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Mysterious 'Saddam Channel' hits Iraq TV - Yahoo! News - 0 views

  • The late Iraqi dictator is lauded on a mysterious satellite channel that began broadcasting on the Islamic calendar's anniversary of his 2006 execution.
  • The Associated Press tracked down a man in Damascus, Syria named Mohammed Jarboua, who claimed to be its chairman. The Saddam channel, he said, "didn't receive a penny from the Baathists" and is for Iraqis and other Arabs who "long for his rule." Jarboua has clearly made considerable efforts to hide where it's aired from and refuses to say who is funding it besides "people who love us."
  • Saddam's hanging three years ago was on the first day of Eid al-Adha, the most important holiday of the Islamic calendar. His execution — and the day it was done — remains a sore point for Saddam sympathizers still smarting over images of the defiant leader in his final moments as Shiites in the death chamber shouted curses.
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  • broadcast across the Arab world
  • One prominently displayed image is that of a man burning an American flag. Another shows graves covered with Iraqi flags
  • audio recordings of Saddam making speeches and reciting poetry. Patriotic songs urge listeners to "liberate our country." None of the pictures appear to be recent, and no announcers or commentators appear or speak.
  • In a telephone interview Sunday from Damascus, Jarboua said he is Algerian and that the Saddam Channel is based in Europe but refused to say where, citing safety concerns for its employees.
  • Ziad Khassawneh, a Jordanian Baathist who once headed Saddam's defense team, said wealthy Iraqis living in Lebanon, Syria and other Arab countries are funding the channel. He declined to give names.
  • A Mideast satellite expert said al-Lafeta's operators tried to hide any clues to their identities and broadcast sites by using a variety of satellite services and frequencies. The channel airs via Noorsat, a Bahrain-based satellite service. It also has purchased a frequency on Egypt-owned NileSat, which is run by Eutelsat, a European consortium.
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Egyptian Chronicles: #WeWillSpeak : Egyptian Tweeps speak up about Twitter Middle East ... - 0 views

  • Hundreds of Egyptian tweeps began on Monday a new campaign on Twitter against Twitter MENA policies after a wide suspension of opposition and activists’ accounts in the popular social media network. The Egyptian tweeps launched  #WeWillSpeak” and #هنتكلم hashtags to reach out for Twitter in the United States.
  • several opposition and political activists' accounts were either permanently or temporarily suspended allegedly for violating Twitter policies
  • Twitter MENA is paying attention only to the bad language of the tweeps including activists opposing the government only in that crackdown.
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  • right-wing Arab fascists and ISIS accounts as well as spammers are left untouched
  • There are Pro-regime supporters who got several accounts and are involved in actions like harassment, trolling and spamming as well as spreading hate and racism on the same level of right-wing figures in the West. They are left untouched I reported dozens of accounts spreading lies, hatred and racism against Syrians and Sudanese people but there were not closed down.
  • Needless to say, the fact that Twitter MENA is currently in Dubai made many Tweeps not only in Egypt but in other countries wonder if the Emirati government has got some kind of deal with Twitter to target dissident voice in the Arab world.
  • Already there are calls to force Twitter to transfer its Twitter MENA Headquarter form the United Arab Emirates to Tunisia as the cradle of the Arab Spring enjoys more freedom of speech.
  • Twitter has been the alternative forum for people to let their voices heard especially when mainstream media fails to do its job. Unfortunately, it has been hacked internationally and not only in the Middle East by political and social powers that are actually against freedom of speech in the first place. Yet some people believe it is worth to fight for including those Egyptian tweeps.
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How Western Urban Planning Fueled War in the Middle East | The American Conservative - 0 views

  • 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.
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Secret British 'black propaganda' campaign targeted cold war enemies | Cold war | The G... - 0 views

  • The British government ran a secret “black propaganda” campaign for decades, targeting Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia with leaflets and reports from fake sources aimed at destabilising cold war enemies by encouraging racial tensions, sowing chaos, inciting violence and reinforcing anti-communist ideas, newly declassified documents have revealed.
  • The campaign also sought to mobilise Muslims against Moscow, promoting greater religious conservatism and radical ideas. To appear authentic, documents encouraged hatred of Israel.
  • The Information Research Department (IRD) was set up by the post-second world war Labour government to counter Soviet propaganda attacks on Britain. Its activities mirrored the CIA’s cold war propaganda operations and the extensive efforts of the USSR and its satellites.
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  • The Observer last year revealed the IRD’s major campaign in Indonesia in 1965 that helped encourage anti-communist massacres which left hundreds of thousands dead. There, the IRD prepared pamphlets purporting to be written by Indonesian patriots, but in fact were created by British propagandists, calling on Indonesians to eliminate the PKI, then the biggest communist party in the non-communist world.
  • “The UK did not simply invent material, as the Soviets systematically did, but they definitely intended to deceive audiences in order to get the message across.”
  • “reports” sent to warn other governments, selected journalists and thinktanks about “Soviet subversion” or similar threats.The reports comprised carefully selected facts and analysis often gleaned from intelligence provided by Britain’s security services, but appeared to come from ostensibly independent analysts and institutions that were in reality set up and run by the IRD. One of the first of these, set up in 1964, was the International Committee for the Investigation of Communist Front Organisations.
  • Between 1965 and 1972, the IRD forged at least 11 statements from Novosti, the Soviet state-run news agency. One followed Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 six-day war against Israel and underlined Soviet anger at Egypt’s “waste” of so much of the arms and materiel Moscow had supplied to the country.
  • The IRD also forged literature purporting to come from the Muslim Brotherhood, a mass Islamist organisation that had a significant following across the Middle East. One pamphlet accused Moscow of encouraging the 1967 war, criticised the quality of Soviet military equipment, and called the Soviets “filthy-tongued atheists” who saw the Egyptians as little more than “peasants who lived all their lives nursing reactionary Islamic superstitions”.AdvertisementThe IRD also created an entirely fictive radical Islamist organisation called the League of Believers, which attacked the Russians as non-believers and blamed Arab defeats on a lack of religious faith, a standard trope among religious conservatives at the time.
  • The IRD’s leaflets echoed other claims made by radical Islamists, arguing that military misdeeds should not be blamed on “the atheists or the imperialists or the Zionist Jews” but on “Egyptians who are supposed to be believers”.
  • Other material highlighted the poor view that Moscow took of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the limited aid offered by the Soviets to Palestinian armed nationalist groups. This was contrasted with the more supportive stance of the Chinese, in a bid to widen the split between the two communist powers.
  • One major initiative focused on undermining Ian Smith’s regime in Rhodesia, the former colony that unilaterally declared its independence from the UK in 1965 in an attempt to maintain white minority rule.The IRD set up a fake group of white Rhodesians who opposed Smith. Its leaflets attacked him for lying, creating “chaos” and crippling the economy. “The whole world is against us … We must call a halt while we can still save our country,”
  • In early 1963, the IRD forged a statement from the World Federation of Democratic Youth, a Soviet front organisation, which denounced Africans as uncivilised, “primitive” and morally weak. The forgery received press coverage across the continent, with many newspapers reacting intemperately.
  • A similar forgery in 1966 underlined the “backwardness” and “political immaturity” of Africa. Another, a statement purportedly from Novosti, blamed poor academic results at an international university in Moscow on the quality of the black African students enrolled there. The IRD sent more than 1,000 copies to addresses across the developing world.
  • As with most such efforts, the impact of the IRD’s campaigns was often difficult to judge. On one occasion, IRD officials were able to report that a newspaper in Zanzibar printed one of their forgeries about Soviet racism, and that the publication prompted an angry response. This was seen as a major achievement. Officials were also pleased when Kenyan press used fake material about the 1967 six-day war, and when newspapers across much of the Islamic world printed a fake Novosti bulletin on the conflict. Occasionally, western newspapers unwittingly used IRD materials, too.
  • Though the IRD was shut down in 1977, researchers are now finding evidence that similar efforts continued for almost another decade.“The [new documents] are particularly significant as a precursor to more modern efforts of putting intelligence into the public domain.“Liz Truss has a ’government information cell’, and defence intelligence sends out daily tweets to ‘pre-but’ Russian plots and gain the upper hand in the information war, but for much of the cold war the UK used far more devious means,” Cormac said.
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Liberal Islamophobia: Anti-Muslim hostility is not just a conservative phenomenon | Mid... - 1 views

  • it would be wrong to view Islamophobia as a strictly conservative phenomenon. Polling data indicate that 49 percent of Democrats hold unfavourable views of Islam. Also, Brookings Institution scholar Shadi Hamid has argued that US President Barack Obama, a Democrat, holds views that amount to “Islamic exceptionalism”. Hamid argues that Obama’s statements about Muslims suggest that he is “frustrated by Islam” and that he has bought into Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis
  • American news media, including liberal outlets, have done a poor job contextualising stories about Muslims and Islam. A growing body of empirical research into American news media coverage of Islam reveals deeply problematic patterns - negative, stereotypical portrayals, almost no Muslim sources, and few mention of Muslims or Islam in the context of positive news. That American news outlets apply the “terrorism” description almost exclusively to Muslim-perpetrated violence cannot be lost on anyone paying attention
  • while denunciations of terrorism by Muslim groups generally go unreported, Islamophobic statements drive news narratives
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  • Glaringly absent from American news media are opinion polls showing that Muslims are no more likely to accept violence than other groups. For instance, a 2011 Gallup World Violence poll showed that Muslims were just as likely as non-Muslims to reject vigilante acts of violence against civilians
  • A 2011 Gallup poll found that American Muslims were the least likely of all polled American religious groups to accept vigilante violence against civilians. In all, 26 percent of American Protestants, 27 percent of Catholics, 22 percent of Jews, 19 percent of Mormons, 23 percent of atheists, but just 11 percent percent of Muslims said that it is “sometimes justified” for an “individual person or a small group of persons to target and kill civilians”.
  • the CIA estimates that there are around 30,000 Muslim jihadists in the entire world. A Kurdish leader has suggested that the CIA underestimates the jihadist threat, and claims that the total number is closer to 200,000. Even assuming the larger figure, jihadists represent a grand total of 0.01 percent of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims
  • Media scholar Jack Shaheen carried out a content analysis of more than 900 Hollywood movies featuring Arab or Muslim characters. Shaheen found Muslim characters are almost never cast in positive or neutral roles. The overwhelming majority of films that feature Arab or Muslim characters cast them as enemies, terrorists, violent, savage or backwards
  • compared to other threats of violence, Muslim terrorism garners exaggerated attention in American news and politics.
  • In the 14 years since 1 January, 2002, Muslim terrorists have killed 45 Americans in the United States, a smaller number than right-wing conservative terrorists have killed during the same time period. Also, since the start of 2002, there have been more than 200,000 firearm-related homicides in the United States
  • More realistic, proportionate presentations would greatly improve American political life. However, given the extent to which the Islamophobia industry is funded, people shouldn’t hold their breath waiting for fairer, less sensational presentations.
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The Psychology of the Intractable Israel-Palestine Conflict - New Lines Magazine - 0 views

  • reinforcing the entrenched identities, hardened by trauma, which have contributed to the intractability of this conflict. Many researchers have been pointing out for years that societies are becoming more polarized, meaning that more people are reaching a point of complete identification with a single group, leading to demonization and, in extreme cases, dehumanization of those outside their group, and a corresponding inability to communicate with those outside of their community. Polarization essentially describes a situation where a middle ground, vital for dialogue, has been lost.
  • Emotions drive behavior, and extreme psychological states drive extreme behavior, including violence. The question becomes what to do with these insights, when violent responses to violence produce ever stronger emotional states stemming from fear and rage. The long history of this particular conflict ensures that there are now generations of traumatic memories to reinforce large-group identities based on shared feelings of vulnerability and victimization, creating an intractable cycle.
  • most of us gain our sense of belonging through a variety of groups we interact with on a daily or weekly basis — our families, friends, colleagues, sports teams or groups based around other hobbies and interests. But in addition to these groups that we experience in person through shared activities, we all have larger-group affiliations, which can vary in strength from one person to another. These can include our country of birth or residence, a political party, a wider religious group that includes people from other countries and cultures, an ethnicity, a language group or an identity based on shared passions, such as being a music or sports fan. There are many parts to a typical identity, but sometimes, if rarely, one comes to dominate above all others, leading to specific psychological states and associated behaviors, including violence.
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  • Whitehouse and Swann describe the fully fused state, when commitment to one group dominates over all others, as a “form of alignment with groups that entails a visceral feeling of oneness with the group. This feeling is associated with unusually porous, highly permeable borders between the personal and social self.” In other words, an insult, a compliment or an injury to the group or another member of the group is perceived as an insult, a compliment or an injury to the self, as most people can recognize when someone from outside the family insults a family member.
  • In Jordan, no one I interviewed ever put their nationality in the top three, but rather chose family, tribe or region, religion or “Arabness.” (There was one exception, and it turned out he was working for the security services.)
  • Extreme states of belonging to a single group have enabled the most extreme violence seen throughout history and around the world, from suicide bombings to kamikaze attacks during times of war.
  • once an individual is fully fused to an identity, all positive and negative experiences serve to reinforce that single identity, with ever more rigid policing of the boundaries of “us” and “them,” and ever-shrinking spaces for communicating with the “other.”
  • they have come to feel that no one is coming to their rescue, a feeling reinforced by the example of Syria: Not only did the world not act to prevent Syrian deaths, but the world — including Arabs — also ignored President Bashar al-Assad’s brutality against his own Palestinian population.
  • Israel’s occupation causes daily, ongoing fear and humiliation among the Palestinian population, as well as challenges to everyday existence that dampen the energy to act. But, as Fromm writes, “Young people may succumb to apathy temporarily but a return to rage is always a possibility, in part as a vitalizing alternative to helplessness or despair.” That is, the violence we have witnessed from Palestinians is a natural response to Israel’s occupations when framed in terms of psychology; as an Israeli colleague of mine put it back in 2019, “There is no chance for peace without first ending the occupation.”
  • “The Holocaust for Israelis and the Nakba for Palestinians condense into two words a multitude of horrific experiences suffered by millions of people,” he wrote, describing a trauma not only for those who experienced them directly but also for their descendants; both are just within living memory. “When members of the victimized group are unable to bear the humiliation, reverse their helplessness, or mourn their losses, they pass on to their children powerful, emotionally charged images of their injured selves.”
  • For these people, Hamas’ actions symbolized a reassertion of dignity and pride in an Arab identity against an unjust oppressor. This single massacre, which included whole families shot in their beds, has prompted more demonstrations of support for the Palestinian cause than any other occasion in the past few decades. In Jordan, pro-Palestinian protesters only dispersed from the Israeli border after the Jordanian army used tear gas.
  • “apocalyptic mindset,”
  • classic asymmetric warfare, laid out in an al Qaeda manual taken up by the Islamic State, “The Management of Savagery,” which advocates baiting the enemy’s military into wars they cannot afford and depleting them — as was achieved by 9/11 at a financial cost of mere hundreds of thousands of dollars, compared to the trillions spent on the subsequent 20-year “war on terror.”
  • In times of low stress, even a hardened identity does not fear the other and can exhibit curiosity, or at least a lack of animosity, toward an out-group. But this retreat isn’t available to groups whose security is at risk. Fully fused large-group identities, with psychological boundaries hardened by both inherited trauma and daily fear, have another damaging implication for the prospects of peace. This is the perceived threat of reaching across the divide, including gestures of reconciliation. It is felt as betrayal to build bridges with the other and is experienced as a psychological wound.
  • We are now seeing mass hardening of psychological barriers in the region and globally, with many unable to see faults on their side or, conversely, laudable elements on the other. And it is not just rhetoric
  • there is a shrinking space for empathy and dialogue
  • Conflict resolution in such a situation seems meaningless: Neither side wants nor can even conceive of a relationship with the other, so what is the possible basis for negotiation, let alone peaceful coexistence?
  • all around the world people have told me a version of “No one has suffered as we have suffered.” Victimhood limits our ability to see others also as victims, to everyone’s detriment, for violence is then justifiable, and this is what fuels ongoing wars. It is unclear who can address the intergenerational wounds of the past, but without that work, nothing can improve.
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Secret Alliance: Israel Carries Out Airstrikes in Egypt, With Cairo's O.K. - The New Yo... - 0 views

  • For more than two years, unmarked Israeli drones, helicopters and jets have carried out a covert air campaign, conducting more than 100 airstrikes inside Egypt, frequently more than once a week — and all with the approval of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.The remarkable cooperation marks a new stage in the evolution of their singularly fraught relationship. Once enemies in three wars, then antagonists in an uneasy peace, Egypt and Israel are now secret allies in a covert war against a common foe.
  • Their collaboration in the North Sinai is the most dramatic evidence yet of a quiet reconfiguration of the politics of the region. Shared enemies like ISIS, Iran and political Islam have quietly brought the leaders of several Arab states into growing alignment with Israel — even as their officials and news media continue to vilify the Jewish state in public.
  • Both neighbors have sought to conceal Israel’s role in the airstrikes for fear of a backlash inside Egypt, where government officials and the state-controlled media continue to discuss Israel as a nemesis and pledge fidelity to the Palestinian cause.
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  • Israeli drones are unmarked, and the Israeli jets and helicopters cover up their markings. Some fly circuitous routes to create the impression that they are based in the Egyptian mainland
  • In Israel, military censors restrict public reports of the airstrikes
  • They moved into hitting softer targets like Christians in Sinai, churches in the Nile Valley or other Muslims they view as heretics. In November 2017, the militants killed 311 worshipers at a Sufi mosque in the North Sinai.
  • Mr. Sisi, then the defense minister, ousted Mr. Morsi in a military takeover. Israel welcomed the change in government, and urged Washington to accept it. That solidified the partnership between the generals on both sides of the border
  • In November, 2014, Ansar Beit al Maqdis formally declared itself the Sinai Province branch of the Islamic State. On July 1, 2015, the militants briefly captured control of a North Sinai town, Sheikh Zuwaid, and retreated only after Egyptian jets and helicopters struck the town, state news agencies said. Then, at the end of October, the militants brought down the Russian charter jet, killing all 224 people on board. Advertisement Continue reading the main story It was around the time of those ominous milestones, in late 2015, that Israel began its wave of airstrikes, the American officials said, which they credit with killing a long roster of militant leaders.
  • The Egyptian government has declared the North Sinai a closed military zone, barring journalists from gathering information there
  • Zack Gold, a researcher specializing in the North Sinai who has worked in Israel, compared the airstrikes to Israel’s nuclear weapons program — also an open secret.“The Israeli strikes inside of Egypt are almost at the same level, he said. “Every time anyone says anything about the nuclear program, they have to jokingly add ‘according to the foreign press.’ Israel’s main strategic interest in Egypt is stability, and they believe that open disclosure would threaten that stability.”
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The complicated legacy of Qatar's World Cup - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • perhaps the biggest test case for what happens when a Middle Eastern nation intent on using oil money to enhance its influence through sports emerges on the global stage.
  • Can sports help bring societal progress to a region that has long resisted change? Or are those countries rewarded with reputational prestige despite human rights abuses that they have little intention to address?
  • Owing to its small population of roughly 300,000 citizens, Qatar relies heavily on migrant workers. When it won the World Cup bid, it employed a labor system called kafala. Under kafala, migrant workers, mostly seeking to leave impoverished conditions elsewhere, have to pay exorbitant recruitment fees and cannot change jobs without the consent of their employer. The system led to rampant abuses that included wage theft and unsafe working conditions, ultimately resulting in the deaths of thousands of workers. Qatar also bans homosexuality, which it defends on religious grounds.
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  • “FIFA has a human rights policy that guarantees press freedom, women’s rights and nondiscrimination,” said Minky Worden, the director of global initiatives for Human Rights Watch. “What the Qatar World Cup showed is that, if you have enough money, you can absolutely ignore those requirements.”
  • In 2016, Qatar said it would abide by the United Nations’ human rights code. In 2019, Qatar announced it would abolish kafala. In 2021, Qatar instituted a minimum wage. The Supreme Committee, Qatar’s World Cup host organization, created a workers’ welfare program for those who built World Cup infrastructure. By the sound of the first whistle last November, the country’s labor market was “radically transformed,” a FIFA spokesman said.“Would any of that have happened if they hadn’t hosted the World Cup?” said Mary Harvey, chief executive at the Centre for Sport and Human Rights. “Would kafala still be in place in Qatar if they hadn’t hosted the World Cup? That may not be the question people want to ask, but it’s important. … You don’t just flip the switch with a law change and expect an implementation is going to take hold. It’s going to take a generation probably to get this put in. But it’s still big change, and it’s change that is needed.”
  • Max Tuñón, head of the International Labor Organization’s Qatar office, said he has seen major improvements in working conditions for foreign laborers over the past five years.
  • We work all over the world, and we rarely see change happening at this pace
  • Rothna Begum, a Human Rights Watch researcher, has worked extensively in Qatar and visited with workers. (Unlike Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Qatar’s government allows human rights groups to work in the country.) Begum said it is “not the case” that Qatar dismantled kafala in practice.“They didn’t do it properly, anyway,” Begum said. “They didn’t take away all the elements. They reformed aspects of the kafala system, but they didn’t dismantle the kafala system. The bits that they did reform, they are implementing in such a way that kafala still exists in practice.”
  • While workers can apply to change jobs, Begum said, she has found they must first give notice to their employer. If the employer does not sign a resignation notice, the worker cannot get permission from the government — “employer permission through the back door,”
  • “Qatari authorities — not just Qatari authorities but FIFA — sought to weaponize a narrative of Qatar being an underdog, that they were under attack in this double-standard way that no one else has been under attack before, and it’s because they are a Middle Eastern country,” Begum said. “Rather than dealing with the fact that they just did not come through with reforms and did not protect migrant workers who really contribute to the success of the World Cup and made sure they got their wages and compensated them for it, they instead used this narrative and weaponized it. We’re seeing the Saudis and UAE are moving in that direction.”
  • Qatar’s reforms also did not address the biggest cost of the World Cup: the migrant workers who died — in the thousands according to human rights groups, a number disputed by the Qatari government — while building stadiums and other infrastructure FIFA required after working in extreme heat on strict schedules. Human Rights Watch challenged whether Qatar could move forward with meaningful reform without compensating the families of the workers who died.
  • FIFA instituted its human rights policy in 2017 in response to criticism about Qatar. That policy may receive a more stringent test in coming years. Saudi Arabia, whose government has jailed and executed dissidents, submitted a bid to host the 2034 World Cup and is the favorite to host the tournament. Unlike Qatar, Saudi Arabia has not met with human rights groups.
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Ahmed Shihab-Eldin: The Arab World and the Media's Symbiotic Revolutions - 1 views

  • Social media connected these young Arabs to like-minded individuals, across the region, and beyond, but perhaps most importantly with the media -- highlighting the limitations of parachute journalism, which is as ineffective as it is costly. Instead, it offered them a new source for news-gathering, social-media
  • Despite social media's challenging of the state's intimidation and targeting of journalists, Bahrain, Syria, and Egypt and many others continue to crackdown on dissent. But through citizen reports and mobilization on social media, their stories could not be suppressed.
  • Twitter alone has changed the way we, as global citizens, communicate and the way wars are covered, especially when governments ban journalists from entry to the country. Twitter ultimately becomes the wires
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  • In this democratized media environment, where the authoritative is drowned out by the masses, and immediacy and transparency trump objectivity, videos documenting demolitions and disfigurements expose enough in real time for us to grasp the reality based on sheer volume, even when what we are seeing is not instantly verifiable
  • Al Jazeera, like social media, played a crucial role in amplifying and accelerating the voices of those protesting in the streets
  • the fallacy of objectivity and how transparency, participation and empowerment can trump that calling
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An Arab world first: LGBT radio goes online in Tunisia despite threats | The Japan Times - 0 views

  • An online radio station catering for the LGBT community, believed to be the first of its kind in the Arab world, started broadcasting in Tunisia on Monday
  • homosexuality is officially illegal
  • It intends “to sensitize the people of Tunisia, ordinary citizens and political decision makers about homophobia in society and to defend individual liberties,”
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  • Gay rights activists have emerged from the shadows in Tunisia since the revolution in 2011, but their position remains precarious in Tunisia’s conservative Muslim society.Article 230 of the penal code includes a punishment of up to three years in prison for homosexuality and young men are regularly detained and prosecuted.
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MediaAcT » Home - 1 views

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    Media accountability in Europe and the Arab world
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Anderson Cooper 360: Blog Archive - Women, bloggers & gays lead change in ... - 0 views

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    Rather too many broad generalizations for my taste, but given the platform, this should get some attention.
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Women's Testimonies of the Tunisian Uprising (2011-2015) - 0 views

  • Testimonial narratives are an essential feature of intellectual life in post-totalitarian societies. Post-Soviet Eastern Europe, post-dictatorial Latin America, and post-Apartheid South Africa all witnessed a proliferation of autobiographical accounts by victims of the ancien régime, seeking to reclaim their public voice. Currently, post-Ben Ali Tunisia is witnessing the same phenomenon. More and more activists and intellectuals have begun reflecting on the past, in order to forge the country’s future. What is remarkable about this wave is the increasing number of women, including both activists and intellectuals, who have written autobiographical accounts of the uprising and its aftermath
  • For Tunisian activists and intellectuals, the urgency of remembering the past, in order to make sense of it, has been driven by the realization that authoritarianism can easily return in a different form
  • As violence was increasing on the religious right, politicians on the secular left were encumbered by internal disagreements and unable to muster an appropriate response. As a result, the “old left’s” weakness and concomitant rise of the Islamist right have figured prominently in the testimonies of Tunisian women activists and intellectuals. Indeed, the testimonies published so far have mostly been triggered by a fear of an Islamist takeover of Tunisia’s newly-liberated public sphere
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  • Published in the first few months after the 2011 uprising, Ben Mhenni’s book is the most euphoric of the four testimonies. Much of the narrative is a celebration of the power of cyber dissidence, which Ben Mhenni defines as a combination of citizen journalism (blogging and filming events) and on-the-ground activism
  • While acknowledging how her parents’ history of resistance as members of the UGTT prepared her for a life of activism, Ben Mhenni attributes much of her political development to the “real-world” friendships she established with cyber dissidents in the Tunisian blogosphere.
  • This testimony is more chronological and personal than Ben Mhenni’s. It constructs the author’s life teleologically as a journey from bourgeois indifference in suburbia to grassroots activism in the country’s downtrodden interior. It also documents Ben Mbarek’s co-founding of the civil rights network, Dostourna, which marked her renewed faith in “the power of citizens.”
  • Like Ben Mhenni, Ben Mbarek celebrates the politicizing power of social media, crediting Facebook for encouraging the rise of citizen journalism, which sparked her political (re)awakening. As she argues, it was thanks to citizen journalists from besieged cities that she finally felt connected to the leftist cause long championed by her father.
  • Convinced that the stultifying bureaucracy of political parties made them incapable of meeting the demands of the leaderless Arab Spring revolt, Ben Mbarek sought to create autonomous regional cells of civil rights activists throughout the country. Their job would be to address each region’s specific political needs
  • As a professor of philosophy, Belhaj Yahia champions the values of the Enlightenment and believes in the vital importance of dialogue. Accordingly, her text probes the origins of the discord between Islamists and secularists, in order to understand the tensions marking the post-Ben Ali period
  • she analyzes the “schizophrenic” discourses of her diasporic family members and the “narcissistic wounds” of old dissidents, who are now mimicking Ben Ali’s authoritarianism. She also critiques the regional and class disparities perpetrated by the old regime
  • Belhaj Yahia believes she is the product of a moderate and worldly national education, which is currently under threat in Tunisia. She locates this threat in the state’s gradual abandonment of public education and the resurgence of conservative ideologies
  • Her book ends with a call for other Tunisians to publish their own self-reflections, in the belief that writing and reading autobiographical accounts can pave the way for more understanding between the different factions comprising Tunisian society.
  • Fakhfakh’s book is a fictionalized diary written between January 14, 2011, the day of Ben Ali’s ouster, and May 18, 2015
  • Each diary entry is comprised of two parts. The first part is a summary of national and regional events with a brief commentary from the author; the second part is a biography of a pioneering Tunisian woman
  • As the author notes throughout the book, state attempts to propagate an institutional-form of feminism have devalued women’s history
  • The author worries that women’s achievements are constantly erased, in order to accommodate the ego of male leaders, like Bourguiba. She is also concerned that the rise of political Islam may eventually obscure Tunisian women’s “legacy of freedom” even further
  • Fakhfakh embraces the narrative of “Tunisian exceptionalism,” in which Tunisian women are presented as the most progressive in the Arab and Islamic world. This nationalist mythology about Tunisian women is common, even among Tunisian intellectuals, and is used as a means of differentiating and elevating Tunisian women above Arab and Muslim women more broadly. The inherent divisiveness of this narrative is problematic, and is left unexamined in Fakhfakh’s book
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One World Media :: One World Media Week - 1 views

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    RT@Tahrir_Square: Social Media Lessons for Development from the #Arab Spring 6.30-8pm Overseas Development Institute 111 Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1 7JD Three months on from the dramatic events in Egypt, ODI and One World Media bring together an expert panel to explore what changes to the media landscape in developing countries could mean for the future of development. Social media opens up new possibilities for getting around restrictive media laws, disseminating information and mobilising political movements. More established forms of media will also continue to empower citizens and encourage accountability. Access to technology is giving millions of people a chance to communicate beyond long established boundaries, but what will this mean for the role of media in developing societies? Chair Bettina Peters, Director, Global Forum For Media Development Panel James Deane, Head of Policy, BBC World Service Trust Mark Harvey, Executive Director, Internews Europe Ian Douglas, Technology Writer, The Telegraph Jonathan Glennie, Research Fellow,ODI and blogger, Guardian Development
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Gulf states crack down on Twitter users - FT.com - www.ft.com - Readability - 0 views

  • social websites are expanding Gulf public life in contrasting and sometimes conflicting directions, as nationals traditionally served only by heavily censored media grapple with rapid social change at home and the political turmoil gripping the Middle East
  • While Twitter has carved out a niche in Gulf countries as a tool for organising protest, it has also emerged as a means of religious enforcement; an alternative to physical demonstrations in societies where such confrontations are taboo; and as a debating chamber between loyalists and enemies of the ruling monarchies
  • a migration of Gulf nationals of all political persuasions to Twitter. In a recently released infographic, Amman-based social media consultant Khaled el-Ahmad showed users from the region making up more than two-thirds of the estimated 1.3m Twitter accounts active across the Arab world
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  • reach of religious figures is far greater than that of the revolutionaries, media personalities and entertainers comprising the site’s elite in other Arab states
  • It is part of a wider embrace of Twitter in the Gulf that has been as messy – and sometimes ugly – as might be expected in a region suddenly offered a mighty platform for long repressed public discourse. “Twitter has contributed to an expansion of freedom of expression,” says Dima Khatib, a correspondent for Qatar’s Al Jazeera, who has emerged as one of the region’s biggest Twitter stars since the start of the Arab uprisings. “But things have cracked wide open – we still don’t know how to respect other points of view yet.”
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Reaction to Obama's Mideast Speech in Arab Capitals Is Muted and Mixed - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • many people said they were too busy with their own popular struggles to pay much attention to words from Washington
  • there was no mention of Saudi Arabia, perhaps the most powerful conservative influence on the region and a close American ally. Mr. Obama said that Iran may have sought to capitalize on the unrest in another ally, Bahrain, they noted, but he failed to mention that Saudi Arabia and other gulf countries had intervened there to crush the revolt
  • “We’ve had long experience with American policy in the region, and we don’t trust Obama’s call for change in Syria,” said Abdel Majid Manjouni, head of the opposition Socialist Democratic Arab Union Party in Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city. “Only the Syrian people can impose change, not the powers abroad.”
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