After we got rid of the notorious ISU for good, it seem that now it’s the turn of CITC to prove that idiotic internet censorship is still well and alive in Saudi Arabia. After blocking liberal forums and some small blogs, they have decided to go big this time and block the Guardian Blogs. Probably this has something to do with Al Yamamah scandal, but the BAE investigation file pages where you can find out about the deal are still available. It’s not that they usually have a good reason to block websites in the first place, anyway.
Category Blogging
On Linky Love
Reading this piece from the NY Times about the Larry Craig case, I thought it was worth pointing to this quote by famous blogger Jeff Jarvis: ”A link is not necessarily an endorsement, but a way to say ‘you go judge for yourself.’ ”
Because blogging is still not well understood in this part of the world, there are some things that people don’t realize about this medium. Many people think that when I link to something it necessarily means that I agree with it. This is not true. In most cases, when I link to something I usually mean: “hey, check this out.” Another thing is that most bloggers here don’t know how to use linking properly to provide a better reading experience.
Old timers on this blog probably remember when I used to link to dozen of stuff everyday with short or no commentary at all. I stopped doing that, but I still provide a lot of links everyday to content that I think worth checkin out in right sidebar under the title Arabic Picks. I chose to make it all in Arabic because I don’t write in Arabic anymore and I thought this could be like an alternative to writing (I admit it’s not, but hey, at least I’m trying :-). I’d love to hear what you have to say about this, so kick things off in the comments.
Saudi Favourites
British expat Margrave is starting a series of posts called Riyadh Favourites (RF). The aim is to help you find places to go and things to do in the capital. I think this is a very nice idea. If we started to post reviews like that and tag them with tags like Riyadh Favourites, Jeddah Favourites, etc. we might end up with a good collective Saudi tourism directory. I have already tagged some of my old posts about restaurants and other stuff in Riyadh which you can find here. On a related note, check out the Jeddah Food blog.
Saudi Laptop Sleeves from iNouf
Fellow Saudi blogger Nouf has collaborated with her sister to offer this neat collection of hand-made laptop sleeves. The price is SR 150 per piece and you can order from here. I like the shmagh one :-)
I already have a sleeve for my MacBook that is also hand-made, although it’s not as fancy and cool as the creations of Nouf and her sister. Last year I found this DYI on Lifehacker, so I gave an old T-shirt to my mother and she sewed the thing to fit my laptop. I was going to put a picture of my sleeve but it looks exactly like the picture below because somehow I ended up not just following the instructions but also using a very similar color.
What Civil Society?
When I was interviewed by Naif Abu-Saida on Orbit few months ago, I asked: “Do we, in Saudi Arabia, really have a civil society? There is no system or law regulating the functioning of civil society organizations.” Naif disagreed with me and insisted that there are such organizations and it was simply ignorant on my part to deny their existence.
The interview was mainly about blogging, but civil society got a mention during a call by fellow blogger Hadeel al-Hodhaif who touched on the issue. Since then, I’ve been meaning to write about this but never got around to do it and I finally decided to give it shot, so here it goes.
What Naif meant when he was talking about civil society organizations is mainly charities and philanthropic bodies. It is true that charities are usually included when citing examples for civil society institutions, but most literature on the subject is focused on the political element of these organizations, which aims to “facilitates better awareness and a more informed citizenry, who make better voting choices, participate in politics, and hold government more accountable as a result.”
Needless to say, such political element is clearly absent in this part of the world. Of course this has much to do with the fact that we don’t live in a democratic system because the civil society concept is closely linked to democracy and representation. As far as I know, Shoura Council have been discussing a new law for regulating civil society organizations that is expected to be voted on soon.
Until we find out what our esteemed Shoura members have been up to, my question for now is: considering our circumstances, can we here in Saudi Arabia actually call the many charities and philanthropic bodies functioning in the country civil society organizations?
Kuwaiti Bloggers Abducted
Some very sad and disturbing news coming from Kuwait:
At Saturday 8pm Kuwait State Police abducted 2 Kuwaiti bloggers Bashar Al-Sayegh from Al-Ohmmah.org and Jassem Al-Qamis without the due protection of the Kuwait Constitution while leaving work. The reason being that an anonymous commenter wrote something criticizing the Emir yet even though it was removed immediately by Al-Sayegh they are still holding him responsible.
You can keep up with the latest updates from the Kuwaiti blogosphere through Safat.
Liberal Blog Hacked. How Pathetic!
I was skimming through my feeds in Google Reader while watching a football match on TV when I saw this:
It looks like some muttawa kids got too much free time in their hands and they decided to use it to do some cyber jihad. They have hacked a Saudi liberal blog written in Arabic and erased its content completely. The pictured above statement says “any attempt to regain the ownership of the blog or anything like it will be hacked.”
I think the original owner of the blog should contact Jeeran, who host his blog, about this and they probably would be able to return it to him as well as restoring his posts. I don’t have much to say about it, but: seriously kids, this is pathetic.
UPDATE: The posts are back now on the blog, but all of them carry today’s date instead of their original posting dates. I don’t know what happened and the blogger doesn’t offer an explanation (yet), but I’m glad it’s back.
UPDATE 2: The blogger has responded to a comment I left on his latest post saying this happened after he was working on the blog at an internet cafe and then left without logging out. He offers more details here, and says he will write about this incident soon.
Saudi Jeans 
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