Tuning in to the Bloggers’ Wavelength

HOT ON the heels of a recent call by Dubai’s Crown Prince for ’despotic regimes’ in the Middle East to ’stop censoring alternative views’ in the media, the Dubai authorities promptly blocked access to the Gulf emirate’s main satirical blog.

Local surfers have been unable to access Secret Dubai Diary, which examines life in the United Arab Emirates from an occasionally ironic perspective, since July.

Irony, indeed.

Meanwhile, the Iranian authorities, who do not even pretend to champion freedom of speech, have adopted ’one of the world’s most substantial Internet censorship regimes’, according to research undertaken by the Open Net Initiative, a partnership of researchers from Harvard, Cambridge and Toronto universities.

Arash Sigarchi, an Iranian blogger, was jailed for 14 years in February on charges of spying and aiding foreign counter-revolutionaries after he used his blog to criticise the arrest of other Iranian online journalists.

Despite this grim backdrop, tens of thousands of men and women continue to blog throughout the Middle East, joined by Arab and Iranian exiles based mostly in the United States.

With blogging software freely available for download from the Internet, and so easy to use that anyone who is computer literate can master it in a few hours, blogging offers a highly accessible way of disseminating information to people in a region that has the least free press in the world.

And the results have not been merely cosmetic.

Some of the most prominent Arab bloggers who have opted to write in English say that their goal is to tackle sensitive political issues usually ignored by the carefully choreographed propaganda that constitutes ’news’ in their state-controlled media.

’It might be fair to say that blogging is actually one area where the Middle East does not lag behind the rest of the world,’ said the Lebanese opinion page editor of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, Mr Michael Young, who also blogs for Reason and Slate’s online magazines.

He added that this is because ’the official media in the Arab world is often inaccessible to those who want to make their opinions known’.

Battling governments

WHILE blogging in the English language offers the opportunity for Arabs to gain an international readership, it begs the question: How widely read are these blogs in the region itself?

In Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country and historically always at the vanguard of Arab cultural developments, a tightly-knit group of political bloggers has probably no more than a few hundred regular readers.

But they still manage to have a serious impact on the political process - helping, for example, to organise a series of unprecedented pro-democracy demonstrations earlier this year.

For the time being, their sites are not being blocked by the authorities.

At first glance, this seems strange. But in Egypt, as elsewhere in the region, the English-language media is often freer to explore sensitive issues because it is accessible only to an elite and is therefore not seen by the ruling regimes as such a threat to the status quo.

’The most prominent (Egyptian) opposition movements, such as Kifaya, are using the Internet to communicate with Egyptian Internet users as well as to organise their activities,’ said the author of one of the country’s most popular blogs, The Big Pharaoh, who asked that his name not be revealed.

Pictures and news of the various demonstrations, he said, appear on those blogs.

’Such information can never be conveyed through the Egyptian mass media, which is government-controlled,’ he added.

In one of the Gulf’s most liberal countries, Bahrain, bloggers have fought a number of key battles with the government.

When the Bahraini authorities arrested earlier this year a blogger and two website technicians from the Internet forum Bahrain Online, which had posted a United Nations report critical of the government’s alleged discrimination against the local Shi’ite majority, local bloggers rallied to their defence.

The three have since been released.

’We felt that their arrest as moderators of an online community and their incarceration due to views and posts other than theirs...was a direct attack on freedoms of expression guaranteed by the Constitution,’ said Mr Mahmood Al-Youseff, the author of Bahrain’s best-known blog, Mahmood’s Den.

’We would like to think that we brought pressure to bear on the government to make them understand the error of their ways in this particular situation,’ he added.

However, Mr Al-Youseff - whose blog combines personal anecdotes, sardonic digressions on Bahraini culture, and weighty political discussion of Gulf politics - cautions that the charges against the three have not yet been dropped. This means that they are still barred from leaving the country, which affects ’their jobs, lives and liberties’.

Many Arab bloggers, including the writer of The Big Pharaoh, were inspired to start after witnessing the proliferation of Iraqi blogs after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in March 2003.

One of the first Iraqi blogs to gain international attention was Where Is Raed, written by a young Iraqi man known only as Salam Pax, or ’The Baghdad Blogger’. His daily musings on life in the country gained him thousands of readers and led eventually to a book and film deal.

Other blogs written by ordinary Iraqis keen to tell the world about life in the troubled country quickly attracted the attention of a global audience.

One such blog is Iraq The Model, an online diary focusing mainly on politics and reform which is written and run by three Baghdad-based brothers - Mohammed, Omar and Ali.

Each entry on their blog now provokes hundreds of comments from readers.

Blogging from afar

ARABS blogging in America constitute another influential group.

They range from anti-Israeli left-wingers to those who use their blogs to support the stated Bush agenda of ’spreading democracy’ in the Middle East.

Professor Asad Abukhalil, described in a recent Los Angeles Times profile as ’an atheist, anarchist and twice-divorced feminist’, writes the hugely popular Angry Arab News Service, which he launched in September 2003.

A Palestinian who grew up in Lebanon, and now a tenured professor in the politics department of California State University, Stanislaus, his blog - and frequent appearances on Al-Jazeera - have made him borderline famous in the region.

’This is a personal endeavour that helped me deal with my political frustrations in exile: frustrations at conditions in the US, the Arab world, and the world in general,’ he said.

Passionately against the US-led Iraq war, Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and what he condemns as often shallow reporting by self-proclaimed Middle East ’experts’, Prof Abukhalil provides links to articles on topics in the region often overlooked in the mainstream United States media.

But perhaps the biggest draw for non-Arabic speakers are the translations from the Arabic-language press and summaries of programmes that have been aired on Arabic-language satellite channels, with the accompanying deeply sarcastic but highly informed commentary - all interspersed with personal attacks on whoever he has decided to rip into on that particular day.

Like many bloggers, he said that the activity sometimes threatens to take over his whole life.

’I am not proud to admit that the increase in visitorship and publicity made me feel more obligated to the readers, although (in my mind, rationally speaking) it should not matter a bit,’ he said.

’But I realise how much it takes of one’s life when I panic whenever there is some technical problem. I once landed at (a) London airport exhausted and then arrived at my hotel, threw my luggage in my room and rushed to... blog. That did not please me.’

Mr Young, the journalist and blogger in Lebanon, cautions against obsessions.

’I’ve seen several Middle East scholars, or purported scholars, who have been entirely sucked up by their blog persona, to the detriment of their more serious work,’ he said, without giving specific examples.

At the other end of the political spectrum from Prof Abukhalil is Mr Oubai Shahbandar, who was born in Damascus but later moved to the US after being forced to flee Syria for political reasons.

A self-described ’radical Arab’ who supports the neo-conservative foreign policy agenda in the Middle East, he is the North American spokesman for the Reform Party of Syria (RPS).

The Syrian regime has promulgated an official decree banning the party and participation in any activity related to it. Unsurprisingly, RPS’s blog - Syria Comment Plus - is also blocked.

’The blog is dedicated to the representation of the full spectrum of diversity within the Syrian nation and the promotion of the overthrow of (President) Assad’s oppressive Ba’ath regime,’ said Mr Shahbandar.

Correspondents and student writers inside Syria are set to start contributing pieces to the blog.

’Through a network of writers inside Syria and the international Syrian diaspora, Syria Comment Plus will shed light on the Ba’ath Party’s oppressive measures and crimes committed against Syrian dissidents and ethnic minorities,’ Mr Shahbandar added.

Since Syria Commentary Plus has a political agenda that drives the information it decides to disseminate, it can hardly be considered an objective news source.

And that, of course, is the problem with political blogs, in the Middle East, as elsewhere: There is no way of knowing what is spin and what is news, and what seems like a breaking news story might turn out to be yet another conspiracy theory.

But there is no way of distinguishing between what is news and what is propaganda in the official media either, and with such a dearth of objective news coming from official sources, discriminating readers are likely to surf the blogs more to help fill the information gap.

BLOGS MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE:

Secret Dubai Diary
secretdubai.blogspot.com

The Big Pharaoh
bigpharaoh.blogspot.com

Mahmood’s Den
www.mahmood.tv

The Baghdad Blogger
dear_raed.blogspot.com

Iraq The Model
iraqthemodel.blogspot.com

Angry Arab News Service
angryarab.blogspot.com

Syria Comment Plus
reformsyria.blogspot.com