A curious and timely tale about the increasing disconnect between Muslims and Western leaders: Followers of Moroccan blogger Ahmed, who writes on Alash? [Ar] (Why?), know he is fond of the art of satire. Earlier this month he published a post about a supposed announcement by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy [Ar] of a series…
Showing all posts tagged blogging
Nokia and their mates in Tehran
In my book The Blogging Revolution I examined the role of Western web multinationals in assisting repressive regimes censoring information. This latest story should therefore not come as a shock but how many Westerners realise that their mobile phone company is backing a dictatorship? A jailed Iranian journalist is suing phone company Nokia on the…
Not every “serious” analyst wants to destroy Iran
Despite a push by some Zionists in the US and beyond to strike Iran, Noam Sheizaf blogs from Israel that there’s hardly consensus inside his country to bomb the Islamic Republic. Some sanity still remains.
What the web has done for honest Mid-East debate (eg. helped)
Following the desperate smear of neo-con Lee Smith against dissenting bloggers on the Middle East, two leading writers weigh in. Max Blumenthal explains how how frustrating it must be Zionists who simply can’t believe that their views are no longer sacrosant. And Israel Lobby co-author Steve Walt explains that the blogosphere has truly liberated debate…
Neo-con would like Israel to be a protected species online
A sadly predictable article in Tablet claiming that some prominent online writers and bloggers are “using the Internet to make anti-Semitism respectable.” Seriously, because a handful of comments on a website may be anti-Semitic – and depends who you ask when defining that troubled word – people like Glenn Greenwald and the Mondoweiss website are…
Book event at New York’s Revolution Books
Next Sunday, 25 July, I’ll be appearing at one of New York’s leading independent bookshops, Revolution Books, for an event that can’t be missed! Palestine and Iraq — 2 Occupations Brunch roundtable discussion with authors Michael Otterman (Erasing Iraq: The Human Costs of Carnage) and Antony Loewenstein (My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution). On…
Growing worldwide pressure on Iran only worsens lives inside the Islamic Republic
A worrying story in the New York Times that indicates Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government is cracking down even harder on those not sharing his fundamentalist reading of Islam. The paper regularly publishes propaganda against Tehran but this report correspondents with other stories in the blogosphere.
We’re dying in Afghanistan and you want to hug a general?
While here’s yet another mainstream journalist upset that Michael Hastings actually embarrassed military men in Afghanistan – it truly seems that many corporate reporters and commentators would rather general worship towards men and women in uniform – the real cost of two devastating wars is brought home. When was the last an injured service person…
Rules of the cyberjihad
In my book The Blogging Revolution I examine Tehran’s various methods of censoring the web and torturing online dissidents. That campaign is only getting worse and Western firms are complicit: Iran’s mullahcracy inevitably recalls the latter days of the Soviet Union. But — at least until the very end — the Soviet censors could clamp…
Public opinion is lost
While Israeli bloggers debate the rights and wrongs of this week’s Gaza flotilla massacre (there’s something right about it, I hear you ask?) this piece of news is pretty damning: Israel was tonight under pressure to allow an independent inquiry into its assault on the Gaza aid flotilla after autopsy results on the bodies of…