Anthony Hopkins for Index on Censorship
An Index on Censorship cinema advert from 1986, featuring Oscar winner Anthony Hopkins
Middle East media round up
Morocco’s on-again off-again ban on the Al Jazeera satellite news channel is apparently on again. The kingdom is famously touchy about certain issues — last year it banned a magazine for publishing an opinion poll about King Mohammed II’s popularity. The poll actually showed a 91 per cent approval rating, but the palace felt it was disrespectful to even ask the question.
This time around, there doesn’t seem to be one specific incident that prompted the latest Al Jazeera ban. Communications minister Khalid Naciri, in announcing the ban, said the channel’s editorial line, “systematically tarnishes Morocco’s image,” whatever that means, and accused it of “transmitting a caricature of Moroccan reality.”
One news report quoted an anonymous Moroccan government official as saying the regime was reacting “to the way Al Jazeera handles the issues of Islamists and Western Sahara.” The 2003 Casablanca bombings prompted a sweeping crackdown on fundamentalist Muslim groups that continues to this day. Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony, was annexed by Morocco in the mid-70s and remains home to a vibrant separatist movement.
Turkey has once again banned YouTube after the site refused to remove footage linked to a political sex scandal. Access to the site had already been blocked since 2008 over videos that made fun of Turkey’s venerated founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. That ban was lifted just last week, but within days a new 30-month ban was levied over a video showing the country’s main opposition leader Deniz Baykal in a romantic hotel room tryst with a female staffer. Baykal resigned in May over the scandal. Here’s a link to a (safe for work) excerpt from the video in question.
From the self-censorship file, Egypt’s most prominent modern novelist, Alaa Aswany, is working to PREVENT one of his books from being made available in Hebrew. An Israeli research center translated The Yacoubian Building (an excellent read by the way) against Aswany’s will in the interest, they said, of “expanding cultural awareness”. Aswany, like many Egyptian writers and intellectuals, wants no part of what he considers “normalisation” with Israel until there’s a fair resolution to the Palestinian issue. Aswany, by the way, recently announced he was giving up writing his regular column in the independent daily Al-Shorouk. The reason: the government, as part of its ongoing press crackdown, was raiding and shutting down unrelated businesses owned by Shorouk owner Ibrahim Al-Muallem to pressure him to tone down criticisms by Aswany and other columnists. Also worth reading is the Guardian’s always perceptive Brian Whitaker, here he points out one of the ways Egypt’s government controls information: by monopolising statistics.
In Libya, the government has shut down the weekly Oea newspaper. Coverage of the incident in a Qatari newspaper (in Arabic here) pins the ban to a recent editorial that, “claimed that the government had failed to handle the problem of corruption”. The twist: the paper is partially controlled by Said Al-Islam Qaddhafi, son of the Libya’s leader Col. Muammar Qaddhafi. The paper was already banned for six months earlier this year and only resumed normal publication in July.
In Lebanon, the country’s General Security office censored a five-minute scene from a recent play. The scene in question dealt a little too flippantly with Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The play’s Shia writers claim they meant no disrespect to Nasrallah and say they are mystified by the decision. Lebanon is known as a bastion of comparative liberalism in the Middle East, but the General Security office in the Ministry of Interior still has broad powers to ban works of art that could upset the country’s delicate political sensitivities.
Courtesy of the +972 blog, here’s a useful guide to the political line of the major Israeli newspapers, for those seeking to unravel the often bewildering complexities of Israeli politics.
China releases dissident artist Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei, China’s best-known dissident artist, is called God Ai by his supporters. Ai helped design the Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Summer Olympics and more recently his Sunflower Seeds installation created a splash at the Tate Modern; but Ai continues to be a thorn in the side of the Chinese state. His blogs and microblogs were long ago been blocked in China after his controversial investigations into events such as non-accidental deaths in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake angered the authorities.
His international standing presents difficulties for the authorities: should he be ignored or co-opted? Ai claims that two years ago, the Shanghai authorities asked him to build a studio to help develop an arts district it was developing to increase the city’s cultural status. Now the same authorities have ordered that his USD$1.1m studio be torn down. They claim the building is illegal — that the correct permissions were never obtained.
Ai declared that he would have one of his sensational parties to “celebrate”: this time everyone would have something in-season to eat: 10,000 river crabs. For anyone in-the-know the word “river crab” is important. According to the New York Times the river crab is:
…a sly reference to the Mandarin word hexie, which means both river crab and harmonious. Among critics of China’s censorship regime, hexie has become a buzzword for opposition to the government’s call to create a harmonious society, free from dissent.
On Friday, Ai was placed under house arrest meaning he would be unable to attend his own party, planned for this weekend. Reports of his angry reaction are here and here.
Ai’s detention focused the media’s attention on the party and the studios pending demolition. Within China there has been criticism and accusations that Ai is seeking free publicity from the foreign media; some argued that he advertised the party for too long, almost seeking a reaction. However much the Western media report it, no reports have appeared in the Chinese press.
Ai’s house arrest was due to end at midnight last night — his supporters took it upon themselves to celebrate in Shanghai without him. Ai told AFP the police left his Beijing home a little earlier at 11pm, too late for him to reach the party. Nonetheless at the Shanghai banquet his fans had their say.
PLUS: READ INDEX ON CENSORSHIP MAGAZINE’S INTERVIEW WITH AI WEIWEI HERE
YouTube does not cause extremism
Recent reports on the stabbing of Labour MP Stephen Timms seem to suggest that his attacker Roshanara Choudhry was “radicalised” by the Internet, and specifically videos of Yemen-based Anwar al-Awlaki on YouTube.
The Telegraph’s report on interviews with Choudhry is revealing: it is claimed she “did not attend mosque” and had “no-one to answer questions about her faith”.
This strikes one as somewhat disingenuous: Choudhry’s misfortunate parents are both said to be practicing Muslims, and it is not difficult to find a mosque in east London. There are people to ask. So the question arises: was it that she had no one she could ask about her faith, or no one who would tell her what she wanted to hear: that she should become a jihadi, or even a shahid.
Much was made of Roshanara Choudhry’s bright academic record, as if this made her receptiveness to jihadism all the more unusual. But this displays a seemingly wilful ignorance of Islamist politics, and its hold on UK, and particularly London, university campuses.
Only a few weeks ago, anti-extremist think tank the Quilliam Foundation produced a report on the hijacking of university Islamic society’s by far-right Islamists, focussing on City University in Islington, north London.
As it happens, I attended City University myself, over a decade ago. Even then, groups such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir and its extreme splinter Al Muhajiroun had a strong presence on campus, and exerted disproportionate influence on the Muslim student population. This trend, by all accounts, has only intensified post 9/11, and is manifested throughout London’s universities.
So it is seems unlikely that Choudhry would not have encountered extremism before logging on to YouTube.
But that is the narrative being spun. And there seem to be to be several reasons for this.
It is a measure of the ubiquity of the web in modern life that we now tend to appeal to it for solutions and bemoan it when things go wrong in our society.
Humans always look for an overarching reason when we feel that something has gone badly wrong: in the past, we imagined that capricious gods decided our fate. Now, when an ugly phenomenon rears its head, we look over its shoulder to find a cause beyond the phenomenon. We blame “the Internet”.
There are, of course, some major sites that most of us use daily: chiefly Google, YouTube and Facebook.
When Facebook pages sprung up dedicated to murderer Raoul Moat (pages, incidentally, that contained as much criticism as praise, and more irony than either) Prime Minister David Cameron sincerely suggested that he would consult Facebook about the possibility of removing them. Let us not engage with the content: let us instead rush to have the content hidden.
So apart from its assumed omiscience and omnipresence, Google (and Facebook, and well, all web services) faces another problem. We all assume we know how easy it is to remove something from the web. And you know, it is fairly easy. Technically adept people will always be able to dig up ghosts of Internet past, but for the majority of people, when we press “remove” on Facebook, or unpublish a page on blogger, that’s pretty much the end of it. Censorship seems easy, and doesn’t carry the same taboo as pulping books or running lines of blue pencil over a correspondence.
But just because we can do something, doesn’t mean we should. If we are to be serious about free speech, which we are supposed to be as a society that aspires to democracy, then we have to accept that poisonous ideologies will be disemminated: it is only when only very specific, credible, direct, incitement or threats are raised that we should even conceivably discuss censorship.
While al-Awlaki, bin Laden and others may call for jihad against the kuffar, surely it was Choudhry’s own interpretation of this that led to her vicious attack on Timms.
Which brings us to the area of personal agency: the majority of the vast amounts of material uploaded to YouTube is put there by individuals: That is the real glory of the site. Google states:
“YouTube has community guidelines that prohibit dangerous or illegal activities such as bomb-making, hate speech, and incitement to commit violent acts. We also remove all videos and terminate any account registered by a member of a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization and used in an official capacity to further the interests of that organization.”
Which you can agree or disagree with.
But the company also says:
“What we can’t do, and which few people would want a private company to do, is check what people want to post online before they do so. The truth is that due to the huge advances the internet has enabled in free expression, offensive or even illegal content may appear for a time, but we have clear rules and will continue to apply them to material brought to our attention.”
This seems right: while one may have difficulties with certain provisos, the greatest offence would be for YouTube to monitor and edit every last piece of content uploaded. Apart from being undesirable, it would quite simply be impossible.
If we are worried about the spread of jihadist ideology and its appeal to people such as Roshanara Choudhry — which we should be — then we are much better served actually learning about it and examining it, giving society power to challenge its arguments. We cannot do this if our first impulse is to block it out.