Blogging the democratic revolution
The popular Los Angeles-based Iranian satellite network, National Iranian TV (NITV) has been forced to cut off the broadcasts to Iran due to serious financial problems. The SMCCDI Secularist Movement has details: One of the main bridges of communication with Iran, which is the Los Angeles based “National Iranian TV” (NITV), has been forced to cut off its satellite broadcasting due to financial problems. Such a bad timing couldn’t have come at a worst time, as; the well trusted and popular NITV has prepared, since months, the ground for massive demonstrations at the occasion of the banned “Tchahar-Shanbe Soori” (Fire…
A newspaper office in Los Teques, a small city south of Caracas, was bombed in a multiple molotov cocktail attack that was politically motivated. There were no injuries. The paper, La Region, had done too much reporting on the state of Venezuela’s abysmal health care, led by Cuban agents. Angry fliers were left at the scene of the crime, calling the reporters, in explicitly Castroite language, “miserable,” and declaring that they deserved the death penalty by ‘people’s tribunals.’ (Recall that Cuban dictator Fidel Castro likes to use the word ‘miserable’ – an odd word, really – on his enemies.) Venezuela…
Alek Boyd at VCrisis and Daniel at Venezuela News & Views alert us to a new Chavista propaganda offensive against some of the best reporting on Venezuela coming out these days. It looks like Venezuela’s attacks on the free press do not stop at its water’s edge, but extend to any media anywhere in the world that dares report the truth on Venezuela. In a spectacular article, The Christian Science Monitor sent a freelance reporter up to Venezuela’s mountain shantytowns and interviewed people about just how they felt about Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez. Not surprisingly, Venezuela’s poor have the same…
The municipal government in Volgograd has decided to close down a local newspaper for printing a cartoon showing Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and Moses watching a crowd of clashing people while saying, “We never taught them to do that…” The mayor of the city is quoted as saying that the paper was shut down in order to prevent inter-religious strife; meanwhile, the prosecutor-general is looking to file charges. Jim Hoft wonders if Russia is just being PC or crushing dissent. I’d say both. But more than anything it is being opportunist. Volgograd is in the south-west of the country, has a…
As hearings begin on Capitol Hill over Google’s kowtowing to the repressive Chinese regime, China itself is cracking apart INTERNALLY over its Google censorship. Party officials have taken on other party officials and they are all slashing at each other at the top levels of Chinese government. Christian Science Monitor has the story here. Pamela at Atlas Shrugs is doing some terrific, tremendous blogging about this Google controversy. Read her latest in full here. Rebecca McKinnon at RConversation has news from Capitol Hill and further background here and here. Or go here and just keep scrolling.
Why? Find out more here . And remember, the Bahamian authorities behave as badly as Castro. How long will it take before the civilized world realizes that Cuban refugees deserve the status of political refugees and must be granted political asylum? I am endorsing the boycott.
Val at Babalu blog has an important item on a hunger strike being done by an independent Cuban journalist inside Cuba who’s been denied any Internet access at all from which to file his stories to the outside world. The rest of us take this for granted but in Cuba, it’s something Castro considers his privilege. This poor fellow is willing to starve himself to get the gag off and barely anyone is noticing. It’s sad. Val’s writeup, and a photo of the Havana journalist, is here. UPDATE: And Ziva, at Blog for Cuba, has more thoughts here.
Global Crisis Watch/ClandestineRadio.com’s Nick Grace and Rich Lafayette hosted an interview with Aryo B. Pirouznia of the Iranian opposition movement SMCCDI and the newly-founded Iranian National Secular Party and with me. Listen to it here . The interview begins from the minute 8’30.
Islamofascist fanatics have set fire to the Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Chilean embassies in Damascus, blaming all four for the Danish cartoons that offended Koranic commands not to make graven images of religious figures in a bid to halt idolatry. Anyone who looks at those cartoons can be pretty sure he wouldn’t be tempted to idolatry, given their derisive content. Well, except maybe an intellectually zeroed-out Islamofascist, who knows? The European Union, according to a Danish correspondent here, has responded wimpily, hanging the Danes, their own member country, out to dry. That’s emboldened the fanatics, who’ve burned the embassies in…
The Washington Post published an editorial over the weekend entitled, “U.S. Policy Seen as Big Loser in Palestinian Vote” that is well worth a read for anyone who wants to know exactly what it’s like to be completely oblivious to what democracy actually is and the institutions that are needed to sustain it. Staff writer Glenn Kassler attempts to critique Bush administration policy toward the Palestinians, in which there are probably many. But it ultimately turns into a condemnation of America’s policy of trying to spread democracy in the Middle East and becomes a declaration that the Palestinians, Egyptians, Iranians,…
Glenn at Instapundit has an excellent roundup of this growing issue about Google’s problematic relations with Red China’s government and its implications for freedom of press. The link is here. Val at Babalu and Steve at Hog On Ice have additional thoughts – or well, deeds – here and here. UPDATE: This just ran across the stock ticker: Google (GOOG) lost 6.35 to 436.68 in high volume despite news it launched a search engine in China. The search engine censors topics that are sensitive to Beijing, creating some controversy. Google hit an intraday high of 454.23 before falling back. THE…
I spent some time at Globovision in Caracas. It is a fearless television station that insists it will defy the newly declared censorship from the Venezuelan government. This is all fully in character. During the coup attempt of 2002, when Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez tried to break into all the television stations with a speech in order to suppress news of the unrest in the streets, Globovision, being full of real journalists, defiantly created a split screen so that the people of Venezuela could see what was happening at that critical moment in their country. The split screen showed Chavez…
A few months ago, a 70s-leftist at Columbia Journalism Review, John Dinges, smugly assured us all was well with Venezuela’s press freedom and the only problem in that country was the ‘irresponsibility’ of the private media. For, you know, printing unfounded rumors and stuff. And not liking it (due to their being hopelessly middle class!) when the government Propaganda Minister read off their names publicly in his daily criticism lists. As if they were 4-year-olds. And as if there were no problem with that! In Dinges mind, that, and not anything Chavez did, was the problem! To hear it from…
VCrisis has several good pieces tonight on Argentina but one that caught my eye an event I knew about – that Argentina’s largely leftist press is on the take, with a few isolated exceptions. Now many of those exceptions are under attack as the Nestor “Anti–Summit of the Americas” Kirchner regime strengthens and consolidates its power a la Hugo Chavez. Press freedom is beginning to wither there for those who are not on the take. The story is here.
Christian Science Monitor has some hagiography on Hugo Chavez’s own house organ, Telesur, insisting that it’s — no, really — full of professional journalists. It cites as proof the Telesur chief, the creepy, rat-like former Chavez shill and spokesman, Andres Izarra, a man who was suddenly forced to leave CNN a few years ago, and on very murky grounds. The one who, when he was Chavez’s shill, used to read off journalists’ names at Caracas press conferences to say just how much he didn’t like their reporting. That one. Extolling Telesur’s questionable leadership is something Telesur tried to do when…
The rift between Poland and Belarus continues, with the leading Polish newspapers blacking out their front pages to protest censorship in its less democratic neighbor. Could you imagine the papers here in the U.S. taking such a stand? WARSAW, Poland – Poland’s two leading newspapers blacked out large sections of their front pages Wednesday in an eye-catching protest against media repression in neighboring Belarus. The main pages of Gazeta Wyborcza and Rzeczpospolita looked as if a censor had taken a black marker to them, with most text and photographs crossed out. Amnesty International, which led the protest, wrote at the…
Pajamas Media hosted another one of its blogjams, where in this case the editorial board members discussed ways that the company could be more “bloggy” and overall revolutionary in its approach to media. Well, after reading the whole thing, I have one big suggestion that I think the editorial board should take into account when revising how it provides content. Since I wasn’t part of the blogjam, it’s going here. Don’t takes news from Xinhua, which you may or may not know, is the official state news and propaganda agency of the Chinese government. Google News does it, and it…
Olavo de Carvalho is a brilliant Brazilian intellectual who keeps closely focused on the origins of the far left movements that exist in Latin America and why they are so insidious. Aleksander Boyd at VCrisis spent some time with him, and a terrific, deeply thoughtful exchange of ideas between the two revolutionaries followed. Carvalho attributes the new traction for nondemocratic leftism in the Americas to the writings of an Italian intellectual named Antonio Gramsci. In the ruins of communism’s demise in Eastern Europe, this Italian’s stock has risen, because his approach to Marxism is quite new and different from the…
This is the scariest picture ever of evil Donald Rumsfeld, couretsy of CBS. Why does he have no pinky? And is he doing some Darth Vader move, or did he just rip out the CBS producer’s face? What is going on? Via Academic Elephant.
Alvaro Vargas Llosa, one of the gold standards of Latin American journalism, has a great new Spanish-language blog with The Independent Institute, a libertarian think tank in Oakland. It’s full of excellent items, and has contributions from first-rate journalists and thinkers from all over the hemisphere. It’s so nicely done – and already I can see it’s going to be a success – Alvaro has an item here about Patricia Poleo, whose case we have been following at Publius, among other topics. Check it all out here.
I just spat my drink out through my nose, or would have if I’d been drinking, when I came across this subtitle at Reason: Palestine, not Iraq, is the best shot at an Arab democracy. I suppose in part that’s because I was recently planning on using the same comparison to make the point that externally imposing democracy is more likely to succeed than, well, anything at all in Palestine. After running through the usual pie in the sky hopes naive liberals commonly hold of a peaceful Palestinian people laying down their arms and taking up democratic politics, or at…
Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has hurled a major strike at the free press. Patricia Poleo, the fearless journalist who exposed government shenanigans over a mysterious car-bombing last year of a prosecutor, has been arrested — and along with a military man, a banker and a Cuban exile, charged with the murder herself. The background to her story is here, here, here, and here. Poleo is a dissident, and has even organized protests against Chavez, like this one we blogged here, but she has never engaged in or advocated violence against the Chavez regime. Her only obsession seems to have been…
Luis Ramirez at Voice of America, the best correspondent in East Asia, as we and even Amnesty International have noted before, has come up with some kickass reporting on …. North Korea’s rich elite and the continuing famine in North Korea. It is fearless journalism, and like none other you have read. Even people who look down on VOA have admitted to being stunned by the first-rate quality of this reporting. The award-winning Voice of America bureau chief in Beijing went to Pyongyang and has since come out no-I-wasn’t-fooled journalism on this dark, closed, monstrous totalitarian dictatorship, the very worst…
On Academic Elephant’s superb blog, I found a small post that resonated with me: The tendency of the mainstream media to belittle U.S. officials when they visit small countries. There are all kinds of valid reasons to criticize them, and from many angles. But to savage Donald Rumsfeld because he paid a visit to distant Mongolia or distant Paraguay is absolutely despicable. The news media has mocked such visits, written them off as proof that Rumsfeld can’t get any other friends, and insulted the countries themselves and their customs. Elephant notes that the media focused almost exclusively on a horse…
Following up on yesterday’s journalist poetry awards, Academic Elephant submits this Haiku loaded with meaning and insight (text by nutjob Arabist Juan Cole): Partition is the consequence of failed co- lonialism. Beautiful! If anyone else composes some news poetry, please send it along (or post it in comments). Oh, and while I’m on the subject of Cole, here‘s a recent post by Anton Efendi of Across the Bay that I meant to link to recently, dissecting the latest ass-headedness from Prof. Cole — it’s about the authenticity of the letter from Zawahiri to Zarqawi.