Remarkable documents have emerged from Egypt from inside Alexandria’s State Security compound: This past weekend, Egyptians lost their patience and simply started dismantling it themselves. After reports of documents being burned and moved out by the truckload, crowds converged on its offices in Alexandria, Cairo, and the southern city of Aswan. Once they broke in,…
Showing all posts tagged internet
Memo to Western MSM; Twitter revolutions exist only in your heads
Jordanian activist Sohail Dahdal: The rise of social media made a set of online tools for revolution readily available and accessible to the largest demographic in the Middle East — youth. Put a powerful tool of communication in the hands of a handful of highly motivated, highly educated activists with the potential to reach the…
Israeli blogger documenting his country’s descent into fascism
Haaretz reports: “It’s important for me to say that personally I love this country,” Shaltiel says. “I would not be doing all this if I didn’t love it.” But the erosion of the foundations of democracy here is gathering momentum, he says, a process he naturally feels more intensely since he started to collect information.…
Surely the most complete take-down of Scientology imaginable
During my five hour flight from Sydney to Perth, while thinking about the lack of internet access and ability to focus more on reading, I read this extraordinary recent feature by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker about Scientology, film-maker Paul Haggis and the toxic culture inside cults. It’s truly one of the finest pieces…
Perth Writer’s Festival, here I come
This will be fun. I’m about to head across to Perth in Western Australia for the Perth Writer’s Festival. My events: Sat 5 Mar, 2.00PM The invasion of Gaza in 2008 provoked worldwide condemnation and questions aboutIsrael’s right to exist. Some asked why other nations acting unjustly don’t face debate about the validity of their…
Hillary Clinton: “Al Jazeera is winning” message war
Almost comical. Like the Israelis, the Americans think that they can simply communicate better and use Twitter and the Muslim world will start to appreciate their dictator-friendly and Zionist occupation loving policies. Here’s Hillary Clinton mumbling about not winning the information war. As if they ever will (or should): “Let’s talk straight realpolitik,” Clinton said.…
Hypocrisy trumps policy in Western alliance with Libya
My following article appears today on ABC’s The Drum: The latest BBC interview with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, situated in a fancy restaurant on the Mediterranean, was painful to watch. Clearly delusional and blaming drug-addled youth and al-Qaeda for the ongoing revolution in his country (which he claimed he didn’t lead, the “masses” were in…
Don’t let Facebook infect Afghanistan!
So says this clearly scared Muslim leader: Burhanuddin Rabani, a leading Islamic cleric who also leads President Hamid Karzai’s peace council — formed to make peace with the Taliban — have warned Afghanistan’s conservative religious community against increasing influence of Afghanistan’s new generation that he described as “facebook kids”. No doubt if the Ulema (Islamic…
What the West fears is true independence in the Arab world
The following article by Kate Ausburn appears in Green Left Weekly: Popular uprisings in the Arab world have challenged a political landscape dominated by undemocratic regimes and fronted by dictators, a panel of academics and journalists said at a Sydney University forum on February 15. Speakers discussed the regional and international ramifications of the uprisings…