Under (Personal) Attack

Flame-wars are coming to the Saudi blogosphere, and they are coming very fast and furiously. Here is a new blog, called Shot of Death, which declared the war from his very first post. “When someone goes too far, and starts to offer his trashy ideas, then he becomes a betrayer to the noble task of blogging,” says the debut post (Arabic).

Apparently, this blogger is going to write posts that attack the current Saudi blogs, one blog at a time. The first victim of these attacks is Ibrahim, who has been taking us with him on a journey to find his wife-to-be. The idea behind the Shot of Death can be good, but right now, there is something that is really, really bad about this blog: The blog attacks the person behind the blog, not the blog itself. In this post he insults Ibrahim, and fires accusation that don’t seem to be based on any solid facts. So, this blog could be fun, and can make a lot of buzz, but don’t expect it to be a major success story here.

However, I think there is one way that this blog can make a huge success. Instead of taking on blogs, this blogger can take on some of the many ridiculous stories that appear in our local newspapers everyday. A good example for what I’m talking about here is Veiled Conceit, which specialize in the Weddings and Celebrations section of the NY Times. But if this new blogger is insisting on working on blogs, than I have one little piece of advice to offer: Criticize your target blogs constructionally, and avoid personal attacks.

I was thinking of telling you what I’m going to do if Saudi Jeans and/or Yawmyat came under attack, but I thought I’d rather ask you about this: What are you going to do if you found your blog featured on Shot of Death?

This story from Smithsonian Magazine on the Saudi …

This story from Smithsonian Magazine on the Saudi baby boomers says that Al Waleed Bin Talal’s company, Kingdom Holdings, has the only known Saudi workplace that allows Muslim women to choose whether to wear the hijab or Western dress. This reminds me of a recent post by a Saudi female blogger, who went to a job interview, where she was asked to take off her abaya and scarf. She was amazed, they told her: Sorry but as you can see that this is our work environment, so do you want to go through with the interview or not? She, of course, left the place.