bloggers - James Buck on Diigo

01 Oct 09

The magazine Stockholms Fria has spoken to the Egyptian embassy in Stockholm. It claims that Per Björklund has violated Egyptian law."I don't want to speculate in which crime he has conducted, but I can assure you that it is not about something he has written, since press freedome is prevailing in Egypt", says Nader Nabil Zaki from the Egyptian embassy to Stockholms Fria.

27 May 09

Saudi official: why popular blogger Farhan was jailed | csmonitor.com

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15 May 09

Memo From Cairo - Egypt’s Critics Have a Voice, but Never the Last Word - NYTimes.com

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Agence Global - Article

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14 May 09

Should we also make lists of the world's ten worst places to be a vegetarian? | Marc Lynch

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13 May 09

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The emergence of activist blogging in Egypt is closely tied to the Kifaya National Movement for Change, a loose grassroots, all-encompassing movement that has been agitating for human and civil rights and political reform since December 2004. If Kifaya has provided the political space for voices of opposition to speak out, blogs have provided the means for Kifaya’s mobilization. Not only have bloggers continued to challenge the official version of events, exposing a wide array of abuses by Egypt’s authorities and monitoring fellow activists’ lives in jail, they have also rallied other activists to the cause by publicizing Kifaya demonstrations often overlooked by mainstream publications.

For Malek, 25, Kifaya’s strength is in its diversity.
General Mostafa Radi, Head of the General Administration for Information and Documents at the Ministry of Interior,
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- Activist blogging in Egypt has had an impact, but on a very small scale. Collaboration between bloggers and independent media in highlighting regime abuses of power have been remarkable, but if blogging, as a new media tool, continues to be associated with antagonistic, political activity it will never achieve the widespread appeal that would eventually set it up as a forum for wider public debate, a channel for social change, or an alternative information source for the many rather than for the few. Indeed, although key members of the Egyptian opposition movement Kifaya have channeled substantial energy into blogging gleaning international credit, reformists have been unable to mobilize wider public opinion against the government through blogs alone. The plurality of the medium may encourage greater social acceptance of pluralism, but also may impede efforts to build a unified opposition movement. The future of political blogging in Egypt greatly depends on its fostering links with mainstream independent media, links which will likely determine whether blogs are seen as enclaves of marginal opinion and hearsay, or rather as venues for news and commentary deeply rooted in Egyptian society and central to its political life.

12 May 09

Al-Ahram Weekly | Egypt | Activists in a jam

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02 May 09

BBC NEWS | Africa | African bloggers find their voice

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Egyptian policy was to a large extent responsible for helping spur the development of bloggers into activists by adopting unpopular policies and cracking down on citizens who attempted to demonstrate against them.

01 May 09

A Year Since Black Wednesday: A Timeline « Unpopular Arab Thoughts That All Arabs Have Thought

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Egyptian bloggers who were harassed and detained in Egypt are harassed and detained in the US - Boing Boing

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Egyptian bloggers who were harassed and detained in Egypt are harassed and detained in the US

30 Apr 09

Global Voices Online » Part One: Inside the school of the Egyptian blogosphere

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101 egypt blogs bloggers democratizing & blogs activism history

It is being made clear almost daily that the dynamism of the Egyptian bloggers isn’t just online; the country's activist bloggers are also highly engaged on the street as well. They've been playing an active part in the pro-democracy reform movement which is contesting Mubarak's long reign; they're present at almost every sit-in and demonstration, supporting the Kifaya National Movement for Change and using blogs, text messaging, videos and photos to expose police abuses during rallies, and even inside police stations.
In other words, the Egyptians aren't merely sitting in front of their computer screens, blogging about the change they'd like to see happen — they are deeply committed to being a part of the process.

Egypt's growing blogger community pushes limit of dissent | csmonitor.com

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101 egypt bloggers blogs dissent CS Monitor starred

Other countries in the Middle East have started cracking down on the Internet, arresting bloggers and imposing strict censorship regimes.
As bloggers gain clout in Cairo, observers say it is only a matter of time before Egypt follows suit.
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- At a recent demonstration in Cairo's Opera Square against the 25-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak, activists distributed placards that read "Freedom Now" and "No to Oppression." Fattah, on the other hand, passed out lists of websites to a dozen or so local bloggers who act as an unofficial media outlet for Egypt's disparate opposition.
  
  "You just can't rely on the mainstream media here," he says.
- The number of blogs worldwide has doubled in the past five months, and a new blog is created every second, according to a recent report by the blog-watchers Technorati.
- "I had never heard the word blogger until May 25," says Rabab al-Mahdi, a political science professor at the American University in Cairo, and an opposition activist. "But now I know them well because of all the amazing coverage they had of the protests. My friends overseas all followed what happened through the blogs, because they have more credibility than the mainstream media."
- Activists in Egypt rely on blogs like Fattah's to find out the time and place of future demonstrations, to learn who has been arrested and where they have been taken, and to debate the effectiveness of opposition strategies. In short order, Egypt's bloggers have become a political force, capable of more than merely commenting from the sidelines.
- "Egypt's bloggers seem to have been able to make the transition from spouting hot air, to political organization and political work and that's impressive," says Marc Lynch, a political science professor specializing in Arab media at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass.
- The new threat is only beginning to dawn on Middle Eastern regimes, long accustomed to tightly regulating the flow of information.
- "I help people build websites," says Fattah, the Egyptian blogger. "This is the biggest contribution I can make to the movement."

IkhwanWeb

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29 Apr 09

Miss Mabrouk of Egypt

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Turning a blind eye toward the ongoing crackdown undermines the credibility of an already shaky American commitment to democratization in the Middle East. It also cements the perception among Egyptians that Washington blesses autocratic regimes.
Lawsuit to Block 21 Egyptian Blogs
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- Abdel Kareem Sentenced to Four Years
- serve three years for insulting Islam and inciting sedition, and one year for insulting Mr Mubarak.
- Hafiz Abou Saada of the Egyptian Human Rights Organisation called the sentence "a strong message to all bloggers who are put under strong surveillance".

Not Green Data: Three Years Blogging

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101 egypt bloggers blogs history background starred

The first time to hear about blogging was when I installed Google Bar in my browser, and saw the Blogspot icon there. I guess Rami Sidhom (Ikhnaton2) was introduced to blogging the same way. Then I found Manal and Alaa's Bit Bucket, which was a Blog Aggregator created by two married Linux and Programming Gurus. As you can see, at that part of the Egyptian blogosphere history, many blogs were into computers and IT, such as JPierre and Mohamed Sameer's FooLab. And even now, when there is diversity in blogs topics, away from the technical ones, you can still notice that many of today's bloggers are Engineers.
Manal and Alaa's Bit Bucket was really very famous then, and for many ones the blogs that are not aggregated there were simply not existing. They also started a blog hosting service on their site. Many of those blogs hosted in Manalaa, as well as their friends and those one who consider the a blogging role models shared some common characteristics; they are focused on human rights and defended free speech and many of them joined movements such as Kefaya and participated in protests and many were put into jail for that such as Malek, Alaa, and Sharkawy. However the first blogger to be put in jail for what he writes and not for participating in a protest in the street was Abdul Karim Amer. Anyway, their blogs also had something else in common, they preferred to use the language of the street. As you know the newspapers here use Traditional Arabic, but Manalaa et. al. are used to write in the Egyptian Slang, and they also use some rated words that may not be accepted by conventional media. I've also noticed that many of the active bloggers then were leftists.

Arab Media & Society

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101 egypt bloggers history background

The first stage is the Experimentation Phase, in which a few dozen Egyptians discovered and tinkered with a new publishing platform.
Egypt got connected to the Internet in 1993.[2] In 2003 Egypt had 3 million internet users and nearly double that number of mobile phone subscribers; by 2005 the number of internet users had jumped to 5 million and mobile subscribers to more than 13 million,[3] though connectivity numbers are inherently difficult to obtain because of the lack of data collection and the characteristics of Internet use in Egypt.[4] Such figures also tend to discount the impact of public places like internet cafes, libraries, and schools that offer access.[5] In 2004 there were about 400 internet cafes in Cairo and high-speed DSL connections at home could be had for $50;[6] by 2008 internet cafes were prolific and DSL had dropped to between $10 to $22 depending on the speed. Home computers and laptops were common and taken for granted among the middle and upper classes.[7]
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- Until the late 1990s publishing in Arabic was technically difficult, but by the turn of the new millennium efforts at facilitating computerized communication in the Arabic language had made great strides. Blogspot, the most popular blogging platform, enabled Arabic script in its posts and its simple user interface meant that anyone, even those with little technological literacy, could create a blog.
- Online forums, the predecessor to blogs, were popular among many Internet users in Egypt. Many of the core bloggers had participated in them. By the time blogging platforms like Blogspot started to become popular their generation was already becoming familiar with email, online forums, and other technologies that by the third phase had become a relatively common part of daily life in the middle class.
- relative opening of freedom of expression as Mubarak’s government sought to stay in the good graces of the United States and international organizations like the World Trade Organization. The media industry during this time underwent a substantial makeover as satellite television and especially the Qatar-based news station al-Jazeera reshaped audience expectations and the practice of Arab journalism.[8] The Iraq war and George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” created a political context in which pressures for democracy had to be balanced against cooperation on terrorism, the war, and foreign assistance.
- Protests against the Iraq war In January and February 2003 ushered in a new era of activism as thousands took to the streets. They culminated in a demonstration in central Cairo on the day of the invasion that resulted in mass arrests and drew 20,000 – numbers not seen since the 1972 student-led protests.[10] But there was not yet a link between new media technologies and the activists.
- As the war got underway in Iraq, blogs written by Iraqis describing the situation on the ground drew international attention, inspiring others to start blogs
- Out of the Iraq war protests grew a new political movement that became known as Kifaya,[13] Arabic for “enough.” The group made street protests and eventually blogging part of its repertoire of contention as it sought political change at the very top. Kifaya first appeared on the scene in December of 2004 when hundreds of people held a silent protest, their mouths taped with yellow stickers reading “Kifaya” at Cairo’s High Court to demand that President Mubarak step down and hold direct, competitive elections.[14] Kifaya’s manifesto called for civil disobedience and sought to break taboos and establish a right to demonstrate and talk about the country frankly.[15] Over the next two years the movement inspired people to demand change by taking to the streets and speaking out; among them were many of the core bloggers who shared the same desire for change. A natural symbiosis between Egypt’s early core bloggers and the emerging protest movement helped popularize the Egyptian blogosphere as a site of protest as Kifaya grew in popularity during 2005.
- efore 2005 there were only a handful of bloggers in Egypt and about 40 total blogs.[16] These core bloggers were primarily bilingual twenty-somethings, many of whom were active in the online forums that predated blogs. Several worked in translation or technology jobs and most wrote in English.[17] These early adopters were primarily liberal, anti-establishment and often leftists who blogged about personal interests. They were also open-minded and flexible, committed to individual rights and collaboration across political and social divides.[18] Several were self-described techies or Linux geeks, such as Malek, Alaa, and Ahmad G., while others wanted to try out a new publishing medium. Blogs entered the consciousness of these forerunners randomly, through Google searches, for example, or through the attention granted to the Iraqi blogs made famous in the Western media in 2003.[19]

Carnegie: “U.S. Democracy Promotion During and After Bush” | The Arabist

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Wednesday October 25 2006
Eliciting some 750 comments—a massive jump from the average 30 comments Malek receives—the post broke a story which Egypt’s state-run media were either unwilling or unable to report: the sexual harassment of women in Downtown Cairo during the Islamic post-Ramadan feast holiday Eid in October 2006.
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- The story shows the extent to which bloggers and independent media may be increasingly challenging the narrative provided by Egypt’s state-run media.
- But the growing willingness of private media to harness blogs poses difficult questions about the ability of individual bloggers to provide accurate accounts of events. It also calls into question whether blogs alone can drive the push for political reform in Egypt and the wider Middle East.
- The emergence of activist blogging in Egypt is closely tied to the Kifaya National Movement for Change, a loose grassroots, all-encompassing movement that has been agitating for human and civil rights and political reform since December 2004
- If Kifaya has provided the political space for voices of opposition to speak out, blogs have provided the means for Kifaya’s mobilization. Not only have bloggers continued to challenge the official version of events, exposing a wide array of abuses by Egypt’s authorities and monitoring fellow activists’ lives in jail, they have also rallied other activists to the cause by publicizing Kifaya demonstrations often overlooked by mainstream publications.
- Malek readily acknowledges the importance of blogging in propelling the Kifaya movement. For him blogging is not just a channel for communication the authorities struggle to control, but also an inherently plural phenomenon that at once allows for community and individuality to develop. “It helps me reach an ever-growing group of politicized youth,” he says, “while at the same time I maintain my independence. It can also reach people outside the political sphere altogether.”
- The crucial point is that Kifaya and political blogging developed symbiotically in Egypt—Kifaya providing a purpose for bloggers to write, and bloggers giving Kifaya an outlet to take root. Malek believes that for political change to take place the two must work together: “It’s not enough simply to write. Blogging must go hand in hand with street action, otherwise it’s just empty, useless protest.”
- But there are many who question whether blogs really provide for diverse readers. The argument that blogs rather encourage the formation of online ghettos of opinion remains strong in Egypt. Some go as far as suggesting that because of low levels of literacy and Internet access in Egypt, bloggers are voices from the margins mistakenly assumed to be the authentic voice of the average Egyptian.
- “Are there any mainstream bloggers?” asks Tarek Atia^{^[1]}, creator of the first local online news aggregator that launched in 1996, cairolive.com. “Or are they all extremists of one form or another—whether liberal or religious?”
- Atia warns against foreign commentators and journalists crediting individual bloggers with being representative of the wider society in which they live. “It becomes a problem when certain blogs are picked up by the international media and seen as a fair representation of how Egyptians think. Some “celebrity” bloggers clearly pander to their audience.”
- And activist bloggers really have claimed numerous scalps against the regime, not least scooping the sexual assaults scandal during Eid 2006. The “blog effect”, says Wael, has supported Egypt’s reform movement as bloggers deftly and conscientiously report on human rights infringements as well as organizing demonstrations and coordinating sit-ins.
  
  Psychiatrist and human rights activist Dr Aida Seif El Dawla, who is also chair of the Egyptian Association Against Torture, strongly believes in the uncompromising power of bloggers who document events as they see them, without checks and balances. “They are a major challenge and a force to be reckoned with in a country where you’re not supposed to know the truth. They are the popular media which seeks the truth no matter what.”
- To this extent, Nora would agree. Her blogging became more determined after her experiences of an anti-referendum demonstration organized by Kifaya to protest the cosmetic changes made to Article 76 of the Egyptian constitution in May 2005. The day came to be known as Egypt’s Black Referendum Day.
- “I was beaten, assaulted and watched other female journalists being molested by state security’s plain-clothes thugs, as the officers stood by in approving silence,” says Nora. “All because we had the courage to speak out for what we believed in.” The experience combined with the authorities’ “inability to identify those responsible” channeled her passion for documenting the movement. She joined Kifaya’s initiative “El Sharei Lena” (The Street is Ours) and blogged unrelentingly about her experiences—experiences the state-run press were all too happy to ignore.
- Mohammed El Sharkawy, who was arrested and sexually abused during the May 2006 crackdown on the pro-reform movement, has an even more hostile attitude to the state-owned and the independent press. “They only pick up blog posts that serve their interests,” he says. “If a secularist [blogger], for example, published a coherent argument about any given issue, they will never run it so as not to upset the Muslim Brotherhood.”
- “Bloggers have not yet been blacklisted as a threat to national security and there have been no moves towards banning access to our sites,” she says. “If my phone is tapped or I’m being followed, it’s because of what I do on the street, joining demonstrations. This has been the case ever since I filed the complaint after Black Referendum Day.”
- Western human rights and journalist groups would beg to differ. In November 2006 the campaigning group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) listed 13 countries it labelled as “enemies of the Internet.” The inclusion of Egypt, it said, was because “President Hosni Mubarak is displaying an authoritarianism towards the Internet that is particularly worrying” noting the recent imprisonment of three pro-democracy bloggers.
- Karim’s case, according to the executive director of the Arabic Human Rights Network Gamal Eid, started on October 25, 2005. When he blogged about the sectarian violence that took place in Alexandria he was taken from his home and detained for 12 days, told to stop writing and then released.

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