Media in Middle East & North Africa

The veil changes in different countries, and here comes the sociological aspect of my work: I am very careful in rendering the different types of veil, the Maghrebi veil, the Afghani burga and the Iranian chador.”

n important element to negotiating all the areas of culture clash between “Islam” and “the West” is to be able to find a way to humanize each other.

While not all countries in the Middle East and North Africa filter the Internet, censorship across the region is on the rise, and the scope and depth of filtering are increasing. Testing has revealed political filtering to be the common denominator across the region; however, social filtering is on the rise.

Based on ONI testing results, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and the West Bank do not currently filter any material; however, none of those are without regulations.

Bahrain, Iran, Syria and Tunisia have the strictest political filtering practices in the region.

NMIT, a selection of “working” papers on new media and information technologies in the Middle East

"Nobody, absolutely nobody, straps a bomb on their body because they were recruited from the Internet," he said. "It takes an enormous amount of personal face-to-face contact and time in order to recruit a young person into the cause of jihad."

"No one over 30 knows what Bluetooth does," the young Iranians told him.

By some estimates, about 60 percent of Muslims in the Middle East are under the age of 30.

"These internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content and are particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries," reads a Marine Corps order

The Marines' ban will last a year.

Price Floyd, the Pentagon's newly-appointed social media czar

One of the defeated moderate candidates in Iran's presidential election, Mehdi Karroubi, has accused security forces of using harsher methods than Israel."The behaviour of Iran's security agents is worse than those of the Zionist in occupied Palestine,"

The Senate has authorized up to $50 million for the development of Web-based tools to help Iranians evade their government's attempts to censor the Internet. The Victim of Iranian Censorship Act, or VOICE Act, was added to the Senates Defense authorization bill Thursday evening as a response to mass protests following Iran's disputed June 12 presidential elections and concerns that Western companies have sold Iran technology used to monitor dissidents. Internet-based tools such as Facebook and Twitter have become key means for Iranians to communicate with each other and the outside world about protests over what many believe to be a fraudulent victory by incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The U.S. legislation would require President Obama to issue a report on "non-Iranian companies, including corporations with U.S. subsidiaries, that have aided the Iranian governments Internet censorship efforts." Such identification would make it easier to pressure firms to cease such business with Iran.

the Voice of America has an office devoted to anti-filtering technology and anti-censorship technology, but its total budget is less than $5 million. It has invested in a Farsi-language version of the Web browser, Firefox, embedded with TOR, a program originally developed by the U.S. Navy, which cloaks the users Web browsing from state monitors.

when there is money, people will come, and you are seeing a lot of companies retooling themselves to become circumvention providers.

new technology that is revolutionizing the way Arabic-speaking people use the Internet

Abdullah says that of her 500 Egyptian students, 78 percent have never typed in Arabic online, a fact that greatly disturbed Habib Haddad, a Boston-based software engineer originally from Lebanon. "I mean imagine [if] 78 percent of French people don't type French," Haddad says. "Imagine how destructive that is online."

"The idea is, if you don't have an Arabic keyboard, you can type Arabic by spelling your words out phonetically," Jureidini says. "For example ... when you're writing the word 'falafel,' Yamli will convert that to Arabic in your Web browser. We will go and search not only the Arabic script version of that search query, but also for all the Western variations of that keyword."

The State Award is not given to anyone based on the degree of his piety or his following of Islam - we are in Egypt not in Saudi Arabia.

Britain has revoked five licenses for arms exports to Israel after reviewing how British-provided equipment was used during Israel's three-week war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, officials from both nations said Monday. It marks the only such action to date by a foreign government against Israel over the country's incursion into Gaza in December and January

The British Embassy statement said "a small number" of export licenses had been suspended under rules forbidding arms exports "where there is a clear risk that arms will be used for external aggression or internal repression." It did not detail the types of equipment affected by the license revocations, and an embassy spokeswoman said that information could not be released.

I will not allow that on our signs. This government, and certainly this minister, will not allow anyone to turn Jewish Jerusalem to Palestinian al-Quds