Month: November 2008

Links for November 17th

Links from my del.icio.us account for November 17th:

Links November 14th to November 16th

Links from my del.icio.us account for November 14th through November 16th:

Iraq documentary focused on female soldiers

I should have posted this on Veteran’s Day, this past week. It’s a review I recently wrote of a documentary about US service women in Iraq. The special team was called “Team Lioness” (they don’t seem to have had any inkling of the implications of “lioness” in Arabic) and used to interact with Iraqi civilians in situations in which women were needed. It’s a pretty good film, and one more reminder of how much Iraq (remember Iraq? Now that the election is over..) has cost. Although I think we need to always remember that it’s cost Iraqis way more than it’s cost our country.

Let them grope cake

Mama Suzanne says this harassment stuff is all made up:

CAIRO (AFP) – Egyptian first lady Suzanne Mubarak has played down allegations of rampant sexual harassment in her country, accusing the media, and implicitly Islamist militants, of exaggerating the reports.

“Egyptian men always respect Egyptian women,” the pro-government Al-Ahram newspaper on Friday quoted the wife of President Hosni Mubarak as saying in remarks aired on Thursday by Al-Arabiya television.

The Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights (ECWR) released a survey earlier this year showing that 83 percent of Egyptian women and 98 percent of foreign women in Egypt are sexually harassed.

“This gives the impression that the streets in Egypt are not safe. That is not true… The media have exaggerated,” Mubarak said.

“Maybe one, two or even 10 incidents occurred. Egypt is home to 80 million people. We can’t talk of a phenomenon. Maybe a few scatterbrained youths are behind this crime.

“And maybe some people wanted to make it seem as though the streets of Egypt are not safe so girls and women stay at home. This could be their agenda,” she said in a reference to Islamist militants.

Of course, in her own experience, when she goes out on the street in her motorcode surrounded by bodyguards and soldiers, no one EVER gropes her. So it must apply to all other women in Egypt.

Links for November 14th

Links from my del.icio.us account for November 14th:

Sinai’s bedouins have had enough

Since the 2004 attack on the Taba Hilton and the subsequent massive round-up of Sinai bedouins by Egypt’s security apparatus, the situation of Sinai’s bedouin population has gone from bad to worse. Already a marginalized group that has been even more left by the wayside by the government than Nile Valley Egyptians, Sinai bedouins have had to endure humiliating police abuse, detention without trial, and countless other abuses. Living in a poor area of the country under direct military rule, seeing the development of luxury resorts like Sharm al-Sheikh without reaping much of the profits they generate, some have even turned to remember the days of Israeli occupation of Sinai as a golden age. What worse indictment of the Mubarak era, for a president whose great claim is that he was the man who recovered Sinai, that a year or so ago young bedouins staged a symbolic march to the Israeli border? Now, as Egypt collaborates with Israel and the US to close down the smuggling tunnels to Gaza (one of the main sources of income in Eastern Sinai), they turn against the state. The signs have been coming for a while: is any of this a surprise?

Also see:

Three Bedouins Killed In Police Clashes
Armed Clashes Between Security And Tarabeen Tribe In Sinai Detain 25 Officers And Soldiers For Hours

For background and root causes see the International Crisis Group report Egypt’s Sinai Question.

Links November 12th to November 13th

Links from my del.icio.us account for November 12th through November 13th:

Flickr needs to get its #$% together

If you haven’t noticed yet, Hossam over at Arabawy has been having a lot of trouble with his Flickr account lately. For several years now, Hossam has been using his Flickr account (and introducing other Egyptian photojournalists to the service) to spread the use of photography for political advocacy, a strategy he passionately believes in and that has been an underpinning of his media-heavy blogging (which is costing us a bundle in hosting fees!) I think Hossam’s style of blogging (whether or not you agree with his radical politics) is extremely innovative and a great example of how “Web 2.0” services ike Flickr or Twitter can be put to a use their founders never even imagined.

It’s therefore really sad that Flickr fails to see the point he has been trying to make in posting pictures by photographer friends who have given him permission to use their pics on his Flickr account. Flickr says that the account should only have his own pics. That’s silly: he may not be using Flickr only to showcase his own stuff, as most Flickr users do, but as a tool to collect information (in the form of pictures) about certain events and causes. As long as he has permission to use that information (and he does), Flickr should not be reducing the usefulness of a service he paid for.

For me, the troubling thing here is not just that Flickr has taken some questionable decisions, such as marking pro-Palestinian and pro-separatist Irish murals as “unsafe” (and therefore only viewable with a login) with no reason whatsoever. It’s not just that Flickr seems to have arbitrarily selected Hossam’s account, where he openly acknowledges and credits photos that are not his, when its millions of users could simply take credit themselves for other people’s pictures and get away with it. Its great crime, unpardonable for a US company, is that it has shown very poor customer service in this case. If a customer wants to host his and others’ pics – basically wants to have a group account – why shouldn’t he? And if that’s not possible under Flickr’s account rules, then the rules are silly and should be changed, because the customer should always be king.

Links November 11th to November 12th

Links from my del.icio.us account for November 11th through November 12th: