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Meanwhile, the Syrian government's daily Al-Thawrah sees the situation as chickens coming home to roost for US President Barack Obama's foreign policy. "Perhaps it has not crossed America's mind that the terrorism it manufactures and exports to the rest of the world, including to Syria as is the case today, will in the end bounce back. But lately, this fact started to rob Obama's administration's sleep," they write. "Amid the feverish US -Western race to target Syria, developments in Ukraine have started to steal attention as the eyes of the world turn to the Russian Caesar and wait for his final decision on the issue."

In Turkey's Hurriyet Daily News, Verda Ozer notes comparisons between the Ukrainian uprising and her nation's Gezi protests, but she contends that there are "many differences". She calls Ukraine an "authoritarian democracy" without Turkey's record of recent stability. Turkey's government, she writes, has been in an ongoing dialogue with protesters, which has prevented the sort of escalation that happened in Kiev.

Long committed to a free media, Mustafa Amin was imprisoned for six months in 1939 for an article in Akher sa‘a (Last Hour) magazine deemed critical of King Faruq. An advocate of democracy and Western liberalism, he was arrested in 1965, tried secretly in 1966, and convicted of being a spy for America and smuggling funds. Sentenced to a life sentence, he spent nine years in prison before being pardoned by Nasser’s successor, President Anwar Sadat. Ali Amin, accused by Heikal of working for British and Saudi intelligence, went into exile in 1965.

Room for expression existed mainly in the literary pages of al-Ahram, where writers under Heikal’s wings, like Naguib Mahfouz, could publish works of fiction that could be read as challenges to the status quo.[5] As far as the press was concerned, censorship was directed at politically oriented news and commentary rather than the literary sections

During the conflict, as the Egyptian army, under Field Marshal Abd al-Hakim Amer’s command, was hastily retreating from Sinai, broadcast outlets aired invented reports of fabulous victories against the Zionist foe. At no other moment did the state media prove so woefully deficient, contributing to a deep sense of public betrayal.

The speech was written for him by prominent journalist Mohamed Hassanein Heikal and tactfully framed a romp of Arab armies as a “setback,” displaying Heikal’s knack for being both a propagandist and political powerbroker.   It was a moment that brilliantly served to shore up Nasser’s support. Egyptians took to the streets demanding that their leader stay in power. “The People Say ‘No,’” declared Akhbar al-youm (News of the Day) in large red writing. In smaller black lettering the headline read, “The Leader Discloses the Whole Truth to the People.” It is difficult to say how populist and genuine the appeal was and how much of the public display of support for Nasser was behind-the-scenes political machinations of the regime and its media. While Nasser did stay in power, it was only later that Egyptians could comprehend the true extent of the defeat—especially in light of official propaganda—and the institutional failures that placed the whole of Sinai under Israeli control.

slogans shouted and scrawled on building walls that demanded: “Stop the Rule of the Intelligence,” “Down with the Police State,” and “Down with Heikal’s Lying Press.”

Student periodicals posted on the walls of the campuses emerged as the freest press in Egypt. Nasser for the first time became the object of direct criticism in the public space. A campaign against student unrest was waged in the state-owned media, which labeled the activists as provocateurs and counter-revolutionaries goaded by foreign elements

“A centralized editorial secretariat, called the Desk, was founded, as well as the Center for Strategic Studies and the Information Division. To his detractors, these innovations appeared to be spying sessions of an extensive empire dedicated to intelligence gathering

Nasser appointed Heikal to the post of minister of information and national guidance, a role he assumed for six months in 1970 until Nasser’s death. Yet the self-described journalist confided his frustration of being assigned a ministerial post, perhaps intended to distance him from the publishing empire he built, to a colleague, the leftist writer Lutfi al-Khouli, at his home. The encounter was surreptitiously recorded by the secret police, leading to the arrest and brief imprisonment of al-Khouli, and Heikal’s secretary and her husband, who were also present. “Now, Nasser’s regime had two aspects: it had great achievements to its credit but also it had a repressive side. I do not myself believe that the achievements . . . could have been carried out without some degree of enforcement,” Heikal wrote in The Road to Ramadan. “But after the 1967 defeat the positive achievements came to an end, because all resources were geared to the coming battle, while repression became more obvious. When Nasser died the executants of repression took it on themselves to be the ideologues of the new regime as well. They held almost all the key posts in the country. The people resented this and came to hate what they saw as their oppressors.”

after his increasing criticism of Sadat’s handling of the October 1973 War and appeals to the United States to address the impasse, Heikal was removed from al-Ahram in 1974. He remained a prolific author. In May 1978, Heikal was one of dozens of writers accused by the state prosecutor of defaming Egypt and weakening social peace and was subject to an interrogation that extended three months

Sadat attempted to bring the dissident cacophony into line through the mass arrest in September 1981 of more than 1,500 intellectuals, writers, journalists, and opposition elements of every stripe. Among those arrested were leading members of the Journalists’ Syndicate and prominent figures like the political writer Muhammad Hassanein Heikal and novelist Nawal El Saadawi. Sadat’s crackdown against his opponents culminated in his assassination by Islamic militants on October 6, 1981 during a military parade to commemorate the start of the 1973 War. Soon after Hosni Mubarak assumed power, Heikal was released from prison

When Dream aired the lecture Heikal gave at the American University in Cairo, direct pressure was placed on the owner’s business interests, and the veteran journalist found a new forum on pan-Arab satellite broadcasting. The influential writer has made opposition to Gamal Mubarak’s succession a staple of his newspaper columns.

With the rise of satellite television, Qatar’s Al Jazeera commanded audiences not only with news but with popular discussion programmed, like Ma‘ Heikal (With Heikal), a program by Heikal that began the year after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and which was watched by the Arab public with eager interest. Seated behind a desk and looking into the camera, Heikal gave his narrative of historical events and commentary on Middle Eastern and world affairs, exposing the intrigues of regional and global powers from his perch, having privileged access to leaders, diplomats, and decision makers. He has been a critic of Saudi diplomacy, its ballooning regional influence given the power of petrodollars, and its confrontation with Iran. Saudi pundits have consistently taken potshots at Heikal.

A couple of months before Morsi’s ouster on July 3, 2013, Heikal was contacted by Morsi’s defense minister Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi for a meeting, which had led to speculation that the Heikal devised the behind-the-scenes scenarios for an elected president’s removal as the dominant political player, the Muslim Brotherhood, was sinking in popularity. After Morsi was expelled from office, Heikal suggested to the military leader that he seek a popular mandate to lead the country, mirroring Nasser-style populism. Attired in full military regalia, al-Sisi at a July 24, 2013 graduation ceremony of the naval and air defence academies, broadcast live, warned that national security was in peril and summoned nationwide rallies two days later. Heikal supported al-Sisi’s bid for the presidency viewing him as the candidate born of necessity.

In the years after the Baath party came to power, writes Abdi, the budget for the Department of Antiquities increased by 80% and the number of excavations mushroomed, as did the renovation and reconstruction of historical sites

In Syria, too, Assad’s promotion of archaeology was, as the late journalist Patrick Seale described it, part of his exercise in nation building. Stéphane Valter, a French political scientist who specializes in Arab culture and civilization, studied Assad’s relationship to Syria’s archaeology in his 2002 book, “La construction nationale syrienne” (“The Syrian national construction”). He writes that because of the fragility of a social cohesion in Syria due to its varied ethnic and religious communities, it was important for Assad to establish a territorial and historical identity in which all minorities could find a legitimate place. The archaeological richness of Syria doubtless helped build a national identity based on a culture that was promoted as authentically Syrian.

Gadhafi’s view of Libya’s heritage was selective, but like the other dictators, it aligned with the message he wanted to transmit.“Libya links east to west, and north to south, and there are examples of all the cultures that were around us,” said Fakroun.But Gadhafi largely favored Islamic archaeology, in keeping with his Pan-Arab ideological preference at the time (vis-a-vis Pan-Africanism, which he embraced in later years), and after that, prehistory because it was far enough into the past to be relatively uncontested. In contrast, British archaeologist Graeme Barker, who spent many years in Libya, explained that “the country’s fabulous Greek and Roman archaeology represented to him simply the precursor of the hated Italian colonization of the 20th century.”

when Gadhafi saw that the museum staff had named some of the rooms “Greek” or “Roman,” his face fell, said Fakroun, “and he made us change the names to ‘Greek colonization’ or ‘Byzantine colonization.’ ”

“We couldn’t talk about our Amazigh heritage. Or objects that were Tuareg, we had to say they were Arab. We wanted to be scientific, but we couldn’t, because the only ethnicity that existed for him was Arab,”

the Baath regime in Iraq sought to “connect modern-day Iraq with its glorious Mesopotamian past, leaving aside any possible Sunni-Shia division or ethnic divide. Instead, it stressed that Iraq was one nation unified in a shared Mesopotamian-inspired culture.”

Iraq was flooded with propaganda posters, murals and sculpted reliefs in the style of ancient artworks, all depicting Saddam superposed with Mesopotamian rulers or symbols

Saddam rebuilt the site shoddily, most professionals agree, and built a palace for himself on top of it. He used new materials and inscribed his name on the bricks, as Nebuchadnezzar had done over 2,000 years before him. Moreover, said Almamori, “he dug three or four lakes, which damaged and removed part of the Persian cemetery near the northern lake. Many layers of different civilizations were removed. He constructed artificial mounds and built his palace on one of them. Archaeologists with high positions were afraid to say anything.”

“When Nebuchadnezzar II took over from his father, Nabopolassar, he ruled from the same palace which he rebuilt. The Baath party related to this — we have a long history, a strong civilization, that needs a strong army. Nationalists in other countries think the same way.”

the Umayyad period of history was useful to the party because of its multiethnic nature. The Umayyad Mosque in Damascus was one of the best symbols for the party, writes Valter, because of its specifically Syrian cultural traits — first an Aramean and then a Roman temple, then a church and finally a mosque. The mosque figured on Syria’s most valuable banknote at the time, behind an image of Assad. Banknotes included images of Aleppo’s Citadel, the Roman amphitheater of Bosra and Queen Zenobia of Palmyra, and clearly showed the regime’s wish to conflate ethnocultural Arab references with nationalist pride and a pinch of Islam

one of the most important ancient sites for Assad was Ugarit, near the Mediterranean city of Latakia. With five layers of cultures going back to the Neolithic period, not only is it famous for its clay tablets with an alphabet in cuneiform script, but Ugarit is also just north of Qardaha, where Assad was born and is buried.

Unlike in Saddam’s Iraq or Assad’s Syria, in Gadhafi’s Libya, the Department of Antiquities suffered from constant underfunding. “Our budget was next to nothing,” recalled Fakroun. “Once they forgot about the Department of Antiquities when they were drawing up the country’s budget. We had no salary for six months. We’re talking about a country with tons of money from petrol, and they gave us pennies. And we have five World Heritage sites.

outstanding archaeological sites in all three countries suffered looting, vandalism, neglect, or at the hands of the Islamic State or, in the case of Ancient Babylon, from U.S. and Polish troops building their military base on top of the ruins in 2003

In joining the Assad regime’s campaign to delegitimize the Syrian opposition by casting it as a bunch of irrational jihadis (ironically, they seem to have little problem with Hezbollah’s core Islamist values), Assad’s apologists have unwittingly adopted the “war on terror” lexicon introduced by George W. Bush, Ariel Sharon, and the neocon cabal after 9-11. Not only have they invoked the scary specter of The Terrorists (gasp!) to justify morally indefensible acts of violent repression, like pro-Israel hasbarists, they have resorted to rhetorical sophistry to dismiss the regime’s atrocities as necessary evils, unfortunate accidents (what al-Amin called “mistakes”), or fabrications of the regime’s opponents (see Ghorayeb on “unsubstantiated allegations of war crimes.”)

Like the neocon chickenhawks who cheered on America’s invasion of Iraq from the offices of Washington’s American Enterprise Institute, none of Assad’s apologists appear to have done any journalistic fieldwork to support their opinions. Ghorayeb and Narwani seem to have confined themselves to Beirut, where Ghorayeb consults the writings of V.I. Lenin and Paulo Freire to back up her hallucinatory portrayal of Assad as a subaltern freedom fighter, while Narwani cobbles together a scattershot of YouTube clips and hearsay from journalists she hangs out with to justify the regime’s very own “war on terror.”

As a Christian who fiercely rejected sectarianism, Shehadeh’s very presence shook the Syrian regime. After he was killed, the army shelled the Christian neighborhood of Hamidyeh to prevent his funeral, then a gang of shabiha attacked a memorial service for him in Damascus that would have presented a rare display of Christian-Sunni solidarity. It was this sense of solidarity that appeared to threaten the regime the most. As Shehadeh’s mother reportedly said, “They feared him in life, and they feared him in death.”

A few years ago, while visiting the offices of the Nation Magazine, a publication I frequently write for, I reflected on what it might have been like to be working there during the 1930’s when its editorial leadership supported Stalin and willfully ignored his crimes. What were the internal debates like, I wondered, and how would I have reacted? The past few weeks at Al Akhbar have brought those questions back into my thoughts, and they are no longer hypothetical. The paper’s opinion pages have become a playpen for dictator enablers, but unlike the 1930’s-era Nation Magazine, there is less excuse for their apologia. Indeed, given the easy accessibility of online media produced by Syrian activists and journalists, there is no way for Assad’s apologists to claim they did not know about the regime’s crimes

social media compels users to flock to the most popular point of view for fear of exclusion

an element of caution exists on the Lebanese blogosphere when it concerns political debate

to argue that Lebanese bloggers generally avoid debating Lebanese politics is to narrow the definition of what is deemed political

Social media may have constrained political debate in some corners, but overall it has expanded discourse and given new meaning to what is considered political in Lebanon. Political debate is no longer confined to the daily ritual of politicians insulting each other for a greater slice of the pie, whilst the country wallows in corruption, high unemployment, and a lack of basic services. Indeed, Lebanese citizen journalists have broken the limits of political discourse originally defined by politically engineered mass media and the country's sectarian system. Lebanese bloggers may not be responding to Hariri's rally as they have moved beyond the sectarian nature of Lebanese political life, and have grown increasingly cynical of local leaders who evoke the universal slogans of freedom, reform and democracy. Liliane's and @frencheagle's responses reflect the widespread disappointment in the failure of the 2005 “Cedar Revolution” to engender real change, and have thus lost faith in the political system altogether. A positive development out of the failed Cedar Revolution has been the emergence of online activism in tackling the issues Lebanon's sectarian elites refuse to entertain. There are blogs now on a plethora of issues ranging from migrant workers, gay rights, and women's rights, to local governance and poor basic services.

perhaps it is indeed an indication that the Lebanese blogosphere has fallen deaf to old-fashioned Lebanese political rhetoric, and is in the process of defining a new political landscape that transcends sectarianism and nepotism

the requirement for news sites to find an editor-in-chief who has been a member of the Jordanian Press Association for a minimum of four years is a cumbersome task. Okoor explained that many sites are forced to hire a symbolic editor-in-chief who fulfills these criteria, a burdensome cost for sites already in a precarious economic position. Until recently, the JPA, not an independent body, only accepted members from the print media

it seems like certain sources, namely academics, are a bit less likely to talk lately, which, if true, means the government has successfully accomplished its goal of silencing some of its most credible critics. More generally, the political situation has gotten much, much worse, and most of my Turkish and Kurdish friends have either been further radicalized or have simply given up and withdrawn from politics and following the news. There's a great feeling of helplessness. It's an exciting life for a journalist, but it's also just incredibly sad and often seemingly hopeless

When I use the term “Afro-Arab,” it is just my American lingua, not an actual term that Arab thinkers are trying to adopt or even consider. It is the kind of term you find in US academia but not in Arabic letters or political discussions. Even on the e-margins, young East and North Africans have been embracing their Africanness in opposition to Arabness, often citing Arab racism and exclusionary politics as reasons to depart from that historical bond.

I noticed how often Arab writers, including those North and East African, seem at ease when othering Africa—the bordered continent is harder for them to grasp than an imaginary “Arab World” made up by the French, and later appropriated by Arab nationalism. Moreover, the wildly inaccurate treatment of black experiences and cultures as one sum; from Zanzibar and Lagos to Havana and Detroit.

the Arab-Afro encounter seems more connected to the Americas and France, than to Africa itself

translations, references, and intertextual conversations, even by black Arabs, look toward Aime Césaire, Frantz Fanon, as well as African-American literature, and the civil rights era.

From one panel title “Black writer, White reader,” in a nod to Fanon, it was clear how the Arab fixation on black skin functions as an erasure of race, therefore assuming Arab is White

Arab writers, in the aftermath of the Iraq war and its apolitical introduction of identity politics into the region, have found an opportunity in writing about these groups which could get them translated and serve as primary literature for western academics and NGOs alike. Their white translators whisper to me “oh my god, this shit is racist” sometimes mediating in the process to clean up the language

Salahi and countless non-Western others have long known and written about torture at Guantánamo or Bagram or any of the many places where it occurred. But it only becomes a literary, notable, and prize-worthy truth when it flows from the pen of a foreign correspondent at a prestige publication like The New Yorker.

“If you say that you are angry,” Salahi tells the two white men, “it is understood as an emotion. If I say that I am angry, it is seen as a threat to national security.”

Salahi’s words underscore the truth Taub has not told: that writing an article about torture that does nothing to disrupt a worldview that has left brown men forever suspect is not getting anywhere at all.

There are more than 6.5 million internet and social media users in Jordan, the majority of whom are youth, out of a population of roughly 11 million. Jordanians are avid social media users, and over the years have used Facebook, WhatsApp, and other platforms to share news not broadcast on state-controlled channels, jokes targeting the regime, and rumors about the myriad political and corruption scandals circulating across the country on a regular basis

Cybercrimes Law No. 27/2015 is a popular regime tool used to control expression online. Article 11 regulates expression on online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. In April 2019, parliament introduced amendments to the law to criminalize the act of spreading “rumors” and “hate speech,” extending to the use of private messaging apps such as WhatsApp. The latest amendments define hate speech as “every writing and every speech or action intended to provoke sectarian or racial sedition, advocate for violence, or foster conflict between followers of different religions and various components of the nation.” And under the cybercrime law, Jordanians will face a criminal penalty if they are convicted of “sending or resending or disseminating information through the Internet or website or any information system that includes defamation, slander or libel against any person.” Between 2019 and 2020, the cases brought under the cybercrime law exceeded two thousand, more than double the number from the year before. In 2022, there have been more arrests under charges of “spreading false news,” including the detentions of several high-profile journalists.

Even the Jordanian National Center for Human Rights, a semi-governmental organization, wrote in its own recent annual report that “the detention of individuals for what they express is continuing.” Alarmingly, a recent Citizen Lab and Front Line Defenders joint report confirmed that two operators, “likely agencies of the Jordanian government,” used the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware to hack the phones of at least four Jordanians, including a human rights defender, a lawyer, and a journalist. 

Loosely formed groups of youth activists, often described with the term hirak (“movement”), organize in various neighborhoods and towns across Jordan around shared issues. In 2019, a workshop looking at youth activism across the Middle East and North Africa found that youth activism does not adhere to formalized structures of organizing, such as political parties, professional associations, and civil society organizations.

we have seen youth movements in the past decade break the generations-old divisions of urban versus rural and West Bank versus East Bank

organizing around their shared frustrations over unchecked levels of corruption, perpetual over-education combined with underemployment, and restrictions on what they can write on social media or when they can gather.

the attitudes of ruling elites and public officials toward youth are dismissive

the many initiatives launched over the years have not ever been driven by local youth demands, but rather have been top-down, buzzword-filled projects, centralized within the newly created Ministry of Youth, with little to no popular support or participation

Culture is in the air like cigarette smoke in pubs before the ban, but it’s also pinned down in editorial rules and style guides. It’s there in tropes and cliches, precedent and the dread line “just how we’ve always done it”.

if Laura Kuenssberg had needed to be “told what to say — or what not to say” she would never have been appointed Political Editor

NOTMWTS is a shield intended to bat away further questions, to avoid closer scrutiny of how stories are chosen, framed, and reported. “All you’re doing is trying to find the truth,” is a line that comes from the same place as claims of journalistic impartiality and objectivity

purporting to offer true objectivity is like saying you can draw a perfect circle freehand

the notion that there are no clues to Kuenssberg’s politics or worldview in the thousands of hours of broadcasting she undertook in that role is downright insulting to viewers and listeners

Kuenssberg is far from alone in having provided a megaphone for anonymous sources, “not told what to say” but happily parroting lines to a huge audience; it’s an epidemic in British political journalism, where WhatsApp messages whip onto Twitter with undue weight and ceremony.

Their beloved Orwell — writer of two of the handful of books that every columnist leans on at some point (1984 and Animal Farm) — wrote in an unused preface5 to the latter that: Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

The unfashionable opinions have changed and shifted over time but the silence around them prevails

Critics of the war in Libya warned that the US was siding with (and arming and empowering) violent extremists, including al-Qaida elements, that would eventually cause the US to claim it had to return to Libya to fight against them – just as its funding and arming of Saddam in Iraq and the mujahideen in Afghanistan subsequently justified new wars against those one-time allies

The falsehood told by the White House – this was just a spontaneous attack prompted by this video that we could not have anticipated and had nothing to do with – fixed all of those problems. Critical attention was thus directed to Muslims (what kind of people kill an ambassador over a film?) and away from the White House and its policies.

the number one rule of good journalism, even of good citizenship, is to remember that "all governments lie." Yet, no matter how many times we see this axiom proven true, over and over, there is still a tendency, a desire, to believe that the US government's claims are truthful and reliable.