Twit Archive 1-15 November 2011

Above, John Dog sings Imperfect Strangers.

Below the fold, tweets on Iran, Bahrain, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Gaza, Cuba, Afghanistan, and on comics, children’s books, film, and music.

Twit Archive - January 2011

Tweets below the fold from Tunisia to Tahrir.

Also, art links to Norman Saunders (above) at Monster Brains, Olga Dugina and Andrej Dugin at Lines and Colors, Kate Beaton draws The Adventures of Sexy Batman, while Michael Sporn serves a feast of Feininger in parts one, two, three, and continued later in four, five, and six. Sweeter still, Stephen Kroninger scans Magic in Frosting by John McNamara.

Gone. Next?

Four weeks after, and Mubarak follows Ben Ali*. Next up, the revolution comes home?

At International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, Egyptian Activist’s Message to Iranians: Learn From Egyptians, And We Learned From You.

Comment from Potkin Azarmehr and Alan A. at HP.

Al-Masry Al-Youm reports, Group of Egyptian protesters call on Iranians to revolt against Tehran govt.

Pedestrian on Iranian state media coverage of Egypt.

Iran’s Green Movement plans to rally on February 14th/25 Bahman in solidarity with the people of Egypt and Tunisia. More at Tehran Bureau and EA WorldView.

*Caution from Max Fisher at The Atlantic, After Mubarak, Egypt’s Revolution Is Far From Over, and at Global Voices, Egypt: A List of Demands from Tahrir Square.

“Greetings from the center of the world.”

So begins The Tahrir Show, a post by Blake Hounshell, managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, on arriving in Cairo.

I’m too overwhelmed by it all today to pick out many individual items. Bob has a good set of links, and kindly points to my twitterings, but if you want to keep up don’t follow me on Twitter, follow some of the people I follow.

This exchange between David Brooks and Gail Collins at The New York Times site lays out an optimistic view on wider implications for the Middle East, and it’s an optimism I share for what that’s worth.

But the Middle East is not the only context. Tunisia and Egypt are African countries. From an editorial in South Africa’s Mail & Guardian:

. . . the tinder was stacked dry and ready for decades in Egypt. The levels of poverty, frustration and repression are if anything higher further south. Is it too much to hope that Africans choose to treat the Egyptian and Tunisian protests, with all their peril and potential, as our own?

More, via Al Jazeera live blog.

As usual, in depth live blogging by EA WorldView, The New York Times, and The Guardian, along with live coverage from BBC News and Al Jazeera, provides more detail than I can keep up with.

#Jan25 plus one

On #Jan25 plus one in #Egypt I’ve been following @bencnn, @hebalsherif, @Gsquare86, @LaurenBohn, @monaeltahawy, @Dima_Khatib, @norashalaby, @Tharwacolamus, @hackneylad, @themoornextdoor, @RamyRaoof, @weddady, and more.

The New York Times news blog The Lede, and The Guardian News Blog* have been updating through the day.

Mona Eltahawy in The Washington Post, Will Egypt’s protests go the way of Tunisia’s revolution?

The big question now is how loyal the armed forces are to Mubarak and what role, if any, they will play should the protests escalate.

Beyond the moment, Issandr El Amrani at The Arabist looks at the democracy promotion debate in the US.

Meanwhile the story of Tunisia is far from resolved. At FP, Steven A Cook on the calculations of Tunisia’s military. And from earlier in the week in The NY Times, the Pirate Party’s minister in the interim government, blogger Slim Amamou, shows himself to be a pragmatic incrementalist sort of idealist.

More links by way of Bob from Brockley.

*Added: Modernity’s cartoonist health warning re. coverage of another story on the News Blog at The Guardian.

A stain on the wall

Photo by Ayman Mohyeldin: “in govt office on the wall was a stain from picture that was recently removed Guess whose #tunisia”.

From Erich Kästner’s wartime diary, Notabene ’45, an excerpt (translated by Mr Verstappen) describing a town in Austria immediately after the Nazis’ defeat:

Everywhere the swastika was torn from the Hitler flag. Everywhere white bed sheets were cut up. Everywhere the farmers’ wives stitched the red and white bars trimly together on their sewing machines.

[...] Darker patches on the walls told us how easily wallpaper fades and how large Hitler’s portrait had been. In some living rooms the father of the family stood in front of the mirror, made strange faces and shaved, without any feelings of piety, his tertiary sex characteristic, the Hitler moustache, from his upper lip. [...] Now that the light shines out again, there is also light shining in.

Photo copyright © Ayman Mohyeldin 2011.

#sidibouzid

Image: Republic of Tunisia presidential jet TS-100 in flight at approx. 17.48 GMT today, as seen on flightradar24.com.

Added: wider screengrab here.

Tunisia and more #ff @slim404 @nawaat @monaeltahawy @jilliancyork @weddady @themoornextdoor @arabist @EthanZ @Tharwacolamus @Brian_Whit @abuaardvark @shadihamid @SultanAlQassemi #sidibouzid

The day the Tunisian Firewall came down

Update - Slim Amamou is free - @slim404: je suis Libre

At OpenNet Initiative, Tunisia Shuts Off Internet Filter, by Jillian C York:

Following a speech in which Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali stated that all censorship of the internet and traditional media will be halted, Tunisia appears to have shut off its Internet filtering system.

At around 9:45pm local time, Tunisian news site Nawaat reported on Twitter that their site, along with video-sharing sites YouTube and DailyMotion, had been unblocked:

“Nous confirmons, la censure illégale de Nawaat est levée POUR CE SOIR. Youtube et dailymotion également.”

More.

The Australian, Tunisia celebrates as President backs down, by James Bone:

Crowds have poured on to the streets of the Tunisian capital after the country's autocratic president announced a dramatic climbdown on the eve of a general strike that threatened to plunge the Mediterranean tourist haven into its worst violence yet.

President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, 74, who took power in a bloodless coup in 1987, appeared on television to promise he would not seek a sixth term in office in 2014.

He ordered cuts in the price of bread, milk and sugar in an attempt to quell the month-long "Jasmine Revolt," named after the national flower, that has claimed dozens of lives.

Hours after an American journalist was wounded and a protester killed by police amid escalating protests, Mr Ben Ali said he would also instruct security forces to stop using firearms against demonstrators.

Despite a curfew, jubilant crowds thronged the main Avenue Habib Bourguiba, with cars honking their horns in delight.

More.

France 24, Ben Ali rules out ‘presidency for life’ as chaos spreads:

“No one believes in this government any longer. From the elite of Tunis to the lowly worker who earns 80 euros a month,” said Vincent Geisser, a researcher at the Paris-based Institute for Arab and Muslim Studies.

“Given the politicization and radicalization of the movement, the fact that it is spreading to other cities, and the participation of multiple sectors of society – the country’s only trade union, political parties, white collar professionals including lawyers – it was obvious the president’s statements would not convince Tunisians,” Geisser told france24.com.

More.

At Global Voices, Hisham rounds up immediate online reactions to the speech. Continued shooting by police reported.

At NPR’s news blog, The Two-Way, Andy Carvin is putting together a chronology of online documents, blog posts, tweets and videos, telling the story of Tunisia’s weeks of protest so far.

Opinion at Democracy Arsenal, When Pro-Western Regimes Fall: What Should the U.S. Do? by Shadi Hamid, and at Foreign Policy, Where are the democracy promoters on Tunisia? by Marc Lynch.

Resignation letter posted on Tunisian foreign minister’s blog

In Arabic, French, and English. Its authenticity has not been verified. The posts were linked to from Kamel Morjane’s Twitter account.

UPDATE: A tweet from Tunivisions magazine says the Foreign Ministry is denying the resignation.

UPDATE 2: A follow up post on the blog confirms it has been hacked and links to opposition activist site Takriz Extranet.

Just two from today

Ethan Zuckerman: What if Tunisia had a revolution, but nobody watched?

Tunisia is a deeply authoritarian state, but it’s one that’s masterful at public relations. Despite being an aggressive censor of the internet, Tunisia was chosen to host the World Summit on the Information Society in 2005, apparently convincing the rest of the world that they’d use the opportunity to loosen the restrictions on online and offline speech that keep Tunisian opposition groups in check.

Global Voices attended the summit with the support of Dutch foundation Hivos, and we ran a workshop titled “Expression Under Repression” – the Tunisian government removed our workshop from the program, chained the doors of the room where we were to meet and relented only when the Dutch government threatened a diplomatic incident if we weren’t allowed to speak. When we convened, Tunisian security police flooded into the room and began photographing and videotaping the attendees, a technique designed to intimidate anyone brave enough to attend our session. (They also ate all our cookies.) When I led a workshop on internet security, a senior member of the intelligence services introduced himself to me and sat in the front row, taking copious notes, while his associates confiscated the open source software we were attempting to distribute to attendees. Some of the people who met with our team were later detained by authorities. It was a memorable introduction to a country that maintains a network of secret prisons, controls the press and the NGO community and systematically suppresses dissent, all while managing to maintain an image as a comfortable tourist destination and a (sometimes) cooperative partner in US anti-terror efforts.

More

Jillian C York: Letters from Tunisia

Along with Twitter and Facebook, I’ve received numerous missives from friends on the ground in Tunisia. In the past 48 hours, those notes and letters have become increasingly desperate [...]

And tonight, on the phone with a Tunisian friend in California, whose phone calls to contacts in Tunisia have been filled with gunshots in the background, and who is solidly pleading for the US government to step in and, at the very least, denounce the shootings.

More

Mediterranean anti-totalitarian news

Tunisia

AFP: At least 35 killed in Tunisia riots: rights group.

PARIS (AFP) – At least 35 people have been killed in the riots that erupted over the weekend in Tunisia, the president of the International Federation for Human Rights said on Tuesday.
“We have a list of the names of the 35,” Souhayr Belhassen told AFP. “The total figure is higher. It’s somewhere around 50, but that's an estimate.”

More.

Brian Whitaker writes Tunisia: the brink of revolution.

At FP, Marc Lynch writes Arab regimes on edge.

FT: Riots resonate for youth across Arab world.

Issandr El Amrani of The Arabist writing in Al-Masry Al-Youm: Tunisia: A warning sign for Arab regimes.

The Economist: Hotting up.

France 24: Trouble in paradise: Tunisia’s ‘economic miracle’ unmasked.

On TVO’s Search Engine podcast, Jesse Brown talks to Robert Guerra of the Internet Freedom Project about Tunisia’s Totalitarian Tech.

See EA WorldView for more coverage.

Algeria

At FP, Hugh Roberts writes on Algeria’s national ‘protesta’. Further comment on the article from blogger Kal at The Moor Next Door.

Egypt
At The Arabist, Issandr El Amrani writes about US government policy on democracy promotion in Egypt.

By the time Barack Obama took office in 2009, democratic reform in Egypt had already been relegated to secondary importance. As such, the oft-heard claim that the Obama administration made a radical break with democracy promotion in its Egypt policy is patently untrue. Nonetheless, Obama’s priorities in Egypt have disappointed democracy activists.

More.

Gaza
In the LRB, old guard PLO gal Karma Nabulsi pooh-poohs the Gaza Youth Manifesto. Also read Peter Ryley’s short comment on this.

Turkey
Reporters Without Borders: Former editor of Kurdish daily Azadiya Welat sentenced to 138 years in prison, via Terry Glavin’s anti-totalitarian round-up.

Greece
From November, the BBC Word Service history programme Witness remembers the part played by radio in the 1973 Greek student protest.

Frontline Tunisia

Reuters/New York Times: Deadly Clashes With Police in Tunisia.

EA WorldView: Tunisia Latest: At Least 9 Dead in Saturday Clashes.

AP/Al-Masry Al-Youm: Union officials say 11 dead in Tunisia rioting.

BBC News: Fourteen killed in Tunisia unemployment protests.

Amira Al Hussaini reporting tweets and videos at Global Voices, Tunisia: “Please tell the world Kasserine is dying!”

Mona Eltahawy writes, Tunisia: The uprising has a hashtag.

Jillian York compares the Obama administration’s response to Tunisia and its 2009 response to protests in Iran, and writes about her friend Slim Amamou, Tunisian blogger and activist, arrested this week.

More on the arrest of Slim Amamou at nawaat.org.

Reporters Without Borders: Wave of arrests of bloggers and activists.

A Tunisian Girl: Free Slim and Aziz.

Tunisia protests timeline from Al Jazeera.

Related, from last July, a post by Nasser Weddady: Digiactivism Alive in Mideast.

Some Twitter links: #sidibouzid, @weddady, @monaeltahawy.