Today’s Links

Shoura Council finally decided to open its doors to citizens. Shoura said it is ready now to hear the voices of concerned citizens through its Human Rights and Petitions Committee. The King is scheduled to deliver the annual royal speech launching the second year of the the Council’s fifth term Sunday. Unlike Saudi Gazette, I don’t think it would be anything like the State of the Union address.
In other news, the King has received the Jeddah Investigation report. I’m eager to hear the news of some heads rolling. I’m also curious to read the report but I doubt it will be made public.
Okay, so Fox News published a story on Saudi bloggers, but as SUSRIS blog correctly notes, the story has some holes. No surprise here, I guess.
I disagree with almost everything published in Lojainiat, but blocking the website is simply something that I’m not okay with. CITC should stop acting as policemen on our brains.
Typical case of Saudi flirting using text messages. A pretty lame attempt if you ask me. But hey, I never been into this kind of thing so maybe you don’t want to take my word for it.

Why KASP is Flawed?

King Abdullah Scholarships Program (KASP) is an impressive undertaking. More than 70,000 Saudi students have been sent to many different countries around the world to continue their education. The program is fully paid for by the government, and it is said to be designed in a way to cover the demands of the job market in the country. Although it has been deemed mostly successful, the program has some issues. These issues, however, are usually dismissed by officials at the Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) as minor.

For example, 1073 students on KASP have been recently sent home for reasons related to their behavior, religious observance, or academic performance. And there is a fourth reason related to the nation that I don’t quite understand. The ministry says this is such a small number compared to the overall number of students who study abroad, but I think the fact that they had to return more than a thousand students indicates a problem with the selection process.

A friend of mine was recently traveling to the US. On the plane, he met with 15 Saudi students going on scholarships. Only one out of the fifteen could actually read English, and was able to fill out the customs form.

I think some of the problems with KASP have to do with the philosophy behind the program which I believe is flawed. Limiting the program to a small set of technical and medical majors just to supply to the demand of the job market is not the right strategy to develop a modern state. Yes, our country needs engineers and doctors. But we also need artists, philosophers, linguists, sociologists, and graphic designers.

Unfortunately, MOHE is highly allergic to criticism. When a student wrote a blog post about the Saudi Cultural Commission in Canada last year, he had to take it down few hours later. Mohammed al-Khazem, who wrote a book about higher education in the country, says MOHE is seeking attention at the expense of doing what is really important. That is, to help the 20 universities in the Kingdom to become better institutions.

There are high hopes that KASP will transform Saudi Arabia. The students who studied abroad are expected not only to come back with degrees, but also with a change in mindset that will push the country to the next level economically, socially, and culturally. But there is also fear that these high hopes might turn out to be false. We sent thousands of students in the ‘70s and ‘80s to study abroad and when they came back they did not change much. Is it going to be any different this time?

Today’s Links

This is awful: after Michael reposted the abaya pictures, he received death threats via his BlackBerry. The phone calls did not shake him, but later he later received an email with a link to an extremist website that had his images. He had to take the pictures down, again. That’s a real shame, but I can’t blame him. I recently received some hate mail as well after my post on al-Barrak’s fatwa.
As I said before, Maureen Dowd was here. I don’t know what to say about her column. Today I don’t feel particularly optimistic. Hell, I don’t feel optimistic at all, actually. It seems that Dowd met only the fancy people. Also, what’s up with this: “He has encouraged housing developments with architecture that allows families, and boys and girls within families, to communicate more freely.”?

Today’s Links

Note to Arab News: my last name is al-Omran, not al-Omranm. The way you misspelled my name makes it unpronounceable. Another thing: I don’t blog for Saudi Jeans. Saudi Jeans doesn’t pay me any money. Saudi Jeans is my blog. It’s the website where I blog. Also, don’t rephrase what I said and then put it in quote marks. Kthxbai.
Fellow blogger Najla Barasain is about to leave KSA soon heading to the US in order to continue her education. She is understandably worried.

Today’s links

The lingerie boycott did not succeed, reports Arab News. Why? Reem Asaad says because people’s reactions to social causes is weak in Saudi Arabia. I agree with her that even if the boycott itself filed, raising awareness is still a good outcome of the campaign.
~~I have previously posted a video on how KAUST students entertain themselves, but the night version is even better:~~ UPDATE: After speaking with the video owner, I decided to remove it because it might compromise her safety. She did not ask me to remove it, but I thought it would be better for everyone. Sorry.

Prayers for Carol

It is with great sadness that I share with you that my friend and fellow blogger Carol Fleming, aka American Bedu, has suffered the loss of her beloved husband Abdullah al-Ajroush after a long struggle with lukemia. I met Abdullah at his house in Riyadh a few years ago and he was very kind and warm. He was a real gentelman. May he rests in peace.

Carol will contniue her own battle with cancer, as she still has about two months left of her own treatment program. Please keep her in your prayers.

Professional Brain Explosions

Whenever someone asks me about the Shoura Council, I quickly respond: “Shoura is dead to me.” I have lost hope that anything good for the people would come out of this institution. Some think I’m being too harsh on them but I beg to differ. Now this is old news, because a couple of days ago Dr. Fahad al-Aboud, a member of the Shoura Council since 2001, offered yet another reason to take the council less seriously.

In his weekly column for al-Riyadh daily, Dr. al-Aboud wrote about a new iPod from Apple. That confused me a little bit because last time I checked Apple’s latest iPod was introduced in September 2009. So I figured maybe he meant the iPad, which was unveiled by Steve Jobs last month. The “revolutionary device,” he said, is a “tablet” computer. Okay, it’s the iPad then, I thought.

But in the next paragraph he adds, “the new device is 3-in-1: a mobile phone, an iPod, and an internet browser.”

Um, I’m confused again. The iPad indeed includes an iPod app and an internet browser, but can’t make phone calls. The iPod Touch is, well an iPod, can browse the internet, but also can’t make phone calls. The iPhone, on the other hand, can do all that, but it’s not exactly a tablet. So what’s up Doc?!

Aboud iPad

Dr. al-Aboud, who holds a PhD in information sciences from Florida State University, goes on and on about the new mysterious iPod that we have not yet seen, saying the new nonexistent device has given Apple “a psychological victory over its peers.” He then asks the all important question: “how far this amazing technological advancement will go?” It is safe to say, he concludes, that the human brain will have a hard time keeping up with or following this advancement.

Well, I can tell you that my brain is exploding from all this gibberish that I’m reading.

But on a more serious note, I believe this article, in addition to showcasing the incompetency of Shoura members, also says a lot about the state of media in the country. The minister of information and top editors here keep talking about how blogs and internet websites lack professionalism and credibility, presumably compared to their newspapers, and then they go and run utter rubbish.

Publishing an article like the aforementioned shows clearly that these newspapers do no fact-checking whatsoever. Do they even know what fact-checking is? Have they ever heard of such thing? They should. They are, after all, professional.