After reading in one day the wonderfully moving memoir by New York Times writer and author David Rieff about his dead mother Susan Sontag - Swimming in a Sea of Death aims to articulate the struggles of a child coping with a parent who simply can’t face the reality of death from cancer - he speaks here about the work:
So what is the “great plan”? As things look now, this is the way Israel is planning its future: Every time some Middle Eastern country tries to obtain nuclear weapons, Israel will bomb it. Bomb - and bombard. Beyond the problematic assumption that we are allowed to do what others are not allowed, and what is secure in our hands is dangerous in the hands of others, this kind of conduct will lead to disaster. We tried twice, in Iraq and in Syria, and it worked; it is doubtful it was essential.
Now it seems we are going to try a third time against Iran. It may even be successful, but nothing lasts forever. It will end in catastrophe. From bombardment to bombardment, that is not the way for Israel to establish itself in the Middle East in the long term. But no one discusses the long term beyond tomorrow.
We could and should now discuss the chances, and especially the risks, of an attack on Iran. We usually hold such a discussion, if at all, under impossible conditions: either retrospectively, when it is too late, lacking information or after receiving disinformation. Those in on the secrets are also the ones to make the decision. But those in on secrets always lean in a belligerent direction; war is the only doctrine and craft they know. So it is very dangerous to depend solely on them.
Thoughts about creativity by one of the world’s finest and most provocative film-makers, David Lynch:
Portugal experiences its first ever blocked blog.
This doesn’t just happen in repressive regimes, anymore.
Jewish architect Daniel Libeskind, world famous designer of the Jewish museum in Berlin and San Francisco, is asked by Heeb magazine how Judaism affects his work:
I wanted to emphasize that Jewish culture is deeply rooted in the past but has always had an incredible horizon of freedom into the future. I wanted to create spaces that simultaneously connect you to history and reinvent history. That, to me, is part of Jewish tradition and I wanted to introduce that concept through not only the design but the use of the building, which is why there are spaces programmed for a multi-purpose room, education spaces, and event areas, not just galleries.
And I wanted it to be obvious that there is a Jewish sensibility to creating such a building. All of it – from the small to the big, both in the design and the way the building operates – is symbolically and truly Jewish. That’s why the area for kids and families is at the center, the front desk welcomes you with both a literal and mystical understanding [lights create the word pardes on the lobby wall behind the front desk] and the museum is located in an urban context. I think all of those things make you think about and consider Jewish culture in America. It’s not merely an appliqué of Jewish truth, it’s an extension of many Jewish themes through architecture.
Will Facebook succumb to the Chinese internet censor?
Something to remind us of the emotional power of the web to bring people together from across the globe (read this first):
Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.
A portrait of the film-maker as a young man in Castro’s Cuba.
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 is in some parts – to target Jews, many Muslims would say that we feel the exact same way. Somehow there’s a message out there that it’s OK to target people as long as it’s Muslims. And you don’t have to worry about the facts, and people will turn a blind eye.
Hating Islam and Muslims has become legitimate and encouraged. Can we imagine Jews being treated in the same way?
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 article for Vanity Fair, Hitchens - like several other journalists before him - underwent the procedure. “If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture,” noted Hitchens, who lasted roughly 10 seconds under the spout.
Hitchens cites the salient views of Malcolm Nance, a US counter-terrorism consultant who speaks eloquently against its use. “Mr Nance told me that he had heard of someone’s being compelled to confess that he was a hermaphrodite,” recalled Hitchens, adding: “I later had an awful twinge while wondering if I myself could have been ‘dunked’ this far.”
Still, Hitchens cannot escape the grip of American exceptionalism that has so permeated his work since 9/11. “Any call to indict the United States for torture is … a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down,” he huffs.
For Hitchens, in America’s pitched battle with “tormentors and murderers”, the ends justify the means. I disagree. Communist techniques hinged on the infliction of pain elicit bad intelligence and helps fan the flames of hatred against the US. In the case of the “water treatment”, poor means corrupt good ends.
Who said there isn’t money to made in the West from Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe?
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 in China, Egypt and Iran. Internet censorship has become a key global concern.
These issues — and more – were discussed at the recent Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008, held in Budapest. The aim of the two-day event, sponsored in part by Harvard University and Google, was to bring 200 writers, dissidents, bloggers, human rights activists and citizen journalists from across the world to discuss the role of Western multinationals in web filtering — and how bloggers are increasingly challenging the narrow focus of the mainstream media and creating alternative, online spaces for minorities (in, say, Bolivia and Syria) to transmit their messages to the world.
Representatives from various countries, including Madagascar, Venezuela, Kenya, China and Egypt, gave the event a wonderfully diverse flavour but common themes emerged. Everybody wants to be heard. And using YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, FeedBurner, blogs, mobile phones, Facebook and LiveMotion in countries such as Pakistan, Armenia, Belarus and Singapore is one way to circumvent the authoritarian impulse of often US-backed dictatorships.
It was constantly stressed that the internet can’t bring real democratic reform on its own but the web has become an invaluable organising tool to generate political change. Of course, some bloggers just want to write about food, fashion and fast cars.
One session, “The Wired Electorate in Emerging Democracies”, featured Iranian-exile Hamid Tehrani (whose report on the country’s anti-Semitic bloggers offers a sobering perspective on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s pernicious influence). Tehrani argued that Iran’s reformist bloggers, often seen in the West as moderates, have become relatively unpopular and disorganised. They are “serial losers” who are unlikely to regain power any time soon.
Armenian journalist Onnik Krikorian in his country saw the use of YouTube to highlight irregularities such as vote stuffing which forced the regime to defend its actions to the world. Activists also posted YouTube footage of police shooting demonstrators.
Another session, “When Biases Meet Biases”, discussed the ways in which the troubles over Tibet and the Beijing Games have left Chinese netizens and Western audiences more distant than ever. Leading US-based dissident Xiao Qiang said that the internet, rather than finding rational voices over sensitive issues, actually pushed ideologies and opinions to extremes. Calls were made for greater understanding of opposing positions. For example, are most Chinese really opposed to Tibetan self-determination, or are only the loudest nationalists being heard?
Antony Loewenstein was invited to present a paper on the importance of NGOs in assisting on-the-ground activists, the proposed Rudd-government plan to censor the web and his work with Amnesty International Australia on its Uncensor campaign about internet repression in China in this Olympic year. His speech can be found here.
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 week, attended by around 200 bloggers, human rights activists, writers, journalists and IT geeks from every corner of the globe, one participant joked that it was worthwhile buying domain names for dissidents likely to be soon imprisoned. “Just get them with ‘Free (insert name here).com’,” he said.
A University of Washington report this year found that 64 people have been arrested for blogging their political views since 2003. Three times as many people were arrested for blogging about political issues in 2007 than in 2006. More than half of the arrests since 2003 were made in China, Iran and Egypt. Internet censorship has become a concern of global significance.
I was invited to present a paper at the two-day event (see here) that covered the research for my forthcoming book, The Blogging Revolution, on the internet in repressive regimes, how Western multinationals are increasingly colluding with authoritarian governments, plans by the Rudd Government to institute filtering against child pornography and violence, and my work with Amnesty on its Uncensor campaign on Chinese censorship.
Initiated in 2004, Global Voices’s brief is to provide insights into non-Western nations, through country-specific blogs, to Western audiences. Recent years have seen it expand to include a translation service for multiple languages, support for minorities in developing nations (the Rising Voices project) and Voices without Votes, the chance for global citizens to comment on the 2008 US Presidential election campaign.
The Budapest summit featured bloggers and activists from places as diverse as Madagascar, India, Belarus, Kenya, Pakistan, Singapore, Armenia, Egypt, Iran and China. Although the internet can’t bring democratic reform on its own - and it was constantly stressed that only citizens of a particular country should have the right to determine a political system, not outside forces - it is gradually allowing on-the-ground organisations to challenge corruption, fraudulent elections and police-led torture.
Although the people I met came from varied backgrounds, from the elites to indigenous communities using new technology to find a voice in a country like Bolivia, the sense of community was palpable. After all, what can an Australian journalist like myself really understand about democratic struggles in Iran and Bangladesh? By sharing stories, it soon became clear that many speakers related to others on the opposite side of the globe. Tools such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, email, FeedBurner and text messaging were common denominators by a minority online community challenging state-run media lies.
Numerous sessions revealed insights into societies all too easily categorised as oppressive. Iranian exile Hamid Tehrani revealed that the regime, now with one of the most effective web filtering systems outside of China, bans many anti-George W Bush sites such as Juan Cole and Huffington Post but allows a neo-con and pro-war site such as Pajamas Media to remain uncensored.
A number of prominent Kenyan bloggers, including Ory Okolloh and Daudi Were, discussed the role of new technology in the aftermath of the stolen election in late 2007. With only 7-10 per cent internet penetration in the country, bloggers woke up early on election day to film people waiting patiently in line to vote. Some were even embedded with foreign observers and could immediately report, via SMS and Twitter, irregularities in the counting process. International support in the diaspora was crucial to highlight the relatively stable nation outside of Africa.
Blogger Luis Carlos Diaz, from Venezuela, debunked many of the Western myths about President Hugo Chavez. “The problem is we have too much petroleum,” Diaz lamented.
Although critical of many of his policies, Diaz said that Chavez was a democratically elected leader who wasn’t quashing freedom of speech. “Voting is a sport in Venezuela,” he said. To relieve the boredom of Chavez’s weekly eight-hour diatribes on state television, bloggers were providing an alternative perspective on issues that matter to average citizens, such as poverty, housing and education. Diaz said he’d recently spoken to workers whose job is to transcribe Chavez’s speeches. They usually run for around 3000 pages every week.
Unsurprisingly, China featured prominently in the sessions. Rebecca MacKinnon, former CNN journalist and now academic in Hong Kong, stressed that the debate had to progress past the question of “who is more brainwashed?” - Western or Chinese audiences. One of the key translators of Chinese blog posts for Global Voices, John Kennedy, challenged his audience by asking whether the growing Western anger against the Chinese people was justified. Was nationalism as great an influence as claimed? Was self-determination for Tibet so unacceptable in the motherland? Are Chinese netizens any more thin-skinned than Westerners when attacked online for their opinions?
Despite these valid questions, one of China’s leading dissidents, Isaac Mao, wished that the Chinese mob mentality online on issues of national importance wasn’t so strong. He stressed that although the concept of freedom of speech is paramount in the West, many other societies place greater emphasis on the rule of law and fighting corruption.
Mao, who launched Digital Nomads to host hundreds of independent blogs away from prying authoritarian rule, feared that citizens in prosperous, Western countries rarely understood the “crimes of omission” in their own societies. “They don’t get why the non-Western world wants to talk about issues that the Western largely ignores,” Mao said, “such as poverty and environmental degradation.”
The role of blogs in China is therefore more than simply reacting to perceived Western slights. Many netizens may not be calling for the dissolution of the Communist Party or planning a revolution, but they’re given far more freedoms today than five years ago. Mirroring what I found during my research in China last year, very few Chinese bloggers appear upset with the excessive filtering regime.
A Western translator living in Japan, Chris Salzberg, posed one of the more provocative questions of the summit. During the recent mass-stabbing incident in Tokyo, two passers-by started filming the event, transmitting live murder around the web (discussion here and here). Only a few thousand viewers saw the video, but should such images be allowed broadcast? Should there be any limits on material posted on the internet? Japan, like Australia, is currently debating placing restrictions on online content and indicates a Western trend towards governmental regulations over the medium.
It was encouraging to hear from IT insiders that many employees of companies such as Google and Yahoo feel distinctly uncomfortable with the role their companies play in a countries such as China and regularly leak material about its actions anonymously and develop tools to allow an email program such as Gmail to be used securely, away from the prying eyes of censorious regimes.
The Budapest conference indicated yet again that the mainstream media remains woefully under-prepared and unwilling to provide coverage of vast swathes of the world. Blogging and citizen journalism therefore provides an essential alternative to the daily obsession in much of our media with reprinting government and corporate spin as news.
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 percent of Iranian villages are now connected to internet now.
Iran’s parliament is set to debate a draft bill which could see the death penalty used for those deemed to promote corruption, prostitution and apostasy on the Internet, reports said on Wednesday.
MPs on Wednesday voted to discuss as a priority the draft bill which seeks to “toughen punishment for harming mental security in society,” the ISNA news agency said.
The text lists a wide range of crimes such rape and armed robbery for which the death penalty is already applicable. The crime of apostasy (the act of leaving a religion, in this case Islam) is also already punishable by death.
However, the draft bill also includes “establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy”, which is a new addition to crimes punishable by death.
Those convicted of these crimes “should be punished as “mohareb’ (enemy of God) and “corrupt on the earth’,” the text says.
Under Iranian law the standard punishments for these two crimes are “hanging, amputation of the right hand and then the left foot as well as exile.”
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:
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 consigned to the margins of public life a platform that enables them to be heard by a dedicated (if often tiny) audience. The academic, blogger and pundit Daniel W Drezner has called this new generation - free from the usual constraints of the academia, self-employed, and armed with Google search - “Public Intellectuals 2.0″.
But is it “Public Intellectuals 2.0” or “Dissidents 2.0″? The Budapest experience suggests that the movement slowly emerging on the margins of the blogosphere shares much in common with an older generation of those who sought to “speak truth to power”. The city’s mayor Gábor Demszky - a communist-era dissident - was one of the first people to welcome some Global Voices bloggers. The early stencils used to copy anti-government materials in east-central Europe, now housed in the Open Society archives in Budapest, add to the sense that there are similarities between blogging and samizdat. It may be just a matter of time before an Apple or a Lenovo laptop belonging to a Belarusian or an Uzbek dissident-blogger finds a well-deserved placed next to these stencils.
Robert Mugabe is undoubtedly destroying Zimbabwe, but why does the West have such selective outrage when it comes to Africa?
(Hint: oil.)
This is how Israel treats Palestinian journalists who struggle to report on the indignity of the Zionist occupation of their land.
I connected with many activists and bloggers from around the world at last week’s Global Voices Citizen Summit 2008 in Budapest.
During the event, I was interviewed by the BBC Radio program, IPM, a weekly show about the web and technology. This story featured interviews with dissidents from various nations, telling their stories of using the web to challenge authoritarianism. I was asked about my research for the forthcoming book, The Blogging Revolution:
