Saudi girl rock band shake things up!
November 27, 2008
Members of Saudi Arabia’s first all-girl rock band, the Accolade, are clearly not afraid of taboos.
The band’s first single, “Pinocchio,” has become an underground hit here, with hundreds of young Saudis downloading the song from the group’s Web site. Now, the pioneering young foursome, all of them college students, want to start playing regular gigs – inside private compounds, of course – and recording an album.
“In Saudi, yes, it’s a challenge,” said the group’s spiky-haired lead singer, Lamia, who has piercings on her left eyebrow and beneath her bottom lip. (Like other band members, she gave only her first name.) “Maybe we’re crazy. But we wanted to do something different.”
In a country where women are not allowed to drive and rarely appear in public without their faces covered, the band is very different indeed. The prospect of female rockers clutching guitars and belting out angry lyrics about a failed relationship – the theme of “Pinocchio” – would once have been unimaginable here.
But this country’s harsh code of public morals has slowly thawed, especially in Jidda, by far the kingdom’s most cosmopolitan city. A decade ago the cane-wielding religious police terrorized women who were not dressed according to their standards. Young men with long hair were sometimes bundled off to police stations to have their heads shaved, or worse.
Today, there is a growing rock scene with dozens of bands, some of them even selling tickets to their performances. Hip-hop is also popular. The religious police – strictly speaking, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice – have largely retreated from the streets of Jidda, and they are somewhat less aggressive even in the kingdom’s desert heartland.
Go to The Accolade Myspace page.
Susology , in their recent free mag, have an article about the underground hip hop & party scene in Tehran. Persian hip hop is known as rap-e-Fars and it’s most well known proponent is Hichkas (aka Soroush Lashkari).
As their music is essentially protest music against the oppressive leaders of Iranian society the artists rely entriely on the internet & an underground network of parties, held in people’s apartments. Here they get to meet the opposite sex, drink alcohol, dance, wear the latest fashions and rally against the state.
This, believe it or not is all very dangerous as the Revolutionary Guards regularly patrol neighbourhoods and enter apartments at will looking to drag away any one who denigrates Islam & the regime.
Check out these sites; www.parshiphop.com
And hear Hichkas here (in Farsi).
Beijing Olympics 2008 – out moded cultural exchange
April 25, 2008
image: found at Beau Bo D’Or
I was in Tiananmen Square 1990. It was creepy. Hardly anyone there.
Now the city has changed beyond almost all recognition. Freedom to block out their past. Freedom to eat American junk food. Freedom to spend.
Freedom to obliterate culture. The Olympics do exactly that. Waste of energy, waste of time. People can have their cultural exchange …. online …. any time.
map: torch route
Today’s run relay carrying the Olympic torch was marred by protest all the way along the London route. A protester in Bayswater, central London got his hand on the torch and almost got it off the torch bearer. See the video action here.
Later more protestors attempted to put out the torch flame using fire extinguishers. See this video action here.
The day was marred by farce with the Chinese ambassador having to change her route, taking the torch through London’s Chinatown instead. Gordon Brown refused to been seen holding the torch.
The protests will continue wherever this torch may go over the next few months. London has played it’s part and proudly.
Egyptian bloggers and activists fight oppressive regime
March 20, 2008
image: jailed Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer
Article: BBC, Crossing Continents
Crossing Continents travels to Egypt meeting remarkable women fighting for their rights in a male dominated society. Egyptian women are fighting against female circumcision, the suppression and imprisonment of internet bloggers, poor pay and for workers rights.
Dalia Ziada is a 26 year old activist and blogger who speaks out against the practice of female circumcision, having been circumcised herself. In Egypt it is estimated that over 90 % of the female population are circumcised. Dalia says the key to change is “to change the mentality of Arab women”.
But bloggers who question accepted religious practices are often threatened and Dalia has been accused of being a spy for the CIA. Dalia is also campaigning for the release of Ayman Noor and fellow blogger Kareem Amer sentenced to four years in jail – three years for insulting Islam and one for insulting the president.
The road to real democracy, Dalia believes, lies through women’s rights. “Validate women and you validate the whole society.”
That is brave talk in a country and a region where, as the 2005 UNDP Arab Human Development Report states “In all cases, real decisions in the Arab world are, at all levels, in the hands of men”.
Listen to their story here; BBC radio (one minute of news first, then listen to Crossing Continents).
Kareem Amer – jailed blogger
The case of Abdel Kareem Nabil Suleiman, or “Kareem Amer,” as he’s known in the blogosphere, has shed a spotlight on a growing community of bloggers in Egypt, and on the country’s laws concerning online speech.
To give you an idea of what he did to get arrested, here is a translation from his final blog post last October:
The mere existence of legal provisions that criminalize freedom of thought, and threaten with imprisonment anyone who criticizes religion in any way, is a grave defect in the law.
Two days after he posted those words, he was interrogated by Egyptian police. Eventually, he was convicted of violating the same legal provisions he criticized on his personal blog.
A court convicted him of contempt of religion, specifically Islam, and defaming President Mubarak. Though this is the first time a blogger in Egypt has been convicted by a court for blogging, Egyptian bloggers say free speech and political activists are often arrested and detained.
Is Facebook sharing your info with the CIA?
January 15, 2008
…. the CIA would like you to get one (?)
A very interesting Guardian article by Tom Hodgkinson has come out this week showing possible links between Facebook and the CIA.
Jim Breyer is a board member of Facebook. On the board of such US giants as Wal-Mart and Marvel Entertainment, he is also a former chairman of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).
Facebook’s most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock’s senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What’s In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA.
After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, which “identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions”.
The US defence department and the CIA love technology because it makes spying easier. “We need to find new ways to deter new adversaries,” defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2003. “We need to make the leap into the information age, which is the critical foundation of our transformation efforts.” In-Q-Tel’s first chairman was Gilman Louie, who served on the board of the NVCA with Breyer.
Are you one of the millions that have Facebook? Do you have many friends? Well you might have at least one more … the CIA.
Tony Blair’s $9million book advance.
November 1, 2007
Guarding Blair’s war cash.
Tony Blair, the former prime minister of Britain, has agreed to sell his memoir for an advance of about $9 million, according to a person with knowledge of the negotiations.
After a four-day auction, the book was bought by two divisions of Random House, Alfred A. Knopf in the United States and Canada, and Hutchinson in Britain.
Sonny Mehta, chairman and editor in chief of Knopf, said that Blair intended to write a “serious and frank book” about his life and in particular his decade at 10 Downing Street.
More here.
That’s nice isn’t it. I’ll be reading the bit about where he ignored two million marchers in London before going to war. Tosser!
US police visit blogger’s home.
October 12, 2007
Secret Cuba
October 12, 2007
When Yoani Sanchez, 32, wants to update her blog about daily life in Cuba, she dresses like a tourist and strides confidently into a Havana hotel, greeting the staff in German. That is because Cubans like Sanchez are not authorized to use hotel Internet connections, which are reserved for foreigners.
In a recent “Generación Y” posting (www.desdecuba.com/generaciony/ ), Sanchez wrote about the abundance of police patrolling the streets of Havana, checking documents and searching bags for black-market merchandise.
She and a handful of other independent bloggers are opening up a crack in the government’s tight control over media and information to give the rest of the world a glimpse of life in a one-party, Communist state.
“We are taking advantage of an unregulated area. They can’t control cyberspace out there,” she said.
Luis Sexto, a columnist for the Communist Youth newspaper Juventud Rebelde, recently posted a blistering attack on state bureaucracy at http://luisexto.blogia.com . “Without public criticism, mistakes will continue to hurt our country,” Sexto wrote last month.
A blogger who goes by the name of “Tension Lia” posts mostly photographs of the ruinous state of Havana’s architectural treasures on a blog called Havanascity (http://havanascity.blogspot.com).
The creator of “My island at midday” told Reuters by e-mail message that the anonymity of the blog has allowed him to say some things that nobody has dared write about.
“Dissent has always been frowned upon,” the author wrote. “Intolerance is still the rule in Cuba, even though Cuban society is starting to adapt to diversity of opinions.”
Source: IHT.
