Wala 7abeh.

A petition has been launched against the blockage of Mahmood’s Den. Please support free speech in Bahrain by signing it and sending the link to as many people as possible.

Link to petition

There is music in the meadows, in the air–
Autumn is here;
Skies are gray, but hearts are mellow,

—William Stanley Braithwaite, “A Lyric of Autumn” (1904)

We stopped to pick the leaves that cover the beds of grass behind the cafeteria on campus. It’s not the season for rainbows and hanging laundry- it’s the season for blowing leaves, cool autumn showers, and the crunchy sound of leaves crackling beneath feet.

Picture taken by Noori during our walk today;

My god, the state of internet censorship in the Arab world progressively keeps getting worse, the latest series of bad news coming from Bahrain, which just blocked one of the best blogs in the Arab world, Mahmood’s Den.

Mahmood’s Den blocking order signed by the Minister of disInformation

I mean, what the hell?

Mahmood’s Den was the very first blog I ever read in my life while Googling the closure of Big Brother Arabia in Bahrain due to “indecency”. I had no idea that it was a blog, nor did I have any idea what a blog was. I rediscovered it later on when I started reading blogs in 2004. It is one of the oldest blogs in the Arab world, as well as one of the most informative and interesting. Although internet censorship is shitty in all its forms, what makes the blocking of Mahmood’s Den much more of a pity is that Bahrain’s “Big Brother” cannot distinguish between what’s good for them and what’s bad for them.

The other sites on the list are just as depressing, because this is a sad signal that the Arab world is going backwards with tolerance years at a time. In 2005, Huda Azra Nono, a Jewish lady from the Bahraini Jewish community, was the president of Bahrain Human Rights Society. Today, a year later, Bahrain blocks the following sites:

www.freecopts.net
www.arabchurch.com
www.ladeeni.net
www.kurdtimes.com
www.annaqed.com

Copts. Arab Atheists. Arab church. Criticism. Kurds.
Tolerance = 0.
(add to that albawaba.com, which is like, WTF?)

Ahhh. The state we have reached! It really breaks my heart. Arabs. We need to wake up and smell the coffee.

11 million fricking text messages were sent in Jordan on the eve of Eid.
My God. 11 million? That’s sort of crazy, especially as the whole whopping population of Jordan is like half that number; and I didn’t send any messages so you can count one person out.

The Al-Ghad article reads, “Text messaging service (messejat) reduced the social burden on Jordanians.”

[source]