  • the institutional caution that frames their work has been getting a lot worse. Some of it is probably business-driven — to avoid offending readers who might cancel a subscription. A lot of it seems to be a desire in newsrooms, after Trump’s whirlwind, lie-filled first term, to return to normalcy and the kind of balance that treats the two parties equally, which means ignoring that one has become an authoritarian cult.
  • things will get worse in less than two years if journalists — as individuals, as newsrooms, and as a profession — can’t stop cowering and won’t adopt a much more aggressive posture in defending democracy, the only political system that makes a functioning news media possible. Some of it is basic stuff — more boldness in calling out a blatant lie, like Johnson’s IRS claim, or making it clear when someone is to blame, like Israel’s killing of journalists.
  • I’m terrified that many angry, apathetic, or ill-informed voters will wake up on Jan. 21, 2025, in a country they no longer recognize ... and didn’t see coming.
Ed Webb

Search Engine Helps Users Connect In Arabic : NPR - 0 views

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

Arabic internet online language transliteration typing

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Jul 09 - Cached
  • new technology that is revolutionizing the way Arabic-speaking people use the Internet
  • Abdullah says that of her 500 Egyptian students, 78 percent have never typed in Arabic online, a fact that greatly disturbed Habib Haddad, a Boston-based software engineer originally from Lebanon. "I mean imagine [if] 78 percent of French people don't type French," Haddad says. "Imagine how destructive that is online."
  • "The idea is, if you don't have an Arabic keyboard, you can type Arabic by spelling your words out phonetically," Jureidini says. "For example ... when you're writing the word 'falafel,' Yamli will convert that to Arabic in your Web browser. We will go and search not only the Arabic script version of that search query, but also for all the Western variations of that keyword."
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  • At a recent "new" technology forum at MIT, Yamli went on to win best of show — a development that did not escape the attention of Google, which recently developed its own search and transliteration engine. "I guess Google recognizes a good idea when it sees it," Jureidini says. He adds, "And the way we counter it is by being better. We live and breathe Yamli every day, and we're constantly in the process of improving how people can use it." Experts in Arabic Web content say that since its release a year ago, Yamli has helped increase Arabic content on the Internet just by its use. They say that bodes well for the Arabic Web and for communication between the Arab and Western worlds.
  • Ed Webb on 16 Jul 09
     
    One of our themes was language - how the domination of the web by English might affect who uses it and how.
sean lyness

Al Qaeda fighters move into Horn of Africa, officials say - CNN.com - 0 views

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

al qaeda

shared by sean lyness on 12 Jun 09 - Cached
  • sean lyness on 12 Jun 09
     
    Al Qaeda operatives are leaving the battle zones along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and heading for Somalia and Yemen, where they have set up training camps, according to U.S. intelligence officials."> text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Ed Webb

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

blog.buzzflash.com/12342

censorship TV television opinion analysis jazeera al-jazeera

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

Taking Stock of the Arab Revolutions | Marc Lynch - 3 views

lynch.foreignpolicy.com/..._stock_of_the_arab_revolutions

MENA

shared by Terri Soifer on 07 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • EGYPT Mubarak Leave At Last MUBARAK Worst Speech Ever OBAMA Still Trying for Egyptian Change
  • The greatest structural change of the last two months is not the fall of Mubarak but  the region-wide empowerment of Arab pu
  • All of this is playing out in a unified political space, shaped primarily by al-Jazeera and social media and by the demand by Arabs of all stripes to now be heard and felt. 
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  • rom the perspective of Arab publics, this is all a single story of challenge and revolt in which all are involved.
  • Yemenis don't watch Tunisia as spectators but as participants,
  • Ed Webb on 08 Mar 11
     
    Good job pulling out the key argument, which is consistent with his book. That last point is particularly nice.
Ed Webb

Jewish Horror, Monotheism, and the Origins of Evil - Tablet Magazine - 0 views

www.tabletmag.com/...jewish-horror

film horror Israel Judaism analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 23 Feb 19 - Cached
  • the new horror film The Golem, from directors Doron and Yoav Paz
  • The directors of The Golem, who are Israeli brothers
  • Reasons for the dearth of Jewish horror fiction are varied, ranging from producers possibly fearing that the ethnic particularism of these themes wouldn’t draw in as wide an audience, to the (incorrect) sense that Judaism doesn’t offer the same baroque supernatural possibilities that Christianity does.
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  • The theme of the golem, after all, has been explored several times before, from the silent film era of Paul Wegener’s expressionist Der Golem (1916) until today, including in The X-Files and The Simpsons’ annual “Tree House of Horror” Halloween episodes. There have also been a small number of horror films that explore Jewish folklore, such as Ole Bornedal’s The Possession (2012), which in lieu of The Exorcist’s Pazuzu features the malicious spirit of legend known as a dybbuk, an entity which also appears in David Goyer’s The Unborn (2009), and even in the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man (2009). Yet despite a preponderance of Jewish horror directors from Curt Siodmak, creator of The Wolf Man (1941) to Polanski, Hollywood has tended not to explore explicitly Jewish themes in horror.
  • the sense of the terrors of the real world is fundamental to monotheistic horror, for it asks what the ultimate origin of evil is.
  • The Franco-Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre distinguished between what he called the “uncanny,” whereby the supernaturalism of a story can be ultimately explained by rational recourse, and the “marvelous” in what’s been depicted is to be understood as genuinely supernatural. For Todorov, that which is fantastic in literature exists in the ambiguity between the uncanny and the marvelous, where the characters in a story (and the reader) are unsure as to whether events witnessed are genuinely supernatural or not. Todorov writes: “The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.”
  • what I’ve termed “monotheistic horror” in contrast to “dualistic horror.” The latter is any work which posits supernatural evil as somehow separate in agency from God, while the former steadfastly holds to all things—even evil things—as having their origin in the Lord. I’d argue that Jewish horror fiction, for all of its diversity, must be resolutely defined by an overpowering sense of monotheism, and that it is that sense of the fundamental unity of reality that makes those works terrifying. Ghosts, goblins, and ghouls can exist in both types of horror, but in dualistic horror God is either configured as explicitly separate from those evil things, or mention of Him is passed over.
  • The Paz brothers’ film is an example of Jewish horror not because it takes place in a 17th-century shtetl, or because its story deals with that most Jewish of monsters, but rather because there is no sense that anything that happens doesn’t occur due to the power and sovereignty of God.
  • in The Golem the creature is fashioned in adherence to God’s reality. Hanna’s creation is not demonic, but rather divine—if still capable of malevolence.
  • Any fiction that presents the malevolence experienced in reality as integral to the unity of that very same reality is monotheistic horror. In this way, I’d argue that Franz Kafka is one of the greatest horror writers of the 20th century, with a dark perspective that rivals that of H.P. Lovecraft. The latter thought the world meaningless, but Kafka never fell into that error. The result is paradoxically a horror all the more disturbing for what it implies about evil’s derivation.
  • For Kafka the deep wisdom of reality is even darker than Lovecraft’s nihilism, for his horror is based on the type of irony that can only be born from the most radical of monotheisms. The author could tell his friend Max Brod that here is “Plenty of hope—for God—no end of hope—only not for us,” a succinct summation of the major themes of Jewish horror, where what is fully externalized is a theodicy that recognizes evil exists in the world while also acknowledging that God must be its author.
  • The ur-text of Jewish horror, and what I would argue is perhaps the most terrifying story every told, is the biblical Book of Job. Few narratives can match Job in the sheer awful implications of what’s been recounted, of the upstanding man of Uz who “was perfect and upright, and one that feared God,” but who nevertheless was struck down by the Lord with a deluge of afflictions. So many details of Job’s story, often associated with the fatalism of Greek tragedy to which it bears some similarity, have a gothic sensibility. There is Satan who talks of “roving about in the earth and … walking about in it,” and of Job cursing himself by asking, “Why did I not perish at birth, and die as I came from the womb?” Then there is the pyrotechnic impressiveness of God himself, who “answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?”
  • Monotheistic horror should not be interpreted as the logical culmination of monotheism itself, rather it should be seen as the dark undercurrent, the nagging anxiety, of what it means if there is only one Lord but we’re uncertain as to if He is always benevolent, for as Miles observes “all of God’s actions could actually have been the devil’s.” There is the upsetting ambiguity of monotheistic horror—not that God’s actions are the devil’s, but that they could be.
  • one of the most potent lessons of Jewish horror fiction: that there is a permeable membrane between civilization and anarchy, where those who claim to protect us one day can cast us aside the next. The “friends” of Job are among the most callous of monsters in the book. What makes Jewish horror so frightening is its entirely accurate understanding that all evil ultimately must have its origin not in devils, but in the two most frightening things in our sublime universe: God and his creations.
Ed Webb

How Western Urban Planning Fueled War in the Middle East | The American Conservative - 0 views

www.theamericanconservative.com/...-fueled-war-in-the-middle-east

ArabWorld MENA architecture urbanspace urban homs Syria UAE opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • Architecture has been part of that work. The unspoken assumption was that houses should fit together along alleys and streets, that no private house should be so ostentatious as to stand higher than the mosque or the church, and that the city should be a compact and unified place, built with local materials according to a shared vocabulary of forms. Thick walls of stone created interiors that would be cool in summer and warm in winter with the minimum use of energy. The souk was conceived as a public place, embellished appropriately so as to represent the heart of the city, the place where the free trade of goods expressed the free mingling of the communities.
  • The old souk of Aleppo, tragically destroyed in the current Syrian conflict, was a perfect example of this, the delicate and life-affirming center of a city that has been in continuous habitation for a longer time than any other. That city rose to eminence as the final station on the Silk Road, the place where treasures were unloaded from the backs of camels coming from Mesopotamia onto the carts that would take them to the Mediterranean ports. The fate of this city, which has, in the 21st century, faced destruction for the first time in 5,000 years, is a fitting emblem of what is happening to the Middle East today.
  • it is not only civil conflict that has threatened the ancient cities of the Middle East. Long before the current crisis there arrived new ways of building, which showed scant respect for the old experience of settlement and disregarded the unwritten law of the Arab city that no building should reach higher than the mosque, it being the first need of the visitor to spy out the minaret, and so to find the place of prayer. These new ways of building came, like so much else, from the West, first through colonial administration and then through foreign “advisors,” often taking advantage of the insecure land-law of the region, introduced by the Ottoman land code of 1858. By the time France had been granted the mandate to govern Syria in 1923, modernist building types, the mania for roads and motorized “circulation,” the idea that cities should be disaggregated into “zones”—residential, commercial, industrial, and so on—and the obsession with hygiene had all made their destructive mark on the urban fabric
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  • new ways of building came, like so much else, from the West, first through colonial administration and then through foreign “advisors,” often taking advantage of the insecure land-law of the region, introduced by the Ottoman land code of 1858. By the time France had been granted the mandate to govern Syria in 1923, modernist building types, the mania for roads and motorized “circulation,” the idea that cities should be disaggregated into “zones”—residential, commercial, industrial, and so on—and the obsession with hygiene had all made their destructive mark on the urban fabric
  • As in Russia and Germany, the arrival of the totalitarian state was prefaced by the arrival of totalitarian architecture
  • a modern city, another piece of anywhere
  • Architectural modernism fed into the Arab inferiority complex: concrete high rises, plazas, geometrical patterns, energy-intensive fenestration, sometimes with a mihrab or a dome stuck on in deference to a history that is no longer really believed in—all these have become part of the new vernacular of a hasty urbanization. The basic idea has been to abandon the great tradition of the Ottoman city, with its many communities in their tents of stone, and to “catch up” with the West
  • Rarely, in any of this, however, has provision been made for the migrants from the villages, who have been compelled to survive in unplanned and unregulated structures, heaped up around the cities with no thought for how they look or for the character of the public spaces beneath them
  • The old rabbit-warren city of the Middle East was a conflict-defusing device, a continuous affirmation of neighborhood and settlement. The new city of jerry-built concrete towers is a conflict-enhancing device, a continuous “stand-off” between competing communities on the edge of a place that does not belong to them and to which they in turn cannot belong.
  • in the 1990s there were many popular Syrian TV drama series about how people lived and interacted with each other in the neighborhoods of the old cities in Syria during the late 19th and early 20th century. They depicted the days when the Levant society as it existed in its centuries-old Ottoman era make-up, just prior to the transition into colonial and post-colonial modernity and showed how rich and poor lived together in the same neighborhood, it showed the old houses, the shops & the markets.
  • We should remember that the idea of replacing the organic city of customary styles with cleared spaces and blocks of concrete, while it originated among European intellectuals, was first tried out in the Arab world. Le Corbusier, who had attempted in vain to persuade the city council of Paris to adopt his plan to tear down the entire city north of the Seine and replace it with an assemblage of glass towers, turned his attention to the North African city of Algiers instead, which was at the time under French colonial administration. As architectural advisor to the French Vichy government during the war he was able to overrule the elected mayor of Algiers and impose his will upon the city—though the Allied victory abruptly put an end to his plans.
  • Le Corbusier’s scheme is still studied and even treated with reverence in modern schools of architecture. It involved erasing the old city from the map, replacing it with great square blocks that negate the Mediterranean coastline and the contours of the landscape, and surmounting the whole with streets along which automobiles fly above the population. No church or mosque has a part in the plan; there are no alleyways or secret corners. All is blank, expressionless, and cold. It is an act of vengeance by the new world against the old: not a project for settling a place, but a project for destroying it, so that nothing of the place remains
  • the glitzy restaurant style of Dubai, in which vast gadgets, belonging to no known architectural language but looking like kitchen tools discarded by some gigantic celebrity chef, lie scattered among ribbons of motorway
  • Care for one’s place is the first move towards accepting the others who reside there. The thoughts “this is our home,” and “we belong here” are peacemaking thoughts. If the “we” is underpinned only by religious faith, and faith defined so as to exclude its historical rivals, then we have a problem. If, however, a resident of Homs can identify himself by the place that he shares with his fellow residents, rather than the faith that distinguishes him, then we are already on the path away from civil war.
  • decisions are made by officials, and officials belong to the great system of Mafia-like corruption that is the true cause of the Syrian conflict, and which has encouraged the Syrian political elite in recent times to look to Russia as its natural ally
  • Capitalism’s “creative destruction” is the anti-conservative claim that nothing that exists could not be improved easily in a short time by fast, profitable and “efficient” total replacement.
  • architect Marwa al-Sabouni, whose book, The Battle for Home, tells the story of how the conflict in Syria has overwhelmed her own city of Homs. She shows that you cannot destroy the serene and unostentatious forms of the Levantine city without also jeopardizing the peace that they symbolized and which to a measure they also protected
  • Roger Scruton is romanticizing. He therefore completely misunderstands the expressive functional reality of ordinary homes and security by focusing on public architecture, which everywhere expresses elite ideals instead of common ones. Take Florence and the Italian Republics. Frequent wars and not infrequently with Muslim empires meant homes had to be defensible and closed off from streets. Only later, briefly, and elsewhere later like in Britain and the US were isolated farm villages open to welcome trade, or US farm homes isolated away from the necessity of group protections because genuine threats had become to rare to proactively defend against them. Similarly, the divide in the Muslim world is between open plans in port cities secured through trade by larger powers that could ensure protection, versus homes way from ports, deliberately closed off against strangers so as to be defensible against frequent invaders. Most of the Islamic world remains like unstable and insecure early Florence. And homes throughout MENA reflect their isolation and insecurity through closed plans, just as much as Spanish ones from Moorish times do, even in the New World.
Ed Webb

How Kais Saied uses irregular migration for political gain - 1 views

english.alaraby.co.uk/...gular-migration-political-gain

Tunisia Europe migration Africa migrants Turkey Serbia saied youth civil_society

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Sep 22 - No Cached
  • Since Kais Saied's assumption of the Tunisian presidency in 2019, the number of African migrants who have arrived in Tunisia without being stopped or registered has dramatically increased. “Officially, 10,000 irregular migrants have crossed the borders from Libya to Tunisia during the first half of 2022”, M.E., a former UNHCR employee in Medenine revealed. In reality, the numbers are much bigger.
  • it is believed foreign migrants in Tunisia far exceed a million. 
  • Since the start of his tenure, Saied has put the army and the police at the behest of his political project. After his referendum on a new constitution, Saied sacked and replaced nine high-ranking police officers. Furthermore, Saied's Interior Minister Taoufik Charfeddine has been appointing his own friends to key positions in the police and the National Guard.
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  • Tunisians have witnessed many Africans taking part in pro-Saied rallies in the past months.
  • Tunisia has always formally rejected calls to host migrants and refugees on a permanent basis
  • Migrants in these overpopulated, mostly working-class neighbourhoods “now have a sort of autonomous, independent communities. They have their own laws,” Zarzis-based activist Jihad A. told The New Arab, adding “migrants have strained ties with local communities. Clashes, sometimes violent, have often taken place in the past year."
  • “Unemployed, uneducated, and rebellious Tunisian youth have constituted a big challenge to the regime, since the Ben Ali era”, believes T.J., a blogger and civil society activist. “To get rid of these young people, mainly in the poor southern towns of the country, Saied’s authorities are shutting their eyes to the massive daily migration journeys from the south-eastern coasts of Zarzis, Jerba and Sfax to Italy”
  • more Tunisians sail to Europe from Tunisia than Africans
  • On August 1st, Italy’s Interior ministry revealed that the biggest numbers of irregular migrants who arrived in Italy from January to July 2022 are Tunisians, which is more than Bangladeshis, Sub-Saharan Africans, Iranians and others.
  • in Tataouine, there’s a flourishing network of migration for Tunisians to western Europe, via Turkey and Serbia.
  • individuals and families fly regularly to Istanbul. There, a Tunisian official sells them the official security document, which states that a person is ‘clean’, and not prosecuted in any legal cases in Tunisia. That document, which is never delivered in Tunisia because it is supposed to contain “classified” information, is strictly required by Serbia to allow Tunisians in
  • Medenine and Tataouine, two key regions for fuel smuggling and human trafficking, have remained without senior officials for months after President Saied sacked their old governors.
  • “Mayors can play a major role in monitoring irregular migration and in the hosting of migrants”, explains Boubaker Souid, Mayor of Tataouine. “But they are now left without any prerogative and who knows how Saied’s regime will get rid of them”.   
  • “It seems that one of the tactics of the Tunisian authorities is to empty the country of young people, who have always been the main source of contest and revolt”, says M.B., a civil society activist from Medenine.
  • On February 24, 2022, Kais Saied announced that he wanted to ban foreign funding for associations. For him, associations applying for or receiving foreign funding are “suspicious activities”. Consequently, the civil society ceased to play its role in monitoring and reporting migration issues and in delivering credible information and data about it.
  • Ed Webb on 18 Sep 22
     
    Tendentious, but certainly a lot of complex, possibly related phenomena discussed in this anonymous article
Ed Webb

The Brotherhood and the independence of the media - 1 views

english.alarabiya.net/...224898.html

Egypt media press opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • what we cannot tolerate, for example, is when one of the largest newspapers in the country publishes more than 22 photos and 21 stories about the new president in one single edition. Incidents such as this – clearly an attempt to flatter Mursi - were repeated by more than one newspaper and media outlet, and they evoked memories of how Egyptian state-run newspapers covered the news during the era of former President Hosni Mubarak.
  • a different type of media and press
  • a few days ago when a candidacy registration period was opened for prospective editors-in-chief of state-run newspapers, supervised by the Shura Council and the Supreme Press Council. With the governing body now adopting election principles, having previously appointed editors-in-chief unilaterally, does this mean that the problem of the state-run press has been solved? Or will these establishments remain captive under the direct subordination of the ruling regime?
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  • a review should begin with the system of ownership that governs these newspapers, and how to separate between their ownership and the independence of their operations, which were tarnished by significant corruption during the past era
Ed Webb

Tunisia's bitter cyberwar - Features - Al Jazeera English - 2 views

english.aljazeera.net/...20111614145839362.html

Tunisia censorship internet twitter socialmedia social media media

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Most international news organisations have no presence in the country (and, some say, a lack of interest in the protests). Media posted online by Tunisian web activists has been some of the only material that has slipped through the blackout, even if their videos and photos haven't generated quite the same enthusiastic coverage by Western media as the Iranian protest movement did in 2009.
  • Several sources Al Jazeera spoke with said that web activists had been receiving anonymous phone calls, warning them to delete critical posts on their Facebook pages or face the consequences.
  • Sami Ben Gharbia, who monitors Tunisia's web censorship for Global Voices, said that Google and Facebook were in no way complicit in the sophisticated phishing technique. The initial signs that something was underway came on Saturday, he said, when the secure https protocol became unavailable in Tunisia. This forced web users to use the non-secure http protocol. The government's internet team then appears to have gone phishing for individuals' usernames and passwords on services including Gmail, Facebook, Yahoo and Hotmail. Web activists and journalists alerted others of the alleged hacking by the government via Twitter, which is not susceptible to the same types of operations. "The goal, amongst others, is to delete the Facebook pages which these people administer," a Tunisian internet professional, who has also been in contact with Anonymous, told Al Jazeera in an emailed interview. The same source, who asked to remain unidentified due to the potential consequences for speaking out, said that in communication with the international group, he had come up with a Greasemonkey script for fireFox internet browsers that deactivated the government's malicious code.
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  • The Committee to Protect Journalists says there is clear proof that the phishing campaign is organised and co-ordinated by the Tunisian government, as did other sources that Al Jazeera spoke with.
  • In the siege against cyber dissidence, Twitter has been a bastion for activists. Because people can access Twitter via clients rather than going through the website itself, many Tunisians can still communicate online. The web-savvy use proxies to browse the other censored sites. Yet even if bloggers manage to maintain their blogging, the censorship deprives them of those readers who do not use proxies. The result is what Ben Gharbia described as the "killing" of the Tunisian blogosphere.  Ben Mhenni said that the government's biggest censorship of webpages en masse happened in April 2010, when more than 100 blogs were blocked, in addition to other websites. She said the hijackings that had taken place in the past week, however, marked the biggest government-organised hacking operation. Most of the pages that had been deleted in recent days were already censored. Amamy said the government's approach to the internet policy is invasive and all-controlling. "Here we don't really have internet, we have a national intranet," he said.
Ed Webb

Egypt ratifies new law regulating media outlets | Egypt News | Al Jazeera - 0 views

www.aljazeera.com/...media-law-161227064051239.html

Egypt media press censorship regulation

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • The new law, approved by parliament and signed into law by Sisi on Monday, will see the creation of a Supreme Council for the Administration of the Media, a body that can revoke licences to foreign media and fine or suspend publications and broadcasters. INSIDE STORY: How far will Egypt go in attacking media freedoms? (25:15)
  • The council, whose chairman will be picked by Sisi, will create a list of penalties and sue media organisations that violate its regulations and fine outlets that break licence terms.
  • earlier this month, when the law was still being deliberated in parliament, the press syndicate condemned the legislation as an infringement on the media. "The law allows the executive power to take control of media outlets," it said in a statement published by local media.
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  • Over the past few years, Egyptian authorities have arrested several Al Jazeera employees, with some being accused of conspiring with "the devil" to destabilise the country. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 25 journalists have been imprisoned in Egypt in 2016, making it the world's third-worst jailer of reporters after Turkey and China.
Ed Webb

The price of mocking "Sultan" Bouteflika. Algerian activist fined over Facebook post - 0 views

www.al-bab.com/...algeria-sultan-bouteflika.htm

Algeria facebook censorship

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • The picture above advertises a popular Turkish soap opera – Harim Soltan (the Sultan's harem).  But there is also a satirical version (below) in which the Sultan's face has been replaced with that of Algeria's president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Besides "Sultan" Bouteflika himself, it shows a few members of the president's "harem", including his brother Said, prime minister Abdelmalek Sellal and Amar Saidani, secretary general of Algeria's ruling party, the FLN ...
  • On October 4 last year, Algerian activist Zoulikha Belarbi posted the Photoshopped picture on Facebook with a comment saying: "I don't know when the Bouteflika soap opera will end and he will wake up from his false dream which has become a nightmare threatening the future of Algeria and her people." On October 20, police raided her family home in Tlemcen, arrested her and seized her computer, mobile phone and SIM card. She was held for 24 hours before being released under judicial supervision. "I was treated like a terrorist," she said later. Her case finally came to court last weekend, and she was fined 100,000 dinars ($905) for "undermining the president of the republic". 
Ed Webb

Monsters of Our Own Imaginings | Foreign Policy - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...russels-bombings-islamic-state

terror terrorism foreignpolicy IR analysis opinion GWOT walt Belgium ISIS Qaeda

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Terrorist attacks have occurred in Europe, America, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and many other places, and no level of surveillance, police presence, border controls, drone strikes, targeted killings, or enhanced interrogation is going to prevent every one of them. Even if we could provide absolutely air-tight protection around one type of target, others targets would remain exposed
  • the belief that we could eliminate the danger entirely is no more realistic than thinking better health care will grant you eternal life. For this reason, condemning politicians for failing to prevent every single attack is counterproductive — and possibly dangerous — because it encourages leaders to go overboard in the pursuit of perfect security and to waste time and money that could be better spent on other things. Even worse, the fear of being blamed for “not doing enough” will lead some leaders to take steps that make the problem worse — like bombing distant countries — merely to look and sound tough and resolute.
  • there is no magic key to stopping terrorism because the motivations for it are so varied. Sometimes it stems from anger and opposition to foreign occupation or perceived foreign interference — as with the Tamil Tigers, Irish Republican Army, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, or Hamas. In other cases, it arises from opposition to a corrupt and despised ruling elite. Or it could be both: Osama bin Laden was equally angry at “crusader” nations for interfering in the Muslim world and at the Arab governments he believed were in cahoots with them. In the West, homegrown terrorists such as Anders Breivik or Timothy McVeigh are driven to mass murder by misguided anger at political systems they (falsely) believe are betraying their nation’s core values. Sometimes terrorism arises from perverted religious beliefs; at other times the motivating ideology is wholly secular. Because so many different grievances can lead individuals or groups to employ terrorist methods, there is no single policy response that could make the problem disappear forever.
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  • Compared with other risks to human life and well-being, contemporary international terrorism remains a minor problem
  • The Islamic State killed 31 people in Brussels on Tuesday, but more than half a billion people in Europe were just fine on that day. So when the British government raised the “threat level” and told its citizens to avoid “all but essential travel” to Belgium following Tuesday’s attacks, it is demonstrating a decidedly non-Churchillian panic. Needless to say, that is precisely what groups like the Islamic State want to provoke.
  • the same toxic blend of media and politics that brought us Donald Trump’s candidacy makes it nearly impossible to have a rational assessment of terrorism
  • Newspapers, radio, cable news channels, and assorted websites all live for events like this, and they know that hyping the danger will keep people reading, listening, and watching. The Islamic State and its partners really couldn’t ask for a better ally, because overheated media coverage makes weak groups seem more powerful than they really are and helps convince the public they are at greater risk than is in fact the case. As long as media coverage continues to provide the Islamic State et al. with such free and effective publicity, why should these groups ever abandon such tactics?
  • The Islamic State wouldn’t have to use terrorism if it were strong enough to advance its cause through normal means or if its message were attractive enough to command the loyalty of more than a miniscule fraction of the world’s population (or the world’s Muslims, for that matter). Because it lacks abundant resources and its message is toxic to most people, the Islamic State has to rely on suicide attacks, beheadings, and violent videos to try to scare us into doing something stupid. The Islamic State cannot conquer Europe and impose its weird version of Islam on the more than 500 million people who live there; the most it can hope for is to get European countries to do self-destructive things to themselves in response. Similarly, neither al Qaeda, the Islamic State, nor other extremists could destroy the U.S. economy, undermine the U.S. military, or weaken American resolve directly; but they did achieve some of their goals when they provoked us into invading Iraq and when they convinced two presidents to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the bottomless pit in Afghanistan.
  • Terrorism is not really the problem; the problem is how we respond to it
  • At the moment, the challenge of contemporary terrorism seems to be bringing out not the best in the West — but the worst. Instead of resolution and grit, we get bluster and hyperbole. Instead of measured threat assessments, patient and careful strategizing, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be achieved, we get symbolic gestures, the abandonment of our own principles, and political posturing.
  • how would a grown-up like Marshall or Dwight D. Eisenhower respond to this danger? No doubt they’d see it as a serious problem, but anyone who had witnessed the carnage of a world war would not be cowed by intermittent acts of extremist violence, no matter how shocking they are to our sensibilities. They’d use the bully pulpit to shame the fearmongers on Fox and CNN, and they’d never miss an opportunity to remind us that the danger is not, in fact, that great and that we should not, and cannot, live our lives in fear of every shadow and in thrall to monsters of our own imaginings. They would encourage us to live our daily lives as we always have, confident that our societies possess a strength and resilience that will easily outlast the weak and timorous groups that are trying to disrupt us. And then, this summer, they’d take a European vacation.
Ed Webb

Sex, Social Mores, and Keyword Filtering: Microsoft Bing in the "Arabian Countries" | O... - 0 views

opennet.net/crosoft-bing-arabian-countries

internet censorship filtering search MENA ArabWorld microsoft Bing

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Jan 12 - Cached
  • There is no filtering by keywords if a user chooses another country (e.g., United States, Canada) as their location even if they are physically located in an Arab country. - One anomaly we found when probing filtering by keywords is that filtering does not work if a filtered Arabic keyword is used together with another non-filtered keyword. For example, a search using the Arabic word for “sex” is banned, but using the Arabic term for “sex stories” is not banned.
  • We found no evidence of filtering of keywords in Arabic or English that could return results in other content categories. We tested keywords that could yield politically sensitive content (e.g., “democracy”, “freedom”, “opposition”), content related to violence and terrorism (e.g., “torture”, terror”, “explosive”), Web sites related to minority and religious rights (e.g., “Shiite”, “Baha’i”, “Christian”, “Jews”), and content related to women’s rights (e.g., “gender”, “equality”). None of the tested keywords were found banned.
  • It is interesting that Microsoft’s implementation of this type of wholesale social content censorship for the entire “Arabian countries” region is in fact not being practiced by many of the Arab government censors themselves. That is, although political filtering is widespread in the MENA region, social filtering, including keyword filtering, is not practiced by all countries in MENA. ONI 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 testing and research found no evidence of social content filtering (e.g., sex, nudity, and homosexuality) at the national level in countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Libya.10
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  • 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.
Ed Webb

Proposal for Governmental Monitoring of Information on the Internet : Tunisia Live - 0 views

www.tunisia-live.net/...of-information-on-the-internet

Tunisia media internet socialmedia monitoring facebook twitter

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • sites need to be monitored by the government in order to ensure the accuracy of the information circulating on these networks. “I want to help make the media more reliable,” he said, adding that, “I’m not talking about individuals. I’m talking about journalists who use Facebook and all types of social media. They must be sure not to release false information that could subvert the facts and divide Tunisia.”
  • It’s a matter of organizing things to make the media seem more ordered and reliable
  • the commission would not supervise individuals, only news sources. It would be tasked with monitoring Tunisian media in all of its forms, including things that are published by journalists on websites like Twitter and Facebook
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  • the commission would largely serve the purpose of alerting media when the information published is inaccurate
Ed Webb

Iraqi law recognizes Kurdish, other languages - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...inorities-language-rights.html

Iraq languages education law minorities

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The law voted on by parliament a few weeks ago — eight years after the constitution entered into force — serves as a means to implement what is specified in the Constitution, without adding anything other than clarifications. For example, it notes that Turkmen, Assyrian or Armenian citizens have the right to ask the administration of the government school where their children study to provide the latter with lessons in their mother tongue.  In this respect, Iraq is following in the footsteps of developed countries that have realized the importance of teaching a person his or her mother tongue if they so desire. Lawmakers have confirmed the importance of spreading "linguistic awareness" and bringing the various components of the country closer together. Today, this is now an issue of law, budget and implementation, especially when it comes to the employees who should be appointed in official circles and schools so that this law can come into effect. [To truly implement the law], thousands of employees are needed. 
  • the law confirms — without directly mentioning it — the idea that was expressed in Article 3 of the Constitution: that Iraq is a country of many nationalities, religions and sects. This is one of the most important issues that the Iraq state has refused to recognize since its inception. In Iraq, there are languages that can be traced back to completely different linguistic families. These include Semitic languages, Indo-Iranian languages (from which Farsi and Kurdish originated), Altaic languages (from which Turkish languages originated), Indo-European languages (from which Armenian originated) and Caucasian languages (from which Circassian originated). There are also some Iraqis who speak languages that are Slavic in origin
  • in spite of the sacrifices made by Kurds in Iran, Turkey and Syria, the type of recognition achieved by Iraq's Kurds in January of 2013 still remains a dream
  • Ed Webb on 03 Feb 14
     
    Among other things, this article gives a good sense of the writing style popularized by one of the leading Arabic dailies, Al Hayat.
Ed Webb

Will Bunch: What Battered Newsrooms Can Learn From Stewart's CNBC Takedown - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...ered-newsrooms-c_b_172397.html

newspapers future journalism

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Mar 09 - Cached
  • In a time when newspapers are flat-out dying if not dealing with bankruptcy or massive job losses, while other types of news orgs aren't faring much better, the journalistic success of a comedy show rant shouldn't be viewed as a stick in the eye -- but a teachable moment. Why be a curmudgeon about kids today getting all their news from a comedy show, when it's not really that hard to join Stewart in his own idol-smashing game?
  • People need information but what they so desperately want an outlet that shares their passion -- and, yes, that rage
  • Mainstream media, after all these years, has a hard time understanding that one of the major political forces in this country is mainstream media, something the audience knows all too well.
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  • there's nothing wrong with that, informing and entertaining at the same time -- isn't that what newspapers are charging people 75 cents for?.
  • Ed Webb on 06 Mar 09
     
    Excellently observed, and sound advice. Note that 'objectivity' is presented as false virtue.
Zach Hartnett

Major controversy in Turkish parliament | Middle East | Jerusalem Post - 0 views

www.jpost.com/...Satellite

jerusalem parliament turkish

shared by Zach Hartnett on 02 Mar 09 - No Cached
  • The leader of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) in the Turkish Parliament, Ahmet Turk, created a major controversy when, on Tuesday, he became only the second person in history to speak Kurdish in the Turkish parliament, causing the state-run TRT TV channel to stop its live feed of the session,
Ed Webb

Are Blogs Losing Their Authority To The Statusphere? - 0 views

www.techcrunch.com/...r-authority-to-the-statusphere

blogging twitter statusphere authority socialnetworking

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Mar 09 - Cached
  • As the social Web and new services continue the migration and permeation into everything we do online, attention is not scalable. Many refer to this dilemma as attention scarcity or continuous partial attention (CPA) - an increasingly thinning state of focus. It’s affecting how and what we consume, when, and more importantly, how we react, participate and share. That something is forever vying for our attention and relentlessly pushing us to do more with less driven by the omnipresent fear of potentially missing what’s next.
  • We are learning to publish and react to content in “Twitter time” and I’d argue that many of us are spending less time blogging, commenting directly on blogs, or writing blogs in response to blog sources because of our active participation in micro communities.
  • building a community around the statusphere - the state of publishing, reading, responding to, and sharing micro-sized updates.
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  • Relevant and noteworthy updates are now curated by our peers and trusted or respected contacts in disparate communities that change based on our daily click paths.
  • One blog post can spark a distributed response in the respective communities where someone chooses to RT, favorite, like, comment, or share. These byte-sized actions reverberate throughout the social graph, resulting in a formidable network effect of measurable movement and activity. It is this form of digital curation of relevant information that binds us contextually and sets the stage to introduce not only new content to new people, but also facilitates the forging of new friendships, or at least connections, with the publisher in the process.
  • blog authority as measured by links is booming. It’s now more authoritative than ever before as bloggers can reach and resonate with new readers outside of their traditional ecosystem to cultivate a dispersed community bound by context, centralized links, and syndicated participation. Microblogging will only grow in importance and prevalence. It’s just a matter of embracing the inevitable and measuring the linklove beyond the blogosphere. But forget about blogs. This discussion begets a bigger question. Will we need a separate Technorati-type index for measuring the authority of content publishers on Twitter and other micro-media in their own right? Of course we do.
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