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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

it was not the opposition of "fundamentalists" that kept rai music (not just Khaled's) off of Algerian state radio. It was rather the Algerian (secular) regime's cultural policies. The state promoted classical Arabic culture and language and denied Algeria's multi-cultural nature. Expressive culture in Arabic dialect or Berber was therefore mostly excluded from the state-controlled media. Rai is sung in the distinctive colloquial Arabic of Wahran, which is not only very different from "classical" or literary Arabic but is also full of borrowings from Spanish, French and Berber. This official national-cultural politics, which was particularly severe during the regime of Houari Boumediene (1965-1978), began to loosen during Chadly Benjadid's regime (1979-1992). In his 1998 autobiography, "Derrière la sourire," Khaled recounts how he managed to break the official embargo in the early 1980s. He was invited to appear on a television show in Algiers, which he knew couldn't be censored because it was to be broadcast live. Khaled was warned ahead of time: no vulgarities, no sex. So he sang three songs: the first, about the Prophet Muhammad; the second, a "poetic" song, one that was artistically acceptable; and the third, about alcohol and women.

Khaled, and other rai stars, came to play at this festival due to the efforts of the "liberal" wing of the Algerian regime -- and particularly to Lieutenant-Colonel Hosni Snoussi, director of the state-supported arts and culture organization, Office Riadh el Feth in Algiers, who had taken Cheb Khaled under his wing. The regime's liberal wing became interested in promoting rai in the wake of a spate of unrest that erupted during the early 1980s. Most notably, the 1980 riots in Tizi Ouzou, Kabylia (the "Berber Spring"); the 1985 riots in Algiers, which broke out following rumors that housing being built for the poor would be allocated to state bureaucrats; and the 1986 student riots in Constantine that resulted in the deaths of four protesters and spread to other cities. Young Algerians played a leading role in all these protests. The liberal wing of the regime determined that, to deter further unrest, the state should focus on promoting the interests of youth and on developing the market economy. Rai was very popular with Algerian youth, and so the "liberals" determined that promoting it was to be an important element of these reform efforts. It was changes in state policy toward rai, pushed by Snoussi, that got Khaled and other rai stars onto the stage in Algiers in 1985.

The French government had a stake in trying to control and channel the energies of the rai scene.

the Arab Network for Knowledge about Human Rights (ANKH), which has conducted the first survey of LGBT+ Arab Facebook users. More than 90% of the 450 Arabic speakers who responded had been targeted by hate speech on the platform, it found. A quarter of online hate speech in the Middle East and North Africa urged violence against LGBT+ people and 15% made direct threats. More than half the respondents reported feeling hopeless or depressed as a result and almost one in four had thought of self-harming.

Activists say Facebook can be an essential tool for LGBT+ people in the Arab world, where many face an oppressive legal and social atmosphere, and vague laws against indecency are often used to criminalize sexual activity. Strong social stigma around homosexuality, amplified by conservative religious entities, has led to low acceptance of gay people across the region. LGBT+ activists in the area risk social exclusion, prison sentences, and violence by security forces, according to Human Rights Watch.

Jillian York, director of international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, said enforcing policies would require vast investment in language skills to navigate slang and dozens of dialects. "(Social media companies) are really bad at defining and dealing with incitement and dehumanizing language," she said, adding that Facebook "have a dearth of content moderators in a number of languages where they should have a lot more".

The scenes emerging from Iran today elicit a mix of reactions across a region still reeling from the dark legacy of the “Arab Spring,” which itself came on the heels of the “Green Movement” protests in the wake of Iran’s 2009 presidential election. Many Arabs cannot help but recall the sense of hope that reverberated from Tunisia to Yemen, only to be shattered by unyielding repression, war, and the resurgence of authoritarianism. Subsequent protest waves, including those that began in 2019 in Lebanon, Iraq, and Sudan, were similarly met with brutality, co-optation, and dissolution.

Over a decade on from the Arab uprisings, the path toward democracy and freedom for youth across the Middle East has become more treacherous than ever, as liberation movements find themselves fighting against stronger, smarter, and more entrenched regimes that have adapted to modern challenges to their domination.

Technologies that many hoped would help to evade state censorship and facilitate mobilization have been co-opted as repressive surveillance tools.

Badani is part of a network of at least 19 fake personas that has spent the past year placing more than 90 opinion pieces in 46 different publications. The articles heaped praise on the United Arab Emirates and advocated for a tougher approach to Qatar, Turkey, Iran and its proxy groups in Iraq and Lebanon. 

“This vast influence operation highlights the ease with which malicious actors can exploit the identity of real people, dupe international news outlets, and have propaganda of unknown provenance legitimized through reputable media,” Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar who first noticed suspicious posts by members of the network, told The Daily Beast. “It’s not just fake news we need to be wary of, but fake journalists.”

placed articles critical of Qatar and supportive of tougher sanctions on Iran in conservative North American outlets like Human Events and conservative writer Andy Ngo’s The Post Millennial, as well as Israeli and Middle Eastern newspapers like The Jerusalem Post and Al Arabiya, and Asian newspapers like the South China Morning Post.

Going back 10 years to the Arab Spring and eight years before that to the invasion of Iraq, much of the region has experienced terrible loss not only on a human scale, but also of its archaeological heritage. The culmination of both came in 2015 with the brutal murder of the 82-year-old archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad — who had been in charge of the Syrian UNESCO World Heritage site of Palmyra for 40 years — and the destruction of part of the 2,000-year-old site by the Islamic State group

Three countries — Iraq, Syria and Libya — have an extraordinary heritage of ancient archaeological sites, many of them now endangered, and had in common long-standing dictators, (although in the case of Syria, of course, the Assad regime continues), all of whom used their cultural heritage in various ways to define how they saw their nation

That dictators draw inspiration from ancient history to shape their nations is nothing new — Mussolini looked back to the Roman empire, while Hitler and the Nazi party developed their mythical, ancient “Aryan” race. The last shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, threw one of the most lavish parties in history at Persepolis in 1971 during national celebrations to illustrate the grandeur of the 2,500-year-old Persian empire founded by Cyrus the Great in the sixth century B.C.

On Wednesday, Mr. Khalil canceled a higher-education conference that was to launch the new online publication because of concerns about academic freedom in the United Arab Emirates, where the event was to be held this weekend. That step came less than a week after a similar move by the London School of Economics and Political Science, which canceled a conference it had planned in Dubai after Emirati authorities requested that a presentation on Bahrain, which is facing political upheaval, be dropped from the program. A scholar on Arab politics from the London institution who was to speak at the event was briefly detained at the Dubai airport and barred from entering the country

"We can't talk about upholding academic freedom and launch in Dubai. I don't think it sends the right message."

Al Fanar will start as planned on March 3. It is the first major project of the Alexandria Trust, the charity Mr. Khalil founded in 2012 to improve education in the Middle East and North Africa

“Dehumanizing and demonizing characterizations of the other were very rare in both Israeli and Palestinian books.” The research team found 20 extreme negative depictions in the Israeli state books, seven in the ultra-Orthodox books, and six in the Palestinian books. An example of this rare occurrence from an Israeli book: A passage saying that a ruined Arab village “had always been a nest of murderers.” And an example from a Palestinian book: “I was in ‘the slaughterhouse’ for 13 days,” referring to an Israeli interrogation center. This could be a lot worse, right?

84 percent of the literature pieces in the Palestinian books portray Israelis and Jews negatively, 73 percent of the pieces in the ultra-Orthodox books portray Palestinians and Arabs negatively, and only 49 percent of the pieces in Israeli state schools do the same. In an Israeli state school text, a passage reads: “The Arab countries have accumulated weapons and ammunition and strengthened their armies to wage a total war against Israel.” In the ultra-Orthodox, it ratchets up: “Like a little lamb in a sea of 70 wolves is Israel among the Arab states.” In the Palestinian case: “The enemy turned to the deserted houses, looting and carrying off all they could from the village that had become grave upon grave.” These statements aren’t necessarily false, but they are just one-sided and fearful—and they are rarely balanced by anything sunnier

The research team found that 58 percent of Palestinian textbooks published after 1967 (the year in which Israel took control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, Gaza and Sinai from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria) made no reference to Israel. Instead, they referred to the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea as Palestine. In the Israeli state system, 65 percent of maps had no borders and made no mention of Palestine or the Palestinian Authority, while in the ultra-Orthodox system that number was a staggering 95 percent.

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

Next year, the gritty tale about mafia-style murders will become the first Arabic language film to represent Israel at the Oscars.

Impoverished Israeli Arabs shooting one another in the shadow of the gleaming towers of Tel Aviv is far from Israel's preferred international image.

dark underside to the ideal of coexistence sometimes touted in mixed Jewish-Arab areas like Jaffa.

Heikal was one of the most trenchant defenders of Nasserite Egypt and its pan-Arabism trends

As Nasser's friend since they first met during the war with Israel, Heikal became a staunch supporter of the coup and helped in drafting Nasser's manifesto, The Philosophy of the Revolution, which outlined his outlook for post-monarchy Egypt.

In 1956 and 1957, Heikal served as editor of Al-Akhbar daily, a sister publication owned by media tycoons Mustafa Amin and his twin brother Ali, who are widely considered to be the fathers of Western-style modern Egyptian journalism

the film also shows a Cairo unknown to many in the West, and it is filled with scenes depicting prostitution, class divisions, and agnosticism over the political milieu

“Believe me, nobody wants to be a refugee. I am here, but I am not here,” he said, referring to his thoughts being scattered between London and Baghdad.

“We want people to come away with a feel for the diversity in Arab cinema, as well as Arabic literature.”

Citizens of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states woke up on Monday morning to what is the most severe crisis in the regional block’s 38 year history to date. In a closely coordinated series of statements, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE, along with Egypt, announced the severing of ties with the peninsular state of Qatar.

In what may be the most debilitating move, Qatar’s border with Saudi Arabia—which is its only land border —has been shut and all flights over Saudi and UAE airspace has been closed off to Qatar bound flights and Qatar Airways. Qatari citizens have been given two weeks to leave Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE and all travel by these countries citizens to Qatar is now prohibited.

It is likely that this time the Gulf States will demand the complete shuttering of the Al Jazeera TV Network before any mediation can take place. Additionally, the plug will have to be pulled on networks funded by Qatar such as Al Araby Al Jadeed (The New Arab), originally set up to compete with Al Jazeera and headed by former Arab Israeli politician Azmi Bishara.

Three Arab countries have banned the Hollywood film "Noah" on religious grounds even before its worldwide premiere and several others are expected to follow suit

Islam frowns upon representing holy figures in art and depictions of the Prophet Mohammad in European and North American media have repeatedly sparked deadly protests in Islamic countries over the last decade, fanning cultural tensions with the West. "Censors for Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE (United Arab Emirates) officially confirmed this week that the film will not release in their countries," a representative of Paramount Pictures, which produced the $125 million film starring Oscar-winners Russell Crowe and Anthony Hopkins, told Reuters

the studio expected a similar ban in Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait

"If you want to understand the emotive universe from which the Arab spring arose, cinema is a good place to start. Look at a film like Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention: there the director spits out an apricot pit at an Israeli tank and blows it up. The scene is both fantasy and prophecy."

I don't think the idea of Islamic cinema even exists in the west. Islam is presumed not to have a modern culture. I'd argue it's important that these films don't insist on any kind of stylistic unity – and that in nearly all of them Islam is portrayed as quite marginal. They argue against religiosity as a determining force. They're all about change, too, about modernity, which neocons like Francis Fukuyama say the Islamic world is incapable of

"If you want to be thought of as an auteur, you don't want to be categorised according to ethnicity or religion," Ahmad says. "By calling someone 'Islamic', you're meant to be taking away from their universal appeal."

Miri Regev, the divisive and conservative minister of culture and sport, who wants to deny state money to institutions that do not express “loyalty” to the state, including those that show disrespect for the flag, incite racism or violence, or subvert Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.

For one well-known poet, Meir Wieseltier, the law “brings us closer to the rise of fascism and exposes its true face.” But Isi Leibler argued in The Jerusalem Post that the government is “not obliged to subsidize the demonization of the nation” and should instead support “the inculcation of love of Israel.”

such conflicts, over what cultural works the state should promote for schoolchildren to read or for citizens to see and hear, is part of a political drama in which the politicians of a new generation are jockeying for position as leader of the so-called nationalist camp