Free Speech Under Threat

Apologies to everyone who has visited during the past week, expecting to find new comment for discussion and debate. I started a new job and had hoped to be able to continue blogging but have been to do anything very much on the computer at all! Life should settle down again in about a week though whether I'll be able to keep up the daily posts remains to be seen. So if anyone is interested in joining a team of bloggers for The Difference, do contact me via email.

In the meantime, my most recommended blog post of the past week is Archbishop Cranmer's British blogger to be arrested?:

While British mosques are free to distribute books and other materials that contain hate and disdain towards non-Muslims (and do so with impunity); and imams quote from the Qur’an vast passages which preach hatred, violence and paedophilia (and do so with impunity), a British blogger is to be arrested for daring to criticise Islam and Islamism. ...

It is actually difficult to see how Lionheart may be arrested for stirring up racial hatred, but there may be prima facie evidence under the Religious Hatred Bill . This could easily be deployed to challenge what may be termed the ‘Counter-jihad’ blogosphere. And even more concerning is the fact that as we move towards a ‘harmonised’ legal system throughout the EU, Lionheart could be arrested in the UK under an EU warrant and extradited to any EU country province which happened to find his writings ‘xenophobic’.

Wasting Police Time

Want to know what's wrong with policing in this country and why crime and antisocial behaviour seem out of control? Then make sure you watch Panorama on BBC1 tonight as Stuart Davidson, the police constable responsible for The Policeman's Blog goes public:

"Everyone joins the police with the aim of catching burglars, catching thieves, solving crimes. But as a uniformed officer available for deployment I would spend over half of my time writing in the office. Eighty per cent of what I did was a waste of time. There comes a point where you think, 'This isn't really why I joined.'"

By the sounds of it, the programme will live up to the blogger's strapline, "This blog will do more to put people off calling the police than anything, other than actually calling the police."

Darfur Blog

The Health Centre today resembles a cattle market. There are people everywhere. Children crying everywhere. I do a quick triage of women and children sitting on a large collection of mats outside. Right at the back of the queue I notice a little baby that looks very poorly indeed. I usher both mother and child through to my (grim) consulting room. My seat is a chair made of straw. It looks about 30 years old and I'm sure would provide many exciting hours of study for a Microbiologist and his petri dishes! The back of the chair consists of a grubby piece of rope holding together two wooden legs. The baby is nine months old and looks very marasmic and wasted. Just a thin layer of skin covers her ribs. I put a MUAC (mid-upper arm circumference) bracelet on her and it reads ''red- severely malnourished''. Her whole body is moist with beads of sweat. I give her one week's supply of Plumpinut. This is a high-energy ready-to-eat French product that is stuffed with calories and nutrients. In addition I give Mum a mosquito net and a prescription for a collossal dose of Vitamin A, Measles jab, rehydration solution and antibiotics. This child really needs to be admitted and watched by nurses like a hawk. But we just don't have the human resources or capacity. She has her treatment and takes her chances. I arrange to review her tomorrow and spend a great deal of time and effort giving the Mum advice. She is this baby's only nurse. I also insist that Mum doesn't sell the Plumpinut on the market or feed it to her other kids. This does, unbelievably, commonly happen. Mum gives me her word and I fast track her to the front of the pharmacy queue. Onto the next patient.......

Ever wondered what life must be like for the aid workers trying to help Darfur's refugees and internally displaced people? Médecins-Sans-Frontières doctor Neil Fletcher recently started working in Eastern Chad and is keeping a diary online at www.drfletcherinafrica.co.uk

Free To Defend Freedom

"In an age of technology, the Internet has become the new frontier in the struggle for the right to dissent. With the help of some of the world’s biggest IT companies, governments such as those in Belarus, China, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia are monitoring chat rooms, deleting blogs, restricting search engines and blocking websites. People have been imprisoned in China, Egypt, Syria, Uzbekistan and Viet Nam for posting and sharing information online."

We in the West take so much for granted — like the fact that I can write this blog and you can read it and, should you be sufficiently motivated, even comment on it. Today's Amnesty International annual report reminds us that not everyone enjoys such liberties — see for instance the recent cases of Sandmonkey, Savva Terentyev, Kianoosh Sanjari, and Kareem Amer.

Yet, as the foreword to Amnesty's report concludes, "Marches, petitions, virals, blogs, t-shirts and armbands may not seem much by themselves, but by bringing people together they unleash an energy for change that should not be underestimated ... People power will change the face of human rights in the 21st century. Hope is very much alive." It is in this spirit that The Difference will before the end of the week launch a campaign to help the people of Zimbabwe as they attempt to reclaim their democratic rights.

So, if you're sitting comfortably in the West, why not exercise your freedom and leave a comment? And if you're reading this in a country where you're at risk of imprisonment or worse, know that you are in our prayers.

Blog of the Day: Crime Scene

In view of the news, I thought I'd check out the various Police bloggers and came across Inspector Gadget at the Police Inspector Blog, who posted yesterday:

Official statistics show that the amount of crime committed by tagged offenders has increased by four-fold and the cost of keeping an offender in prison is more than a suite at The Ritz.

As the inspector concludes, you couldn’t make it up.

Another Blogger Silenced

This weekend the blogosphere lost another of Egypt's most prominent political bloggers, Sandmonkey, who cited harassment by the security services as his main reason for going offline:

"It took me a while to take note of the fear that has been gripping our little blogosphere and comprehend what it really means. The prospects for improvement, to put it slightly, look pretty grim. I was the model of caution, and believing in my invincibility by managing not to get arrested for the past 2 and a half years, I've grown reckless."

Sandmonkey was known for his stinging commentary on the Islamisation of Egyptian society and his virulent criticism of President Mubarak's 26-year-old regime; his posts, as he put it: "are usually emotionally charged and reflect my anger or disdain or cynicism towards what Egypt has become over the past two years."

This comes as human rights in Egypt have suffered yet another setback, with the country's Court of Administrative Justice ruling that Christian converts to Islam are forbidden from reverting to their original faith. The court maintains that permitting such actions would constitute a "manipulation of Islam and Muslims" and violate the prohibition against apostasy under Islamic Shari'a.

Officially the Egyptian Constitution guarantees freedom of religion and belief, but judgements such as this and the imprisonment of a pro-democracy blogger earlier in the year expose the truth about the worrying direction the country appears to be heading.

Do You Dare Leave A Comment?

What's the worst that could happen? Here at The Difference, nobody is even going to give you a screenful of abuse, for this blog has its own voluntary code of conduct and inappropriate comments will not be approved. You might even win a copy of the magazine!

In Russia, however, you could find the police knocking on your door. On 15th February, 21-year-old Savva Terentyev left a comment on the blog of his local journalist, Boris Suranov, who had posted about a police raid against the offices of the opposition newspaper Iskra.

Now, the comment was admitted rather lacking in tact and wouldn't have got past this blog's code of conduct. It has since been deleted, but Terentyev allegedly wrote that Russian police are "filth," "the most stupid, uneducated representatives of the living world" and recommended that six police in every city be "ceremonially burned daily, or better twice a day (at midday and midnight, for example)." However, he is now being prosecuted for hate crimes and faces two years in prison or a fine of 300,000 rubles (£5,860).

So, are you scared to express your opinions?  If not, exercise your freedom, and leave a comment!  Not sure how to do so? Then see this beginner's guide.

Jailed Blogger Speaks Out

A couple of days after an appeals court in Egypt upheld the four-year jail sentence imposed on the blogger convicted of insulting Islam and President Mubarak (see Blogger Imprisoned), the Independent has an interview with Iran's most prominent blogger, Kianoosh Sanjari, who has just been released following three months in prison. His crime was writing an account in his blog describing a security forces attack against followers of one of Tehran's dissident clerics. He says the worse thing about his interrogations was "they wanted to connect me to US politicians, especially to [neo-conservative] Richard Perle. They wanted me to write about US money being allocated to the democracy movement. Where does it go? Who gets it?"  The report goes on:

As tensions between Iran and Western countries have escalated over the nuclear crisis and the wars in Iraq and Lebanon, the authorities have come to regard democracy activists as a potential fifth column. Separatist attacks in border provinces have been blamed on the US and Britain.

When Condoleezza Rice promised cash for Iranian democracy movements last year, activists and non-governmental organisations started to feel the heat.

"Such measures always have the reverse effect on the country to those intended," said Elaheh Koolaee, a former member of parliament and official for a major reformist party. "They increase the domestic reaction because of suspicions over the motives of foreign countries."

Which begs the question, how can we best support the sacrifices of individuals who are fighting for freedom in Egypt, Iran, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere around the world?

Blogger Imprisoned

"There are things that one should not talk about, like religion and politics."

So says an Egyptian lawyer quoted in today's Independent, reporting on the Egyptian blogger jailed for four years for hatred of Islam and insulting the President, Hosni Mubarak. Kareem Amer (real name: Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman) had referred in his blog to companions of the Prophet Mohamed as "terrorists", to al-Azhar as "the university of terrorism" and to President Mubarak as the "symbol of dictatorship". In his Blogger profile, he states his main goal "is to defend the rights of Muslim and Arabic women against all form of discrimination and to stop violent crimes committed on a daily basis in these countries."

As elsewhere, bloggers are on the frontline of Egypt's pro-democracy movement, publishing calls for reform and exposing human rights abuses.