It’s no surprise that the Western media was a little slow to catch up to the unrest in Tunisia. The tiny country sandwiched between Libya and Algeria has always been notoriously opaque to outsiders. Known as one of the world’s most quietly...
For months in advance of Sunday’s parliamentary elections, Egyptian officials waged a rather strident campaign to fend off calls to allow international election monitors to observe the vote. The issue, they said, was out of the question and an...
Parliamentary elections are Sunday in Egypt, so here’s a heavily Egypt-centric collection of related links, plus some other happenings around the region In advance of parliamentary elections in Egypt, the regime is cracking down on opposition...
It started out as a routine night on the Egyptian parliamentary campaign trail, and ended as a clear lesson in the methods that a police state uses to control, intimidate and generally confuse journalists. Along with several colleagues, I traveled...
Kareem Amer freed after serving a prison term for insulting Islam and defaming Egypt’s president. Ashraf Khalil reports
Online free expression activists around the world are rejoicing at the news that jailed Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer has been freed and had returned to his family’s Alexandria home. Amer won the Hugo Young Award for Journalism at the Index on...
Ashraf Khalil: Palestine’s ‘Atheist blogger’ behind bars
Waleed Al-Husseini has been making waves and offending religious sensibilities in the Middle East for years. A committed atheist, the 26 year-old resident of the occupied West Bank is known for a prolific online presence --- much of which centres...
Ashraf Khalil: Middle East media round up
Morocco’s on-again off-again ban on the Al Jazeera satellite news channel is apparently on again. The kingdom is famously touchy about certain issues --- last year it banned a magazine for publishing an opinion poll about King Mohammed II’s...
Ali Abdulemam’s trial is an important test case for free speech in the Middle East. Ashraf Khalil explains why
The tight-knit world of Middle East bloggers and electronic activists is rallying forcefully around the case of Ali Abdulemam, a prominent Bahraini blogger and online activist, who was arrested in September as part of a wide-ranging crackdown on...