Year: 2006

Tunisian Blogger Needed for World Cup Blog

The WorldCupBlog is looking for a Tunisian blogger to join their team and blog about Tunisia’s World Cup football team.

Of course, it has to be someone who loves soccer and the national team and who would be able to write well in English.

The aim of WorldCupBlog is to be the place to come for insight, news and opinions about all 32 teams in the World Cup.

If you’re interested, you can either leave a comment here or send an email to bob [at] worldcupblog.com and tell him why you would like to be involved.

More Papers Publish The Offending Cartoons

Both a French and a German newspaper have reprinted the series of 12 Danish newspaper cartoons depicting Prophet Muhammad PBUH, that have sparked huge protests in the Muslim world.

The France Soir daily said it had published the cartoons in the name of freedom of expression and to fight religious intolerance.

Under a headline “Yes, we have the right to caricature God”, the paper ran a front page cartoon with Buddha, the Christian and Jewish Gods and Prophet Muhammad sitting on a cloud above Earth, with the Christian God saying: “Don’t complain Muhammad, we’ve all been caricatured here.”

The German Welt daily put one of the drawings on its front page on Wednesday, saying the picture was “harmless” and regretting that the Danish Jyllands-Posten daily had apologised for causing offense.

“There is no right to protection from satire in the West; there is a right to blasphemy”, says Serge Faubert, France Soir editor.

Well it seems everyone is jumping on this bandwagon, and then saying that they did it in the name of “Freedom of Expression”!!
In fact this French daily says it’s also doing it to fight religious intolerance. So, just to get this straight, they’re fighting religious intolerance by attacking another religion and its prophet!
What kind of tolerance is that?!

And do they think that publishing the caricatures with others of God and Christian and Jewish figures makes it better?
Of course it doesn’t. In Islam we believe in God and all his prophets, and we find it unacceptable to portray any of them in such tasteless manners.
And as for Buddha, it’s unacceptable too because we should respect our brother buddhist’s religion as well.

Anyway, I’ll go on with their claims, and I’ll try to convince myself that it’s all in the name of “Freedom of Expression”, although I personally believe that any person’s freedom ends where the next person’s freedom begins, but let’s try to get over that.
But, based on that, aren’t we also entitled to this same freedom of expression?
Isn’t it normal for us too to express ourselves and say that we’re unhappy about these cartoons and act upon it in peaceful ways like demonstration or boycott?
Or is this so-called freedom available to some and not to others?!!
Why are there always double standards when it comes to dealing with Arabs and Muslims?!!

Related Links:
– The Black Iris
– Al Jazeera
– BBC News

The Danish Cartoons

I briefly wrote about the Danish and Norwegian papers that featured Prophet Mohamed PBUH caricatures in my post Freedom of Racism. But ever since that, there has been an explosion of reactions in the Muslim world, both online and offline. The blogosphere has witnessed a huge number of blogs about this topic, people all over the Muslim world are boycotting Danish and Norwegian products, some countries have pulled their ambassadors, …etc.

Over this time I’ve mainly been watching from the sidelines, wanting to write more about it, but just not finding the time to.

Most opinions I’ve read in the blogosphere are totally against what happened, yet some people think it’s not normal and very backward to react this strongly to these caricatures, and that we should just let it go.
I personally strongly disagree with these people. We’ve let go of a lot of things, we’ve tolerated a lot of disrespect and racism over the years, but when it gets to our Prophet and touches our religion, there is no way we can just let go! It is totally unacceptable!!
I’m against any violent reactions or death threats, but I’m totally for peaceful protest and political or economic boycott if necessary.

If the same paper published some caricatures that touched a Jewish figure, the whole world would have stood against it and pointed the anti-semitic finger at them, and ripped them apart.
But the caricatures being about the prophet of Islam, no one cares, and the angry and offended muslims are made out to be backward thinking and untolerant.
Well yeah, we don’t tolerate anyone attacking our Prophet or religion, and you can call it whatever you want!

A bit earlier, I read that the Danish newspaper that published the cartoons has apologized for offending Muslims around the world, not for publishing the cartoons, but for offending Muslims.
“We apologize for the fact that the cartoons undeniably have offended many Muslims,”‘ Carsten Juste, editor-in-chief of Jyllands-Posten, wrote late yesterday in a letter on the paper’s Web site. He said Jyllands-Posten wasn’t sorry for running the cartoons though.
As for Vebjoern Selbekk, the editor of Norwegian Magazinet, the paper that republished the caricatures, he too said that he “regrets if the drawings were offensive to Muslims.”

Those sound like half ass apologies to me. It’s like someone raping someone and then saying: “I’m not sorry for raping you, but I’m sorry it hurt!”
It’s more of an insult than an apology!

I think they should be able to do a lot better than that!

Related Links:
– The Danish Cartoonist
– Le Boycott : Arme de Destruction Massive (FR)

Happy New Hijri Year

I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Hijri Year 1427.

May it be a blessed, happy and joyful new year for you all bringing you prosperity, success and great health.

Most households in Tunisia cook Mloukhia on this day, because Mloukhia is green, as a way of hoping there’ll be a green and fruitful new year ahead.

We’ll be going over to my parent’s place for lunch, then enjoying the rest of the day off relaxing at home.

links for 2006-01-30

After the 10th Tunisian Blogger Meetup

We just came home from the 10th Tunisian blogger meetup, which was a big success, in which we broke the record in the number of participants and had to keep adding table after table to accomodate the bloggers who came.

What I think is the greatest thing about this meetup is that we had the biggest number of new faces, all thanks to Infinity who took the time to go around blogs and invite them to the meetup. I think we should do more stuff like that with the next meetups.

So, all in all, we were 23 in this meetup, and only 4 were non bloggers. Mrs Senda Baccar, the editor in chief of Femmes Magazine attended the meetup with us and will be writing an article about blogging in Tunisia soon.

The meetup was held at Biwa, which has emerged as a favourite location for our meetups. It started at 1PM and ended a bit after 7PM.

As usual it was a lot of fun, and it was even greater because of all the new faces who were present. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone again in the future meetups and hoping that we’ll have even more people. Maybe in the near future we’ll have to reserve all of Biwa for our meetups 😛

Update: Another thing I liked about this meetup is how it felt a lot like the first meetup all over again because of all the new people who came. Over the past few months, the same faces kept coming, which was great because we became really good friends, but it also meant that we talked less about blogging and more about ourselves and our lives. This time around, with all the new people present we went back to the basics, getting to know each other, talking about our views of blogging, why we do it, …etc.
Plus with a journalist being there with us asking all sorts of questions about blogging, we had to eventually talk about it.

We didn’t come to this meetup with a predefined agenda for what we should talk about and as the number was big, every corner of the table went off in a number of different discussions.
Anyway as usual, the discussions went from talks about blogging to an analysis of the recent weird Egyptian fatwa that says that it is forbidden for a husband and his wife to get naked while making love, just to show you how wide the range is 😛

Hopefully we’ll try to be more organized in the coming meetups with a number of predefined issues of discussion and ideas that we can all debate.

King Kong

King KongLast night, I finally got to watch the new King Kong movie, by Peter Jackson, featuring Naomi Watts, Jack Black and Adrien Brody.

I’ve read a lot of mixed reviews about this movie, some though it was a great movie, and some didn’t like it saying that the only good thing in it was the special effects.

Personally, I really liked the movie and enjoyed it. It was a bit long, but who cares when it’s good. The special effects were amazing, some of the best I’ve ever seen on film.
As for the story, well I disagree with the people who thought it was weak. It’s just a simple, straightforward and clear story with a very obvious meaning, and it was told pretty well.

I didn’t see the original, ok I know that it may seem absurd to some of you that I haven’t seen a classic like that one, but I just didn’t, so I can’t compare. But it’s quite understandable that some people think the old movie is better than the new one, it’s always like that, it’s just like reading a book then watching the movie, the movie never meets your expectations even if it’s really great.

Anyway, to end it all, I really liked the movie and I do recommend watching it for movie lovers.

My score for it is: 8/10.

links for 2006-01-27

Japanese Editions

How come the Japanese always get all these best special edition collector pack gold platinum whatever music album releases, with a bunch load of extra unreleased tracks, live recordings, exclusive photos, videos, cooler cover art, 100 page booklets featuring lyrics, photos, biographies and what not, …etc. ?!!

This is something that has always pissed me off.
It’s like the whole world gets this one shitty edition of the album while they get a perfect cool one.

And it doesn’t stop there, they also get the best music DVDs with extra features, exclusive star interviews, backstage footage, different camera angles and another fat booklet.

Plus all the stars love jumping over to Japan for live concerts, in-store performances, public appearances and this or that!

Why, why, why do they get all the cool stuff while we get second rate shit?!
Why do I have to be Japanese to enjoy some good material from my favourite music artists?
It’s so unfair…