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Saudi Arabia Bans Facebook
gandhi_2 sends in a brief Associated Press piece on Saudi Arabia's blocking of Facebook. "An official with Saudi Arabia's communications authority says it has blocked Facebook because the popular social networking website doesn't conform with the kingdom's conservative values. ... He says Facebook's content had 'crossed a line' with the kingdom's conservative morals, but that blocking the site is a temporary measure." Some reports indicate that at least some individual Facebook pages can be reached from inside the kingdom. There hasn't been an official announcement; the source noted above requested anonymity. Earlier this year when Pakistan and Bangladesh banned Facebook, it was over particular content — cartoons of Mohammed — and the Saudi ban may prove similar once more details emerge.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40166219/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/
Why? Who knows. Does it really matter?
Well, I live in one of those internet black holes, myself. Tunisia. In Tunisia, Youtube, Dailymotion, and many sites were, since 2007, blocked due to "offensive" content (read: politically dissident). What that caused was two things, mainly: More dissidence, and the banalisation of proxies. Right now kids in elementary schools know how to fiddle with proxies and DNS settings to get around the blockade, and despite the govt's sincere efforts, we still watch our vids on youtube (http://www.tekiano.com/net/web-2-0/2-7-1719/youtube-15eme-site-le-plus-visite-en-tunisie.html French blog, sorry). At some point, FB was blocked too, but this nearly caused a riot (Yes, people didn't riot because of a tax increase but they started getting angry when they couldn't play Farmville). This, of course, tought our gov't one thing: being all official about blocking FB is an open invitation to a riot. Thus, they decided to do it diferently and now they block Tunisian IPs from certain pages with... delicate content. (this, I guess, was done hand to hand with Facebook's teams). I do not expect the Saudi gov't to hold on their bloackade for too long, they should play it the smooth way and learn rom their fellow retarded govts.
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If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
everyone,
I am a saudi who lives in saudi and here is my point of the story.
Saudi's (communications and information technology) has a solution of the shelf that blocks pornographic sites automatically (we got VPN so dont worry we get our pr0ns).
This solution keeps its own database and that external database messes up sometimes and blocks stuff that should be blocked. google and secondlife were blocked before and were unblocked. Further more, political website and radical islamic websites are blocked as requested by the government for national security.
facebook's url that was blocked today was (www.facebook.com/home.php) but if you use (www.facebook.com) it works perfectly. so it apparent that the blocking was due to a mess up in the database of the off the shelf solution.
any questions? :D
>> all these backwards countries
Yeah, and the US government, media and public - all - just love wikileaks, eh? Kudos to hypocrisy.
I seem to be able to get to wikileaks from the US.
I seem to be able to make up my own mind about what I can and can not read.
On the contrary, the loss of the right of an entire nation of individuals to access certain media via the Internet is a tragic loss. Yes, the content in question is largely vacuous and no great loss, but the loss of the liberty is definitely not trivial.
First off, a little disclaimer:
Westerners often tend to conflate Wahhabism with Islam, but that is a critical mistake that undermines any clear understanding of the Middle East and Islam itself. The movement has taken Islam from being an unquestioned powerhouse of intellectual and cultural innovation to being perceived as a force of stagnation. Islam is not the problem, the cultural baggage that it is presently burdened with is the issue. Wahhabism itself is only a few centuries old, and in that time it has deeply undermined the perception of Islam in the Western world, and undermined the social, intellectual and economic development of those countries where it has taken root.
It's why women went from being the closest advisors to the Prophet himself, to being deeply despised and treated as subhuman in certain corners of the Islamic world. The najib, the bourqua, the many, many restrictions on women - these came from outside of Islam, and were integrated into the narrative of what Islam is about. Many in the West fail to understand that Wahhabism and the myriad of ancient tribal customs that were given an opportunity for resurgence are not found in the Qu'ran.
One can find the seeds of Wahhabism. The passages and the bits of text that would inspire such an interpretation, but to say it is a legitimate part of Islam would be false. (Wahhabists would strongly disagree. ;) )
But Wahhabism is a factor that must be dealt with regardless of how legitimate it is. So here we find ourselves looking at its biggest proponent - and it's largest victim - Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has siphoned its oil wealth off to fund the lifestyle of countless princes vaguely related to the royal family, while the rest of the young-skewing country faces unemployment and poverty.
The ruling class has tried to embrace the radical Wahhabist interpretation of Islam and use it as a uniting force in the country, while accumulating for itself the material pleasures of modernity purchased with the natural resources of the nation. It hasn't really worked. It's resulted in the aforementioned elites living the high life, while the impoverished masses watch the encroachment of western culture they are taught to despise.
It's a nation ruled by oppression and undermined with a deep-seated cognitive dissonance regarding technology, culture, religion and how it all interacts on a moral and practical level.
It's a climate that is intellectually bankrupt, as it crushes new ideas while longing for the modernity it simultaneously craves / despises. It wants to mesh 16th century mores with 21st century technology. So far it has operated under the illusion that such things are possible, as the country has simply purchased what it desires from the West. But it doesn't develop much of anything on its own. The culture of Wahhabism silences innovation. It creates an environment where fear, oppression, absolutely pathological misogyny are entrenched in the social and legal fabric of the nation.
Saudi Arabia has tried to improve its position by having students study overseas, but they quickly become deeply alienated from the world that stands so far apart from the one they come from. Ideally, the men (and they are almost always men) would return with new ideas and new perspectives. But they so often end up bitter radicals. They see how their nation is widely perceived as a backwards ocean of sand that is valued for its oil and little else. Furthermore, the Western world they encounter is full of temptations they have been groomed to hate, but the promise of economic prosperity they cannot hope to find at home.
The home they return to is a stifling environment of institutionalized corruption (the name Saudi Arabia literally means "Arabia that belongs to the House of Saud"), intellectual stagnation where new ideas are deeply frowned upon, and constant reminders of the morally corrupt world they've left behind.
What hope is there for a country like that?
Even if they didn't come back a
Bahrain is another "entertainment center" for Saudis. The joke in Bahrain is, "Allah cannot see across the causeway."
I guess now they can go there for alcohol, prostitution, and Facebook.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
I've travelled extensively in Morocco and Turkey (just returned from another journey through the former a week ago) and have got into innumerable discussions with the locals about religion. It is true that those countries are not Wahhabi. However, people who feel that Islam is a key part of their identity and who strive to practice it in their lives do agree with many of the problematic aspects of fundamentalist Islam. They do not believe that other religions or no religion at all should be permitted, and they want the state to silence opponents of Islam.
Turkey especially is tilting towards a situation like in Egypt where a secular state is hanging on to life even as the population goes towards a Muslim Brotherhood-like ideology. My secular friends, representative the ever-decreasing portion of the population who think that Atatürk's attempts to diminish Islam's power were a good thing, are now looking to emigrate so they aren't here when the revolution goes down.