While residents in Gaza face increasingly regular power cuts, worsening the already cold conditions, Gazan blogger Amir Ismail writes on the effect of the Israeli blockade: For two decades the Gaza Strip has exported millions of flowers to the West. But the situation deteriorated seriously in the past three years. Horticulturalists’ greenhouses were bombed during…
Showing all posts tagged blogging
What Egypt could like look when free
Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas, a brave soul and long-time enemy of the US-backed client state, speaks out on what he dreams for his country:
Memo to Jews close to God; porn and online gambling are your friends
The intention of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel to ban access to an open internet in Israel isn’t going too well: Are Israel’s Haredi religious authorities losing control of their followers? In December, leading Israeli rabbis launched a new push to curtail Internet use among ultra-Orthodox Jews, emphasizing that their longstanding ban on Web surfing applied…
Is the internet actually helping authoritarianism in Iran?
Web contrarian Evgeny Morozov (I use that term with affection) argues that web tools such as Twitter and blogging are not really assisting dissidents in Iran but are in fact making it far easier for the regime to crack down.
It’s socially acceptable to denigrate Palestinians
In a Sunday New York Times magazine feature about the Little Green Footballs blog – a once virulently bigoted website that seemed to thrive on hating Arabs, Muslims and anybody who didn’t crave American bombing campaigns – founder Charles Johnson is shown to have tolerated the sadly common bile directed at Palestinians: If the tone…
The spirit of Iranian resistance is far stronger than we know
Nasrin Alavi, a keen follower of Iranian politics and its blogosphere, has a fine piece in the latest New Internationalist that challenges our media-led perceptions of the Islamic Republic: A simple glance at the background of Iran’s prominent student leaders tells you that, by and large, they are not the children of affluent citizens of…
What is Google now doing in China?
My following article appears today on ABC Unleashed/The Drum: Google has threatened to withdraw entirely from China in protest at the authoritarian regime’s oppressive online censorship and continuing attempts by Chinese hackers to gain sensitive information of local human rights workers. Perhaps most significantly, Google’s Chinse search engine, Google.cn, now allows once banned material to…
Egyptian blogger continues to face repression behind bars
The definition of a US-backed police state, funded and armed by the US tax-payer: Reporters Without Borders deplores the way the authorities continue to persecute Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman, a jailed blogger better known by the pen-name of Kareem Amer. For the third time in a row, one of his lawyers has been denied the…
Why we need Global Voices to live a long life
The invaluabe Global Voices website – highlighting the work of bloggers across the globe – is turning five. Here’s why it’s become so essential in our understanding of the non-Western world.
Israeli blogger calls the occupation his country’s defining feature
Israel’s stellar blog Promised Land on the 22nd anniversary of the first Palestinian intifada: Our national project is the occupation. We would like you to think it’s the high-tech industry (the current day’s version of the oranges Israel used to grow) but one can’t compare the investment – both governmental and private – in high-tech…