It looks obvious

“Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” — Albert Einstein

Stop pretending

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I guess this is not an issue the UN Human Rights Mockery Council would be concern with:

CAIRO: In a cramped jail cell in Alexandria, Egypt, sits a soft-spoken 22- year-old student. Kareem Amer was sent to prison for over a month for allegedly "defaming the president of Egypt" and "highlighting inappropriate aspects that harm the reputation of Egypt." Where did Amer commit these supposed felonies? On his weblog.

If the Alexandria prosecutors’ standards of censorship were applied in the United States or Europe, thousands upon thousands of bloggers would be behind bars. The basic right of individual free expression is sadly not respected in today’s Egypt. Yet the authorities’ decision to jail an obscure student for his writing reveals a larger struggle for free speech playing out between dissident bloggers and state prosecutors across the Middle East.

But why should it? If in one of its member states this practice is possible:

Regimes accustomed to control have struggled to respond. In Tunisia, a Web publisher, Zouhair Yahyaoui, was dragged from an Internet café by security forces and tortured into revealing his site’s password after he posted a quiz mocking President Zine Abidine ben Ali. In Iran, authorities arrested a student, Mojtaba Saminejad, after he condemned the arrest of several fellow bloggers and "insulted the Supreme Leader." Daif Al-Ghazal, an investigative reporter for the Web journal Libya Al-Youm, was found murdered in Benghazi — his fingers cut off as a warning sign to anticorruption online writers.

Here I intended to write a conclusion paragraph about the fact that the only hope for better Middle-East is more liberal democracy. But the problem isn’t just the regimes in that region, it is the fact that we are willing to accept them as our allies in the "war on terror" - where in fact they are, by oppressing their people, are a major cause for its existence. The problem isn’t only that Tunisian cannot mock their dictators, it is the fact that we agree that these tyrants will be a respectful member in the UN Human Rights Council.

Its time to stop pretending and to call tyrant for what they are.

 

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Written by Rogel

December 28th, 2006 at 12:23 pm

Posted in Freedom of Speech, The Middle East

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Viewing 2 Comments

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    Rogel, have you ever been to Global Voices Online? You'd find a veritable 'wealth' of samples like the one you're mentioning. As for these gov'ts being partners in the war on terror, you know what's what?! They know torture like the best of them, hence their valuable resources for this little thing called, renditioning. Since when does the US have legitimate partners in anything? I've become so cynical and disillusioned, it's not fun..
    ah well, gotta focus on the good things in life too,
    Ingrid
    ps, finally wrote a piece on darfur again with an accompanying video. Have you seen the tv ad from the savedarfur org? I even saw it on tv here in Austin..it was a pretty good one at that.
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    You have to admit, Ingrid, that it is much safer to blog from Texas than from Egypt :)
    I was mainly complaining about the hypocritical structure and behavior of the UN, but I agree that the US should choose better partners than it sometimes does.

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