Antony Loewenstein

Ahmadinejad and wiping Israel off the Map, A Persian Perspective.

A reliable American ally – Egypt continues to repress any kind of political activism – requires creative thinking by anybody caught up in its madness:

James Karl Buck helped free himself from an Egyptian jail with a one-word blog post from his cell phone.

Buck, a graduate student from the University of California-Berkeley, was in Mahalla, Egypt, covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator, Mohammed Maree, were arrested April 10.

On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.

The message only had one word. “Arrested.”

Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt — the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier — were alerted that he was being held.

Reveal “state secrets” and watch out:

A soldier serving in the IDF’s elite 8200 military intelligence unit was sentenced to 19 days in prison on Wednesday for uploading a picture onto the Facebook social networking site.

Abuse the Palestinians and human rights group are forced to challenge the rules:

Today,  16 April 2008, The Public Committee against Torture in Israel (PCATI), Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, B’Tselem-The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, Hamoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual and Adalah-The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel filed a petition to the High court of Justice against the General Security Service (GSS), the Israel Police and the Attorney General demanding that the use of family members as means of exhorting pressure on suspects during interrogations by state authorities be absolutely prohibited.

Only in the Iranian blogosphere:

Iranian women talks about their body and sexual desire.

Saudi blogger Fouad Al Farhan has been released from prison after more than four months away from family and friends.

He is a friend and colleague (more on Fouad here.)

The father of Saudi blogging is back, but I wonder how willing he will be to continue writing critically in his repressive regime.

Global Village TV, co-created by Baha’is and Muslims, aims to provide a forum for inter-faith understanding.

One can never have enough debate between the major and minor religions.

Yahoo goes green.

(It’s a shame, therefore, that the company collaborates with the Chinese dictatorship, though it appears to be making progress towards protecting human rights):

Yahoo boss Jerry Yang, whose company once allegedly helped Chinese police nab and jail cyber dissidents, is today in the forefront of a global campaign to free those languishing in prison for expressing their views online.

And in between his gruelling schedules as chief executive of the Internet giant, the billionaire Yang paces the corridors of the US Congress, writes to government officials and meets with human rights groups to champion Internet freedom.

Exiled Zimbabwean artist Chaz Maviyane-Davies makes a statement about Mugabe’s dictatorship:

Non-violent resistance to Israeli occupation lives:

Today, for a few hours, Palestinians took control over an illegal Israeli settler outpost on the outskirts of Ramallah. Replacing Israeli flags with Palestinian ones, Mohammed Al-Khattib and other members of the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall, accompanied by Israeli anti-occupation activists from Anarchists Against the Wall and international activists from the International Solidarity Movement and the International Women’s Peace Service, non-violently took over the site for more than 3 hours.

Yes, it is apartheid.

Be a Facebooker.

Enjoy the ride.

Stephen Kinzer, Guardian Comment is Free, April 23:

Trying to figure out who won the Iraq war is a challenging parlour game. Nearly every faction, group and nation has lost. The only evident victors are Iran, the Kurds and a handful of giant American corporations.

It is slowly becoming clear, however, that there is another winner: Latin America. With the United States so totally consumed by the Iraq conflict, it has no time, energy or political capital to crack down on challenges south of the Rio Grande. Sensing their historic chance, many Latin nations have embarked on experiments that the US would in past eras have instantly stepped in to crush.

The independence that many Latin American countries have shown in the last five years borders on outright defiance of US power. Yet to a degree unprecedented in modern history, Washington is allowing them to do as they please.

Well, not quite as they please.

Taking the internet and putting it in the real world:

German publishing giant Bertelsmann plans to publish the world’s first reference book based on entries gathered from Wikipedia, the mammoth online encyclopedia written by volunteers.

Bertelsmann believes some people who would rather leaf through a hands-on, printed book than surf through the Internet.

The company said on Wednesday, April 23, it would publish a print, German-language version of free online encyclopedia Wikipedia based on the 50,000 most commonly searched terms on the Web site from the past two years.

Meanwhile, Google faces the wrath of a private investigator.