It’s unbelievable.
The U.A.E’s Etisalat had finally unblocked flickr only a couple of months ago, obviously in an attempt to win back poor users who were stuck with Etisalat for ages before du -the new telecommunication provider- enters the market (and I assure you BTW, that U.A.E had no choice but allow entrants to their market in abidance by the World Trade Organization WTO’s laws after the 10 years of agreed upon monopoly have finally expired this year!) Etisalat though continues to block Websites left and right without bothering to justify anything. Myspace.com was and most probably still blocked along with every dating site out there. I remember two years ago how astrology.com was also blocked, apparently because they decided that everything about that Website is “haram” (sinful) and they took the liberty to enforce their beliefs on the entire population.
Saudi Arabia also has its share of Internet censorship but I don’t wanna go there.
In Egypt some bloggers were tortured and detained, and a campaign was launched to free one of them.
Recently, Bahrain went down that slippery road and decided to block Mahmood’s Den and other Websites for some weird reason that is beyond me. The following is a list of those sites:
www.freecopts.net
www.arabchurch.com
www.ladeeni.net
www.kurdtimes.com
www.annaqed.com
www.albawaba.com
A petition to unblock Mahmood’s blog has been launched, please sign it and spread the word!
Other Jordanian bloggers who wrote about this:
Out of interest - do you know whether there is any similar censorship in Israel?
John, according to what I know, there’s no similar acts of Internet censorship in Israel but there are other kinds of censorship. Check out the following links:
http://ice.citizenlab.org/news.php
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/amnesty/story/0,,1784718,00.html
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=3912