On Information Literacy In The Middle East

As we are exposed to the raw feeds of information in our interconnected world, we are increasingly forced to a much greater degree of editorial responsibility than was previously the case. We need to filter what it is we're seeing and hearing, what we're being told. As mainstream media outlets struggle to keep up with the need to beat 'real time', we see that not only do 'context and analysis' frequently suffer, but also the movement of information is also prone to network effects.

Worryingly, if a newspaper, say The Guardian as an example, publishes a story with a duff fact or premise and you manage to get that story corrected, it's too late. Because fifty other outlets have picked up The Guardian's story and happily repeated it. In the inexorable march to harvest clicks, the most dramatic and counter-intuitive stories are snapped up and media outlets are happy cannibals. Your chances of getting that genie back into the bottle are pretty much zilch.

We're not - despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary - stupid, us humans. We've quickly worked out that this network effect can be used to great benefit. If we're first out with something nice and dramatic sounding, by the time anyone gets around to saying, 'Wait, wat?' the world's already chowing down on our spurious claims. Think Trump.

Even Google is now experimenting with fact checking features, adding fact checking links to news search results.

Now we take all that stuff and we squeeze it into the oddly shaped bottle that is the Middle East, where media have long been cowed and access to unfettered opinion and anything else generally regarded as 'dangerous' for our social well-being and morality has been repressed. This has arguably resulted in societies which lack the practice in questioning and critical faculties to handle the sudden cornucopia which social media and the real time news cycle have unleashed.

We have already seen how the initial reaction to this bounty resulted in tectonic change in the region, I have argued before that Occupy Wall Street started in Lebanon. But if we look at where we are today and at the challenges of understanding and processing all of this information, we can not only see the problematic aspects, but also the opportunities this stuff represents.

It is those very opportunities which have driven veteran journalist, founder of AUB's journalism training program and all-round journalism trainer Magda Abu-Fadil, together with fellow editors Jordi Torrent & Alton Grizzle to produce Opportunities for Media and Information Literacy in the Middle East and North Africa, a report (actually the 2016 Yearbook from the International Clearinghouse on Children, Youth and Media) which highlights the need to teach information literacy in the region's schools. The report makes fascinating reading for anyone who cares about media, the flow of information within society and the need to enhance the critical faculties of a young generation brought into a world where the dizzying flow of fact and fallacy can sometimes threaten to sweep us away.

What I like about it is that the report doesn't sit on its hands and bemoan the parlous state of things, but makes concrete recommendations for positive social change which can be relatively simply and effectively implemented. The time, as the report notes, has never been so propitious...

The Trouble With Labour

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The local partner of the New York Times, which reprints the newspaper for a small and discerning audience in the UAE, chose not to print one issue of the paper this week, Monday's, which carried a report on the labour conditions of the men who built the now completed New York University building in Abu Dhabi.

The article is of course available online for anyone who knows what an Internet is. It's linked here. Buzzfeed, playing Chinese whispers, makes a number of small but critical errors in its coverage of the incident, claiming this is "...the first time UAE authorities had tried to censor an NYT story."

Except it wasn't any 'authority'. The Khaleej Times reprints the NYT and the decision was clearly theirs. The NYT's own letter to subscribers makes it clear that Khaleej Times "deemed it too sensitive". Not the National Media Council, which would have been the censoring body if authority was to come into play.

The move, a muckle-headed one on KT's part if you don't mind me saying so, does the UAE a disservice. The story needed to be aired locally, the attempt to suppress it was clearly futile and did more damage to the country's reputation than letting the piece run would have caused.

I am increasingly frequently enraged by expats acting the censor. They err on the side of caution, fearful for their precious tax-free jobs and then they make fools of us all. We can't talk about that, best avoid this. The whispered, winked conversations are infuriating. It's the politics of the playground, my dad's bigger than yours. "I'm, let us say, close to those in authority and I don't mind telling you this wouldn't play well," says Sam Cheeseman as he stamps his mark on the commentary which actually doesn't 'cross' any 'line' as we know it.

The National Media Council has read, and passed for publication, two of my three serious Middle East based novels. I subsequently chose to take content out because I thought it unnecessarily offensive - my choice and decision entirely and not based on fear of my position here but purely on my judgement of the fine line between what is necessary to make a story 'play' and be realistic and what would annoy or cause offence to my readers. The 'C' word, for instance, I eventually chose not to use because I know women who find it highly offensive and the story lived on just dandy without it. The NMC left it in, I took it out.

The NMC has not asked me to change a word of my books. Not one word. Ever.

Olives - A Violent Romance contains pre-marital sex between Muslims and Christians, Muslims drinking alcohol and other stuff. Beirut - An Explosive Thriller goes way further. There's all sorts of stuff in there, from prostitution to heroin, booze and murder. The NMC didn't bat an eyelid.

Writer friends are sore amazed that books have to be read before being 'passed' as fit for publication, but the NMC is on a journey. When I first dropped wide-eyed onto the tarmac at Dubai International back in 1988, the Ministry Of Information ruled and its rule was indeed heavy-handed. The UAE gets very little credit for how very far it has come in such a relatively short time. Don't forget the UK was still banning and censoring things right up into the 1980s, from Lady Chatterley's Lover to Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Relax.

So you can stop wagging your finger in this direction, matey.

But the core fact in the NYT story and the spate of others like it that really has me wondering is this, undoubtedly set to be most unpopular, thought. If things are so very bad for labour in the UAE, then why - over fifty years after they started building this place - do the workers still come here?

I appreciate conditions are hard, harsh even. But has anyone done a comparative study of labour conditions in, say, Dhaka compared to here? I'm here because I'm better off than I would be at home. And so's everyone else. That's not a shallow argument or excuse. It's simple, plain fact. Ever since Safa Park was a makeshift shanty town for illegal immigrants (it later shifted to Mamzar), people have flocked to the UAE from the Subcontinent to work. Thousands of them have become millionaires in the UAE - having arrived with nothing.

Does that make it all any better or more admirable? 'Course not. But by living here as expats we condone the practice implicitly, perhaps even complicitly. Labour conditions in the UAE have clearly improved significantly over the years I have been here, but European sensibilities are still offended by the camps and reports of 12 hour workdays, let alone the deaths of men travelling from Umm Al Qawain to Jebel Ali to work.

Then there are the practices of agents and usurious visa salespeople, which have led to the popular phrase 'indentured labour' or, as the NYT weasels, 'resembles indentured servitude'. The gombeen men who prey on the workers are not Emirati, but from the workers' home countries. The, apparently infamous, kafala system applies to all expats in the UAE, it's simply sponsorship. That's what the word means, that's what the system is. Your employer provides your visa, contracts with you to employ you and is essentially in loco parentis, whether you're a labourer or a CEO.

Is it abused by companies? Yes. Widely? Yes. Is enough being done to stamp out the abuse of workers? No. Does suppressing media reporting of it help? No. Do constant skewed reports of labour conditions here by callow Western journalists applying selective sampling to make the story more dramatic and create more appealing headlines help the situation?

I'd argue not, actually. There's a lack of balance in the debate and by neglecting the efforts of the enlightened, you empower the entrenched.

Emirates Airline Festival Of Literature Fun

(Photo credit: IsaacMao)

Saturday the 8th March will see me once again pretending to be an author at the LitFest. As well as my usual moderatin' and likely some radio stuff as well, I'm on a panel, "Of Spies, Conspiracy and Censorship", which promises to be a fascinating experience.

There are three inky-fingered teasers of prose in all - myself, Rewa Zeinati and Ibrahim Nasrallah. And we are being joined by Juma Alleem, who is director of media content at the National Media Council. It is he wot is responsible for the people responsible for reading my books and passing them 'suitable for printing' in the United Arab Emirates.

This is going to be particularly interesting for me as I have now faced two instances of censorship in regard to my participation in the festival - both utterly trivial, but then all the more perplexing for it. I have never had any of my writing knocked back in the UAE for moral, social or cultural reasons before. So I'm going to enjoy exploring the nature and purpose of censorship with my fellow panellists. You never know, we might even get around to some spies and conspiracy too!

Here's the session blurb:

Are there specific challenges associated with the context in which an author lives? As writers, are we guilty of self-censorship or are there real obstacles to writing about certain topics and people? What responsibilities do writers have and what role might central guidelines play?

I must confess to being particularly fascinated at the idea writers have responsibilities in regard to censorship. Is a 'responsible' writer merely subservient and compliant? I'm minded of Bulgakov's wicked, hilarious revenge on the fat cats of the Moscow writers' union.

The session's linked here if you want to sign up for it. The LitFest will relieve you of Dhs65, but that's the price of a scrambled egg on toast and coffee at The Archive, so you'll just have to skip breakfast one day this week.

I'm also moderating the session with Simon Kernick & Deon Meyer, 'Criminally thrilling' which looks at techniques for keeping readers glued to the page as your novel flashes around the world like a careening, mad and out of control juggernauty thing. That one's linked here.

Gay Oman Controversy Spirals Out Of Control

Omani weekly tabloid newspaper The Week appears to be in a great deal of hot water indeed. The paper ran a piece last week on what it was like being gay in Oman which looks to the untutored eye like a well written and balanced feature - if a surprisingly frank and open one. It has resulted in an amazing backlash that has led the paper to issue an unconditional apology on its home page as it faces censure at the highest level and the possibility of action from the country's legislature.

The Oman Journalist's Association has strongly condemned the piece according to Gulf News (which hit a new high today by reporting on a woman who threatened to blow herself up at Dubai's Public Prosecution and failed to mention there was no bomb in her 'bomb belt'*), while also calling for the Ministry of Information to act - and the chairman of the Omani Shura Council, Shaikh Khalid Bin Hilal Bin Naseer Al Maa’wali, has weighed in, promising action by the Council's media committee. In a tweet, as it happens. In fact, in a final confirmation that this is, indeed, a hot story (all today's journalist needs to confirm it's a biggie), the whole thing trended on Twitter.

It's not as if homosexuality in Oman hasn't been aired in public before - the (formerly) excellent Muscat Confidential blog ran a great interview on this very topic back in 2010. Muscat Confidential has in the past been blocked by Omani authorities, but no blocking followed the publication of this post.

But, of course, We Don't Talk About Elephants In This Room and there's clearly a huge difference between a blog post and a tabloid newspaper - and it's worth noting the outrage is clearly community driven, it's not a nanny state government acting against a brave little newspaper. The piece has clearly widely offended Omanis.

The Week's apology neatly paraphrases Father Jack Hackett, but 'the article' - so hot its nature can't even be mentioned in that apology, it seems - lives on. Omani blog Oman Coast has reproduced the piece on those who choose not to reproduce and it's linked here for your elucidation. As Oman Coast says, please read on only if you are a mature reader used to free speech who is not easily shocked or offended.

Meanwhile the messenger, it would appear, has been quite comprehensively shot...

* I suppose in the interest of fairness I should point out that Gulf News has now added the no bomb information to its story online, although not rewritten it in light of the new finding, so the first line still reads, "A mother wearing a belt of explosives who threatened to blow herself up in the Dubai Public Prosecution building has surrendered and has been arrested."

Indian Lecturer Held By Dubai Police For Defamation

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gulf News' Bassma Al Jandaly reports today on the case of an Indian university lecturer who has been held by Dubai police, while on a visit to the country, for defamation. Arrested on the 5th May, two weeks later he's still in Dubai, out on bail but with his visa held by police.

The lecturer worked for a "private university" in Dubai's Academic City. According to the story in GN, police confirmed the man had his contract terminated without reason by the university - Dubai courts found in his favour and he had received his end of service benefits.

However, returning to India, the lecturer appears to have indulged in the activity known as the grinding of the axe. I think I found his blog, which makes for highly entertaining reading and lets the university have it in no uncertain terms with remarkable vigour and an almost obsessive degree of staying power. Although comments are turned off and the YouTube videos have been made private, the rest of the content is up there and there is certainly plenty of 'masala' on offer.

The university's response was apparently to lodge a defamation case against the man at Rashidiya police station. And so when he travelled from the US, where he is based according to GN, to the UK and stopped off to see his Dubai-based wife, his collar was comprehensively felt.

In a rare moment of sheer cravenness I'm not going to link to his blog because I can't be entirely sure this is indeed the blog in question (given there are no names in the story, I found a blog that seems to fit the bill quite nicely by Googling "dubai university lecturer india end of service", as you would) and I'd rather not be joining him over at Rashidiya nick trying to defend myself against a charge of sharing links to material alleged to be defamatory.

It's interesting (and noteworthy bloggers, tweeters and all you other online commentators - as I pointed out in my last post, in fact) that in the UAE, defamation remains a criminal rather than civil matter. Now covered by the provisions of the UAE's cyber crime law, the mere accusation of online defamation has resulted in this man's liberty being taken from him. He can now look forward to a lengthy and expensive trial process unless the defamation case is dropped.

In choosing this course of action, I would argue that The University That Must Not Be Named has ensured greater reputational harm will ensue from this affair than if it had chosen not to pursue a criminal case of defamation in the UAE.

However, in the meantime, our lecturer friend would appear to be in rather a lot of hot water...

Careful What You Tweet For

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gulf News today carries a roundup of recent cases of bloggers and tweeters in trouble around the Gulf and it's an extensive and growing list.

Flagged as being 'with inputs from AFP', 60% of the story is lifted directly from an AFP file, (the rest being made uo of this report from Habib Touma, which is the only bit available online) but we mustn't cavil, must we?

Tweets aren't a joking matter anymore - imagine facing this one in court: "undermining the values and traditions of Bahrain's society towards the King on Twitter". The six Bahraini 'tweeters' who did have just been sentenced a year in prison for 'misusing the right of free expression'.

It's as neat an illustration of the conundrum posed by social media in the Middle East as you're likely to get. Here we all are in possession of these powerful and far-reaching technologies that support widely sharing information and opinion and when we use them we're suddenly very far above the parapet indeed.

All this freedom of expression stuff suffers from the problem that it is, of course, that it's an absolute. You're either free to express or not, surely? But then we also apply 'filters' to that absolute in the West (whilst being all to ready to be scandalised by the hypocrisy of societies that don't allow total freedom of expression) - incitement, hate speech, holocaust denial and a number of other things our society deems to be unacceptable.

We also saw how fragile our freedoms are when British Prime Minister David Cameron, faced with lawless rioting across the country organised via Facebook and Twitter made it clear he would favour 'switching the Internet off'. That's the kind of thing despots do, isn't it?

The trouble is, of course, that government is government the world over - there's that lovely definition of democracy - "Say what you like, do what you're told." which works well as long as when you say what you like it doesn't have the benefit of a platform open to every man and with enormous power to allow messages to be shared and reach audiences far wider than are possible with 'traditional media'. Let's not forget, there are now over double the number of users of Facebook Arabic in the Middle East and North Africa than there are newspapers sold every day (in English, Arabic and French combined) in the region. That's Arabic alone - most users in the region still prefer the English interface, whatever language they are posting in.

It doesn't take insulting a leader or inciting religious hatred to get into trouble with the law on Twitter - you can just break any old law that would have applied in the 'analogue world' - for instance, a lady was fined Dhs 1,000 in Dubai earlier this week for calling an Egyptian gentleman 'stupid'. The law in the UAE does take the issue of personal respect very seriously indeed - it's not something limited to the rulers alone. So, logically, calling someone stupid on Twitter could potentially open you up to a Dhs 1,000 fine.

It's a reminder - whether you're going to put your life on the line for something you believe in or whether you're just sounding off. The law is peering over your shoulder - and those little 140 character blipverts are subject to its full might and weight...

Olives - A Violent Romance On Sale In Jordan

Now! Buy the book Jordan's bookstores didn't want you to see!

Thanks to the embargo busting online superheroes at Jordanian bookseller Jamalon, the shameful year-long block of Olives - A Violent Romance in Jordan, the country the book is set in, is over. Olives is now on sale and available for anyone in the country to buy with FREE shipping.

Buy Olives - A Violent Romance from Jamalon here!

The first ten copies are signed and numbered, too. Jamalon will be putting these on promo. On sale alongside them, at the same time as it launches in the UAE, Jamalon will also be selling Beirut - An Explosive Thriller.

You can find out more about Olives at the book's website, linked here for your link-following pleasure. It's about a British guy going to work and live in Jordan who is blackmailed by British intelligence into spying on the family of the Jordanian girl he's falling in love with. A lot of people have said kind things about it, which is nice.

Olives was originally prevented from going on sale in Jordan because distributors wouldn't handle the book - it never got as far as the government's censor. The one distributor who gave a straight reason cited the book's use of the Dajani family name in a fictional context:

"...it would not go through censorship as it mentions, although in fiction, the family name Dajani which is an existing family and all over the Middle East. they are of Jeruslamite origin, and quite influential. I therefore have to decline..." 

This here post over on the Olives blog explains all. After some silly talk about honour killings and a rather vibrant shitstormette on Facebook, the whole affair struck me as so ludicrous as to warrant no further effort on my part. And so things lay until Jamalon's CEO Ala' Alsallal and I got chatting a few weeks back and he basically waved his arms around and exclaimed, 'Tish and fiddle! They're fools. Of course we'll sell it!"

I knew of Jamalon from my involvement in ArabNet, where Ala' and his team presented two years back. I found their plans for taking the region's publishing industry to the 'e-age' exciting - and I still do. Jamalon's online bookstore is just the first step - the company now lists over nine million titles in Arabic and English and has tied up with Aramex to support regional shipping of books at competitive rates. There's a whole load more in the pipeline.

In the meantime, though, anyone in Jordan can now just point and click and, Hey Presto!, freely buy a copy of the book Jordan's traditional booksellers didn't want you to see.

So what are you waiting for? Click away! :)

Jordan! Buy Olives - A Violent Romance from Jamalon here!

The ITU In Dubai And All That

Téléphone ancien (Photo credit: zigazou76)

The Twelfth ITU World Conference on International Telecommunications is currently taking place in Dubai, with much international fanfare. The ITU is proposing to debate the re-writing of its 1988 regulatory framework for international telecommunications (ITR), allowing its members to contribute towards creating a new framework for 'the Internet age'.

Oh dear.

Cue spirited PR campaigns from Google (which has gone as far as to use the hallowed homepage to drum up support for it's 'Take Action' campaign for a 'free and open Internet') and others, pointing out that we shouldn't be letting governments decide on the future of the Internet. This is interesting, as that's precisely what governments think they not only have the right to do but, working on behalf of their respective peoples, should be doing.

Dubai, meanwhile, gets a win for hosting the event and racks up some nifty international publicity.

Of the many aspects of the 'Internet age' being discussed (in many cases, I fear, by people whose understanding of telecommunications is rooted firmly in yoghurt pots and string) is how telcos can share in the enormous revenues being derived from companies using the Internet to provide services to users. These people, argue the telcos, should be paying to use our networks.

It's not only absolute tosh as a proposal, it would be laughable if it weren't being actually listened to at the ITU. Telcos built the rods for their own backs long ago - they built roads and then insisted in charging tolls for the use of those roads which were calculated by the minute. Now they're trying to charge by the value of freight or the transaction you're travelling to close. With precious little innovation on offer, they're now challenged by the fact they have simply become bulk data providers, irrelevant to us in the main and certainly no active part of the thriving, active and profitable ecosystem of the Internet.

So what they want the ITU to do is grant them a charter to continue doing what they have done so well in the past - sit back and tax network users for using their networks, charging unfairly high rates for minimum quality service and contributing not one jot of value to the communities they are meant to serve.

For me the debate regarding regulation is of little interest - governments already regulate effectively enough at the state level and if they all decide to do more regulatin' I suspect there's little we can do.

But the telcos and their bid to pass a cash cow's charter? That's the one that'll affect you and me the most, I suspect...

The Times They Are A-Changin'

The Man Who Fell to Earth (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This isn't really a book post, it just starts like one, so bear with me.

I've just heard that Beirut - An Explosive Thriller has been passed by the National Media Council in Abu Dhabi and I therefore have permission to print the book in the UAE. Many of my friends overseas have a hard time understanding why anyone would need permission to print a book and, in fact, have drawn parallels between this and the control of information by the Church in the dark ages.

The fact of the matter is it's something of a Catch22.In the Middle East it is generally assumed that the national media is controlled by the government and therefore speaks with the same voice. It isn't until you have a fully deregulated environment that you can afford to drop the regulation, and yet a fully deregulated environment is almost impossible to conceive here.

What has changed, however - and to a remarkable degree for someone who remembers how it was in the 1980s - is the lightness of the touch on the tiller. I remember Lawrence of Arabia being banned in the UAE and now a digitally enhanced recut of David Lean's seminal (if sometimes fanciful) film is showing at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival. I once had a DVD of Nicholas Roeg's 1970s art-house movie The Man Who Fell To Earth confiscated by the Ministry of Information in Dubai (and replaced in my Amazon sleeve by a booklet about finding the path to God). Today, bookshops in the UAE are selling EL James' books.

I'm not sure about selling 50 Shades of Grey and its two sibling titles in the UAE, to be honest. While I'm all for freedom of choice and expression, it rather flies in the face of a censored Internet and certainly is not in line with the cultural and moral environment here. I mean, we're asked to dress decently in malls and public places here. You sort of get the feeling that someone, somewhere hasn't understood it - that it has somehow flown under the radar. There was a period some years ago when one prominent bookseller in the UAE was selling George Bataille's scabrous work of porn, 'The story of the eye', much to colleagues' glee. It did not, of course, last.

Magic Menon (explained in this early blog post although I first mentioned the solvent abusing Black Marker Gang here.) must have retired now, too. It's hard to go on putting black pen on pages when they're iPad apps.The Ministry of Information is certainly no more. The dark offices where I was once brought in to be censured as a magazine publisher, all big desks and locked bookcases full of Jackie Collins novels, are now the friendly corridors of the National Media Council. I thought I was pushing it with Beirut - An Explosive Thriller - there was already quite a bit of controversy regarding the morality, or otherwise, of Olives - A Violent Romance. Beirut has a lot more contentious stuff in it. My reader in Abu Dhabi (He's much too jocular and friendly a chap to call a censor) did note the number of f-bombs, but explained he understood 'this is the British style'.

But when you've got 50 shades in tottering stacks in the malls, I suppose I'm pretty safe. Although I personally think it's only a matter of time before someone picks that book up and decides a light hand on the tiller is one thing, but enough is enough.

TRA Calls for Innocence of Muslims Block

The TRA (Telecommunications Regulatory Authority) has directed the UAE's telcos, Etisalat and Du, to block access to the film trailer for 'Innocence of Muslims'. The trailer has been the cause of widespread and often violent protests around the world which have led to over seventeen deaths.

I checked just before mid-day but YouTube access to the film trailer wasn't blocked. Google has resisted suggestions it take down the content, although has supported legally backed blocking requests in Malaysia, Indonesia, Egypt, Libya and India.

It's an unpleasant little film and, in my humble opinion, is quite clearly in contravention of Google's guidelines, which allow it to block content if it constitutes 'hate speech'. The film and its intentions are clearly hateful in the extreme. I for one would hate to be the person who decided this wasn't hate speech, because they have seventeen deaths - and rising - on their hands.

But the film, judging by the trailer, is also clearly the result of a deranged mind. It is laughably acted, woefully directed and amateurish in the extreme. It's quite, quite potty. However, it purports to depict the Prophet Mohammad, which is at the core of the anger the film has caused.

You can clearly hear dialogue spliced in, supporting the actors' claims that the anti-Muslim content was jacked in at post production. The result is a school project gone wrong - but crucially, a film that has met the desires of its maker. Because, of course, we have that reinforcement of Islam as a violent, antipathetic religion - certainly at odds with my twenty six years' experience of travelling, working and for the past twenty years living in the Arab World. And the many, more reasoned, online objections expressed by Muslims all over the world to the trailer have, of course, not made the headlines.

Is blocking it the answer? I suspect not. Supporting its takedown is one thing, but stopping people accessing content that is having such a profound effect on our world means stopping people being able to make up their own minds and make informed judgement while others around the world continue to enjoy that privilege. Even if that content is hateful to us.

Into The Dark

Many years ago, in 2005, I was proud to be one of the sponsors an artshow called 'Into the light', which protested the Amman bombings. Today, Jordan's internet was plunged into the dark in a very different, but just as important protest.

Bloggers and website owners in Jordan are protesting the amended Press and Publications Law, putting up a black 'interstitial' page which reads, "You may be deprived of the content of this site under the amendments of the Jordanian Press and Publications Law and the governmental Internet censorship."

You can take a look yourself by popping over to pal Roba Al Assi's blog here - one of hundreds of sites in Jordan that have gone 'dark' for the day. You can click through to a pretty pissed off post behind the tarpaulin.

They're not kidding, either. The law appears to make the classic mistake, not unlike ongoing Lebanese efforts to bring the Internet into a media law, of confusing the web with print media. Under the law, websites (so badly defined it could include social media, blogs or any other online property) would be forced to join the press association, appoint an 'editor in chief' (a role with some very defined responsibilities) and also opens the door to blocking websites, something Jordan has very laudably avoided doing.

A moderate country with the most competitive telecom market in the region, tremendous intellectual capital and an important regional centre for ICT, IP and software/web development, Jordan's smart and technically capable young people deserve better than muckle-headed legislation hewn from granite by politicians who wouldn't know a website from a wombat.

Let's hope someone noticed how dark it got today...

Anti Social Media

Khanjar, Saidi-type, circa 1924, from Oman. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oman's National Human Rights Commission has come out against the online commentators and activists who have been irking the government to the point where there have been a significant number of arrests recently.

The Commission's statement, linked here, is a model of clarity. For instance: "NHRC pointed out that there is a difference between the freedom of opinion as a right and the practice of this right in reality. The dividing line makes the practice of this right legal and going beyond it a crime punishable by the law. The rule in this issue is that the freedom of individuals stops when the freedom of other individuals starts."

Right.

The Omani public prosecution issued a statement last week that clarified its position on the issue of opinion expressed online and "calls upon all citizens on the importance of following the legal methods and means for the expression of opinion in line with the legal concept for the freedom of expression."

The problem is, of course, as Omani columnist Susan Mubarak points out in Muscat Daily, there is no official 'line' that defines quite where " the freedom of individuals stops" and "the freedom of other individuals starts". Her excellent piece on the issue is balanced by the Uriah Heep tones of the Oman Tribune.

Article 29 of Oman's 'Basic Statute of the State' guarantees "The freedom of opinion and expression thereof through speech, writing or other forms of expression is guaranteed within the limits of the Law." Those limits are, of course, nowhere defined.

Further clarifying its statement, the NHRC said that "It affirmed that it supports the freedom of opinion, which seeks to achieve the public interests rather than those harming or insulting others."

The 'About Human Rights' page on the NHRC's lovely, retro-style website is "under construction". You'd have thought it would have been 404, wouldn't you?

(Update: I've just learned from @muscati that a female member of the NHRC has resigned from the commission as a result of its decision to make this statement.)

Permission To Print

Image via Wikipedia

It always reminds me of the Black Adder sketch in which George is requesting 'Permission to speak' with increasing desperation, said permission denied by the wily Blackadder.

Permission to print is something I bet few writers have to seek on their road to publication. Here in the UAE, it's a must-have - no printing press here will touch a book that doesn't have a Permission, much as no garage will touch a crash repair without a police report.

The permission is granted by the National Media Council, which has to read the work. I was extraordinarily lucky in that the gentleman who manages the English language section of the Media Control Department was very struck with Olives - A Violent Romance and actually went off leave to go into the office and sign off the MS and grant me that all-important go-ahead. It's taken until now for the news to trickle up the Abu Dhabi highway to the NMC offices in Dubai so today I went off to pick up my Permission.

There's a fee of Dhs25 to pay, which I slid onto the desk of the Relevant Person. 'Ah, no, you have to have e-dirham.'

You're kidding me. For Dhs25? Oh yes, she said, handing me a gnarly-looking form with all sorts of requirements, labour cards, passport copies, authorisations, countersignatures by authorised persons. Worse, you have to go all the way to the Ministry of Finance in Bur Dubai to apply in person. For a Dhs25 fee? Yes, this is mandatory.

I left the NMC after vain protests, my head in a spin. I looked at the e-dirham website and found there was an easier way - you can pick up a pre-paid e-dirham card at any branch of a number of banks! Yippee!

A number of banks later, I realise this is total bunkum - the banks at the immigration department have these cards, one chap told me. Sure enough, they did. I dashed back to the NMC all eager and happy. They were having a reception for their colleagues from Abu Dhabi and the place was filled with plates of food and oudh was being burned - so much it set the fire alarms off.

Despite the carnival atmosphere, my own little firework display was to suffer the fate of micturation. She wouldn't take the e-dirham card. 'Only this card from Ministry of Finance I can take.' But it's the same card, look, e-dirham, it's precisely the same card, it just has a different picture and doesn't have my photo. 'No.'

That's when I lost it. I'd printed out two 280-page manuscripts and given them to her, I'd printed a third and sent it to Abu Dhabi, I'd been back and forth to the NMC and the Ministry of Youth and Culture. And now, at the end of it all, I was being made to jump through even more hoops for Dhs25!!! I asked for the mudhir. But he, of course, was closeted in a meeting room with the guests from Abu Dhabi. My gatekeeper managed to mask a look of triumph, but I knew it was there anyway. I left in a high old temper and dragged my way down to the Ministry of Finance.

Who were wonderful. Friendly, smiling and bright, young Buthaina had me sorted out in a few minutes, even transferring the balance from the pre-paid card I'd bought to my new photo ID card. It all certainly lightened the old mood as I set off once again to the NMC, my new e-dirham card sparkling in my pocket.

The long and the short of it all is that I have my Permission to Print in my sticky little fingers. So now I'm going to do just that: print Olives!

Gulf News - See No Evil

Image via WikipediaGulf News ran an Associated Press story on the front page of its business section today on the report issued by Transparency International on bribery. That report's findings are linked here.

GN tagged the piece, a highly edited version of the AP file (the AP piece is linked here for your listening pleasure), 'The Power of Money'. The piece is not available on the GN website, but does point out that China and Russia are the countries most prone to bribery in TI's report.

What it fails to point out is that the UAE ranks fifth most likely to bribe in the report, which surveyed 3,000 businessmen on how often firms from the various countries they deal with resort to bribery. The report lists 28 countries - the UAE ranking fifth worst (joint fifth, to be fair - we rank alongside Argentina, which is in itself something of an indictment) and Saudi Arabia seventh worst. The rest of the Middle East isn't included in the report, which is probably just as well.

TI's report found that 'no country was found to be wholly clean' and also that the construction sector was most likely to bribe its way into business, with the real estate sector coming in joint second worst. Which may go some of the way to explaining the UAE's ranking. This is, by the way, the first time the UAE has been included in the index.

The question is, did GN just paste up an AP file to fill some space without bothering to check if the UAE featured on the index or did it know and let the fact pass it by? If the former, we're looking at awful, sloppy no news-sense journalism - a half-boiled intern with learning problems would have Googled the index to see if the UAE featured (as I did, being a half-boiled intern). If the latter, GN could arguably justify the omission by claiming it's an AP file and as AP didn't highlight the UAE's position, GN didn't see fit to overrule such a respected international news source. Which is hardly tenable, but is probably preferable to admitting you're a bunch of craven, drooling morons who could no more serve the public interest than play Für Elise on a chocolate banjo.

The National ran the piece front page business, too:"UAE companies debut with 5th place in bribery global survey" as opposed to GN's "China, Russia most prone to bribery."

Spot the difference...

Best Burger Bullies Blogger

And you thought that every restaurateur in the Middle East learned a clear lesson from the awful public relations disaster that was triggered when the fools behind Benihana Kuwait decided to try and bully Kuwaiti blogger Mark '2:48AM' Makhoul into retracting a blunt view of their restaurant? Think again.

Omani blogger Omani Cuisine reports receiving an email threatening legal action after posting the unflattering review of Best Burger linked here for your listening pleasure.

The Benihana disaster represented a new low in Middle East media freedoms at a time when we all watched the new highs of Tunis and Tahrir. Let's just hope that the bullies at Best Burger fast come to realise this is not the way to go if you don't want a great deal more unwelcome attention and opprobrium than the original post would have generated - particularly if it had been taken - in the spirit that blog posts are almost invariably intended - as valid customer feedback!

The Tent Next Door

Image via WikipediaAmerican President Lyndon Johnson once memorably said of J. Edgar Hoover, "I'd rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in."

It's a quote that often comes to mind when I see the behaviours of the UAE's newspapers. A journalist on one of the Arabic papers many years ago told me memorably that the trick to being an Arab journalist is never to piss in your own tent. Always do it into next door's.

It's remarkable to compare the coverage of the Sharjah Taxi Crisis in today's Dubai-based Gulf News with that in the Abu Dhabi-based The National. I posted about the issue earlier this week - basically Sharjah taxi drivers are being charged to drive at a rate of Dhs0.52 per kilometre, rendering their ability to make money, already limited by fines, charges and high commission targets, almost untenable.

Gulf News buries the story as a side panel to the page 3 piece, 'Abu Dhabi taxi drivers' protest continues'. In the side panel to the main Abu Dhabi story, GN avers that residents are having problems getting a cab as Sharjah taxi drivers 'refused to work for a third day in a row'. The story is also way down the pecking order on the website - Tom Cruise gets a great deal more coverage. I can't find the Sharjah nib on the website at all. But the extraordinary lack of detail in GN is neatly exposed by The National's reporting.

'Hundreds of cabbies quit over new fuel deal' is The National angle. A bit more dramatic than residents finding it hard to get a cab, isn't it? The National story is well worth a read - according to the paper over 400 cabbies have walked out and the regulator is quoted as saying that 'not even a quarter of the 4800 cabbies are on strike' which I take to mean, because I love phrases like 'not even', that at least 1,200 cabbies are refusing to work.

I don't know if I'd be brave enough to go on strike if I were a cabbie here, particularly if I had a family back home dependent on my remittances. I have posted many, many times about the iniquitous and draconian regime of the taxi companies here, specifically in Sharjah because I have my 'inside man', the lugubrious Mr. G. If you're interested in the full picture, here are those very posts. To actually stand up and defy them must take guts - or desperation.

Sharjah's Gulf Today, of course, merely burbles ridiculously about bus driver standards and training in today's edition because covering possibly the largest labour dispute in the Emirates' recent history is in no way in the public interest (Yes, I know the public interest has nothing to do with it, I'm just saying).

Gulf News deserves to be held to a higher standard than Gulf Today, though. And in this, it has failed. Its silence is nothing less than shameful - and its shame is clearly exposed by The National. Which itself fails to mention the ongoing dispute between Cars Taxis and its drivers in Abu Dhabi, now into a second day of strike action according to Gulf News.So The National hardly holds the moral high ground here.

The lesson in this is clear, though: if you want to find out what's really going on these days, pop over to the tent next door for a gossip. But don't forget to wear rubber-soled shoes.

Hate

Image by George via Flickr

 To be perfectly honest, I'd rather have nothing to say about this at all, but I don't see how I can let it pass by now that it's been resolved, to most people's minds, appropriately.

The blog at www.al-emarati.com posted a hateful piece a few days back, based on the Mangalore plane crash. you can hear more about it in this podcast of the Dubai Today radio show yesterday, which I co-host every Tuesday. Jessica Swann and I talked to Samurai Sam, the shadowy figure behind the ever-central UAE Community Blog about the very issues raised by that venomous little blog. The whole issue raised an interesting ethical conundrum - how bad does it have to be before even people like myself and Sam, who believe passionately in free speech, agree that it's bad enough to be blocked?

I'm told that the al-emarati blog, although it looked as if it hosted several bloggers, was all the work of one man, a person who many bloggers will know as A Blessing in Tragedy. Sure enough, it certainly seemed that way stylistically, veering between interesting comment and bilious ranting. You'd start to worry about the stability of someone capable of that range in commentary rather than fiction.

There was a sizeable group of people calling for the Mangalore post to be blocked by the UAE regulator, the TRA. Although I appreciated people's strength of feeling (you'll just have to believe me when I tell you it was a truly horrible outpouring), I and others felt that blocking is not the solution to stuff that you don't agree with. Tellingly, the regulator's guidelines for blocking do not include incitement to race-hate. And I'm not sure how qualified we are, in the absence of a definition in law, to call that. If it doesn't actually break a law, blocking content is purely an emotional reaction and sets a dangerous precedent for obliterating opinion that we don't agree with - but that is vitally important for open debate.

However, it's been taken out of our wishy-washy pinko liberal hands. The blog has been deleted and now returns a 404 error. The URL had previously displayed the etisalat and du blocking messages, which rather made my heart sink. But now it's a 404. Whether that is because its author finally realised that he'd gone too far, or because Google had invoked US laws governing race-hate, we may never know.

But yes, I am very glad it's gone.

Blockheads Reprised

It would appear that the UAE's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (Or TRA to you an' me) has blocked YouTube's age verification screen.

The problem was highlighted on Twitter yesterday when a link to the now infamous 'Sheikh Zayed Road Madness' video was shared - the link came back with the blocked splash screen on both Etisalat and Du networks. A good link is, BTW, here.

Although the first assumption is that the block was because of the nature of the content, which is a group of nutters endangering the lives of motorists on Dubai's busiest road by pulling doughnuts and the like, this was not in fact the case

(Dubai's police website still allows you, rather charmingly, to key in number plates and get a record of fines and the like without requiring any corroborating evidence that it is, in fact, your own plate you're looking up. So you can look up these chaps' driving history if you want.)

What had happened was the video had been flagged for age restriction (you can't actually tag a video with an age limit on YouTube when you post it, it has to be 'flagged' and a YouTube staffer will review and age restrict the video) and therefore viewers were sent to the YouTube Age Verification Page.

And THAT is the bit that had been blocked. One can only assume that 'if you need to be asked, the answer's no' is the policy in place here.

Helpfully, Etisalat's Twitter Twit suggested to me that YouTube itself was responsible for the block, which is patently not the case, and then referred me to YouTube's Terms of Service which, of course, are totally irrelevant to the point in question.

Have you read YouTube's TOS? Here. Fill yer boots. Bet you can't finish it without going mad.

In the meantime, we await the results of the investigation that is being conducted, I am sincerely advised, into whether it is morally or culturally reprehensible to answer the question: "Are you over 21?"

Silence! I kill you!

Image via Wikipedia

People occasionally like to talk to me about censorship and seem mildly put out when I tell them that I've never come under any pressure to censor the blog. When this conversation takes place as an interview, I am always credited as being a 'blogger' or an 'ex-journalist'. For some reason media are unwilling to put 'PR guy' as my job title. It would appear to detract from my authority when talking about freedom of expression in media, for some reason. Oh well.

I have had a long acquaintance with censorship in the Middle East, from being banned in Saudi Arabia to being bawled at in Bahrain. I've even survived being shut down in the UAE (In, I have to point out, a previous life: nothing to do with the dear old agency I call home). I have been forced to crawl on the floor picking up copies of my magazine tossed there by Ministry of Information officials and had more than my fair share of uncomfortable meetings with blokes sat behind desks the size of aircraft carriers while I crouched on a chair that's lower than a futon, my nose touching the glass that invariably covered said desk. I all fairness, I must point out that all that stuff happened over fifteen years ago. Life is a lot different now and the pressures of censorship in the Middle East today are a great deal less, believe me.


I started this blog in part because I wanted to show that you can speak your mind in the UAE, in your own name. I have set my own limitations based on my experiences in media here and so yes, I'll decide not to comment on a toxic topic. Living here pays my wages, blogging doesn't. I do believe in respecting the society and culture of the foreign place I call my home.


However, I've been irritated on a few occasions recently where I have encountered an insane degree of censorship in the mainstream media I have worked with that has been derived from expatriates fearing the reaction they are assuming will come from 'up high'. That has even extended to broadcast media refusing to cover stories that are being carried not only globally but also in local news media. When I have pointed out how utterly craven it is to ignore a controversial story that is being carried by other media totally accessible by the target audience and subject to the same regulatory environment, I've been told that I should 'know how it is'.

But I do know how it is. And I know that media that self-censors to that degree is serving neither its audience nor its masters.

The New Media Law

Image via Wikipedia

This is a depressing column from Abdullah Rasheed, Gulf News' Abu Dhabi editor, today, written on the occasion of the much-delayed debate by the Federal National Council regarding the new Media Law for the UAE. I sincerely believe that Rasheed's words are required reading for anyone living here.

In it, he argues that media freedom has decreased in the UAE and calls for an end to the culture of censorship and silence in response to media that has become so common recently. "journalists battle to get even the simplest information due to non-co-operation of most official bodies" he says.

He points out that the number of UAE National journalists has dropped. And he points to a wide range of other major issues that are contributing to producing a national media that is uncompetitive. That international news sources and the Internet are sought as alternatives by those who feel un-served by the media. "Journalists are no longer doing their duty, meaning that the press is no longer monitoring the peformance of government."

The one point he doesn't make is that media struggling with all these issues are not challenging organisations in the UAE to respond as harshly as they could (and should) be - and the result of that is there is no culture of debate, argument or managing investigative media. You could well argue that a great deal of the negative international coverage has come about because of the inept way in which UAE organisations manage their relationships with international media - precisely because, of course, the counter-critical culture of the UAE is not mirrored elsewhere. To their surprise, UAE 'press officers', and the people they report to, discover all too late that journalists working for international media who are fobbed off or simply told 'there is nothing here' won't stand for it and will not only report, but do so with considerable vigour, too. Worse, they're being aided and abetted by social media. A leaky shark tank is not a minor problem with a malfunctioning valve when consumer-generated footage of an entire mall underwater is out there in the wild, for instance.


Decent spokespeople, sound media policies and sensible media relations can't develop in the absence of an empowered media. Those skills are critical, IMHO, to the future of the UAE as a player on the world stage - and so is a media that is allowed to get on with the job of reporting the facts in service of its readers, listeners and viewers.