Shahid Malik, British minister in the Department for International Development: I think most people would agree that if you ask Muslims today what do they feel like, they feel like the Jews of Europe. I don’t mean to equate that with the Holocaust but in the way that it was legitimate almost – and still…
Showing all posts in June 2019
Who’s looking bad now?
My friend Mike Otterman, author of American Torture, writes for the Guardian Comment is Free in response to Christopher Hitchens’ piece in Vanity Fair claiming water-boarding is torture…yet suggesting America is somehow not as bad as those repressive regimes…who also use torture: Now, neoconservative pundit Christopher Hitchens has waded into the debate. In a new…
The dangers of blogging for democracy
My following article appeared in yesterday’s edition of Crikey: 64 people have been arrested for blogging their views since 2003, according to… a recent… University of Washington report. Three times as many people were arrested for blogging about political issues in 2007 than the year before. More than half of all the arrests since 2003 were made…
Battle of the Brainwashed
My latest New Matilda column is about the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Budapest last week: Are Chinese netizens any more thin-skinned than Westerners when attacked online for their opinions? Antony Loewenstein reports from the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit During the Harvard University sponsored Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008 in Budapest last…
Personality disorder in Iran
The positive: Iranian Minister of Telecommunications and Information Technology Mohammad Soleimani said on Tuesday that there are as many as 63 million fixed and mobile phone users in Iran. Addressing the Fourth International Seminar on Information and Telecommunications Security in Damascus, Soleimani said 27 percent of Iranian population are linked to internet. Soleimani said 53…
Don’t mention Vietnam
The American mainstream media displays typical, unrestrained mania over daring to challenge John McCain’s Vietnam record. God forbid somebody may question the Republican nominee:
Redefining the democratic model
Evgeny Morozov, Open Democracy, June 30: The Budapest [Global Voices] gathering represents one of the major benefits of today’s internet revolution: the radical democratisation of the global flow of ideas. The technology, the ideas and the processes that have made possible blogs, social networks, and collaborative projects like Wikipedia also give many unconventional thinkers previously…
Don’t worry about those blacks, really
Robert Mugabe is undoubtedly destroying Zimbabwe, but why does the West have such selective outrage when it comes to Africa? (Hint: oil.)
“Do you have love in your culture?”
This is how Israel treats Palestinian journalists who struggle to report on the indignity of the Zionist occupation of their land.