18 Feb 11 | Uncategorized
by Emily Badger
When CBS News announced earlier this week that chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan had been hospitalised for a brutal sexual assault in Egypt’s Tahrir Square last Friday, journalists across the nightly news and blogosphere were appalled. Some also expressed the faint hope the news might help remove the stigma female journalists face in acknowledging such encounters. An even bigger shock, though, came the next day, as left-leaning journalist Nir Rosen tweeted the reaction that he quickly came to regret.
“lara logan had to outdo anderson. where was her buddy mccrystal?” Rosen tweeted, referring to CNN broadcaster Anderson Cooper’s report that he’d been punched in the face in Cairo two weeks ago. Logan had earlier criticised a controversial Rolling Stone profile of General Stanley McChrystal, who was later relieved by President Obama for his own intemperate remarks.
Then, Rosen added:
“jesus christ, at a moment when she is going to become a martyr and glorified we should at least remember her role as a major war monger.”
He later took down the tweets – but not before some conservative news sites snapped screen shots of them for posterity. “I thought, it’s just silly social media,” a chastened Rosen told media blog FishbowlDC, by which time it already was too late. New York University announced that Rosen would resign as a fellow with the Center on Law and Security.
“Nir Rosen is always provocative, but he crossed the line yesterday with his comments about Lara Logan,” the programme’s executive director, Karen J. Greenberg, said in a statement. “I am deeply distressed by what he wrote about Ms. Logan and strongly denounce his comments. They were cruel and insensitive and completely unacceptable. Mr Rosen tells me that he misunderstood the severity of the attack on her in Cairo. He has apologised, withdrawn his remarks, and submitted his resignation as a fellow, which I have accepted. However, this in no way compensates for the harm his comments have inflicted. We are all horrified by what happened to Ms Logan, and our thoughts are with her during this difficult time.”
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg called Rosen’s history of incendiary comments “deeply pathetic.” Salon scolded: “Apparently he still hasn’t remembered that sexual assault isn’t great joking around material.” Mother Jones, to which Rosen has contributed, said he “completely lost his mind today and forgot that “joking” about rape falls into the category of NOT EVER FUNNY.” Cooper, for his part, confronted Rosen personally on his show on Wednesday night.
Rosen has now attempted to explain his position in an article for Salon. He described what he wrote as “a disgusting comment born from dark humour…developed working in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen and Lebanon—and a need to provoke people.” He also pointed out the apparent double standards which allow “racist right-wing pundits (to) say whatever they want on serious platforms.”
17 Feb 11 | Middle East and North Africa, News and features
International media has restricted access to Bahrain, journalists report. At least 95 people were injured and four people killed in a police attack on protesters in Manama’s Pearl Square on Thursday. Two people died in the protests earlier this week.
Nick Kristof, New York Times correspondent said: “Bahrain barring journalists from entry at airport. King Hamad doesn’t want witnesses to his brutality.”
Amira Al Hussaini, whose blog was blocked in the country earlier this year, is tweeting and blogging from Bahrain.
CNN cameras have been confiscated at airport and Al Jazeera’s Bilal Randeree (@bilalr) has not been allowed into the country, Al Hussaini said.
Randeree, an online journalist based in Qatar, confirmed the incident on Twitter: “I arrived@ #Manama airport this morn [Thursday] was told by immigration that no more visa on arrival for #aljazeera ppl – returnin to #Doha soon.”
ABC News reported that its correspondent Miguel Marquez had been caught in the crowd and “beaten by men with billy clubs in Bahrain’s capital, Manama.”
On Wednesday the Committee to Protect Journalists expressed concern about detained and attacked journalists and restricted internet access across the Middle East, in Libya, Bahrain, Iran and Yemen.
In an open letter on Monday, the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights called upon the Bahraini King to prevent the use of force against peaceful protest.
The organisation also asked for the release of more than 450 detainees, including human rights activists.
02 Feb 11 | Index Index, minipost, News and features
As protests against rising food and living costs continue in Khartoum, six journalists and two media staff have been detained by authorities and one student has died of injuries sustained during clash with police. Mohammed Abdulrahman of Ahlia University died in Omdurman hospital after being injured during student protests on 30 January. The detained journalists are Rashid Abd al- Wahab and Ali Ahmad haj al-Amin of Arjas al -Huriya, Sara Taj al-Sir of Al Sahafa, Ahmed Sir al-Khatam of the independent daily akhbar al-Youm, Fatima al-Ghazali of Al-Jarida.
06 Nov 10 | Uncategorized
Recent reports on the stabbing of Labour MP Stephen Timms seem to suggest that his attacker Roshanara Choudhry was “radicalised” by the Internet, and specifically videos of Yemen-based Anwar al-Awlaki on YouTube.
The Telegraph’s report on interviews with Choudhry is revealing: it is claimed she “did not attend mosque” and had “no-one to answer questions about her faith”.
This strikes one as somewhat disingenuous: Choudhry’s misfortunate parents are both said to be practicing Muslims, and it is not difficult to find a mosque in east London. There are people to ask. So the question arises: was it that she had no one she could ask about her faith, or no one who would tell her what she wanted to hear: that she should become a jihadi, or even a shahid.
Much was made of Roshanara Choudhry’s bright academic record, as if this made her receptiveness to jihadism all the more unusual. But this displays a seemingly wilful ignorance of Islamist politics, and its hold on UK, and particularly London, university campuses.
Only a few weeks ago, anti-extremist think tank the Quilliam Foundation produced a report on the hijacking of university Islamic society’s by far-right Islamists, focussing on City University in Islington, north London.
As it happens, I attended City University myself, over a decade ago. Even then, groups such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir and its extreme splinter Al Muhajiroun had a strong presence on campus, and exerted disproportionate influence on the Muslim student population. This trend, by all accounts, has only intensified post 9/11, and is manifested throughout London’s universities.
So it is seems unlikely that Choudhry would not have encountered extremism before logging on to YouTube.
But that is the narrative being spun. And there seem to be to be several reasons for this.
It is a measure of the ubiquity of the web in modern life that we now tend to appeal to it for solutions and bemoan it when things go wrong in our society.
Humans always look for an overarching reason when we feel that something has gone badly wrong: in the past, we imagined that capricious gods decided our fate. Now, when an ugly phenomenon rears its head, we look over its shoulder to find a cause beyond the phenomenon. We blame “the Internet”.
There are, of course, some major sites that most of us use daily: chiefly Google, YouTube and Facebook.
When Facebook pages sprung up dedicated to murderer Raoul Moat (pages, incidentally, that contained as much criticism as praise, and more irony than either) Prime Minister David Cameron sincerely suggested that he would consult Facebook about the possibility of removing them. Let us not engage with the content: let us instead rush to have the content hidden.
So apart from its assumed omiscience and omnipresence, Google (and Facebook, and well, all web services) faces another problem. We all assume we know how easy it is to remove something from the web. And you know, it is fairly easy. Technically adept people will always be able to dig up ghosts of Internet past, but for the majority of people, when we press “remove” on Facebook, or unpublish a page on blogger, that’s pretty much the end of it. Censorship seems easy, and doesn’t carry the same taboo as pulping books or running lines of blue pencil over a correspondence.
But just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we should. If we are to be serious about free speech, which we are supposed to be as a society that aspires to democracy, then we have to accept that poisonous ideologies will be disemminated: it is only when only very specific, credible, direct, incitement or threats are raised that we should even conceivably discuss censorship.
While al-Awlaki, bin Laden and others may call for jihad against the kuffar, surely it was Choudhry’s own interpretation of this that led to her vicious attack on Timms.
Which brings us to the area of personal agency: the majority of the vast amounts of material uploaded to YouTube is put there by individuals: That is the real glory of the site. Google states:
“YouTube has community guidelines that prohibit dangerous or illegal activities such as bomb-making, hate speech, and incitement to commit violent acts. We also remove all videos and terminate any account registered by a member of a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization and used in an official capacity to further the interests of that organization.”
Which you can agree or disagree with.
But the company also says:
“What we can’t do, and which few people would want a private company to do, is check what people want to post online before they do so. The truth is that due to the huge advances the internet has enabled in free expression, offensive or even illegal content may appear for a time, but we have clear rules and will continue to apply them to material brought to our attention.”
This seems right: while one may have difficulties with certain provisos, the greatest offence would be for YouTube to monitor and edit every last piece of content uploaded. Apart from being undesirable, it would quite simply be impossible.
If we are worried about the spread of jihadist ideology and its appeal to people such as Roshanara Choudhry — which we should be — then we are much better served actually learning about it and examining it, giving society power to challenge its arguments. We cannot do this if our first impulse is to block it out.
