I hope these women have masked their IP addresses as well as their faces. Let's hope the beatings are only virtual.
Posted on 10/17/2006 9:15:28 PM PDT by humint
The craze for blogging in Iran has reached an unlikely set of disciples - the country's conservative Islamic clerics.
Following the example of the President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, ayatollahs, seminary students and theologians are receiving training in setting up their own blogs.
Courses run by the newly established office of religious weblog expansion have begun in the holy city of Qom, the traditional home of the country's religious establishment.
Students more used to poring over the theological nuances of the Koran will receive instruction on practical matters such as blog content and technical support. About 300 clerics, religious students and writers have been signed up.
The arrival of the religious ruling class on Iran's blogosphere is ironic in view of the harsh crackdown launched by the authorities against bloggers who have used it to voice political dissent.
Scores of bloggers have been jailed in recent years, and many sites have been blocked using US-made filtering technology.
Iran is estimated to have up to 100,000 bloggers, most of them concentrating on social affairs, culture and sex.
The trend began among the political reformist movement in 2001 as a response to the closures of dozens of liberal newspapers and magazines.
Mr Ahmadinejad jumped on the bandwagon last month when he launched a blog attached to his presidential website.
His first entry set out his personal background and political philosophy and asked if the US and Israel were intent on starting a third world war.
Can they virtually beat their women on the Internet?
I hope these women have masked their IP addresses as well as their faces. Let's hope the beatings are only virtual.
Saudi Arabia's bold young bloggers
BBC ^ | 10/16/06 | Roger Hardy
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1720635/posts
Posted on 10/16/2006 9:52:41 PM CDT by Valin
There's not just an oil boom in Saudi Arabia - there's a blogging boom too. "It really took off last year," says Saudi journalist Rasheed Abou-Alsamh. There are now between 500 and 600 Saudi blogs - in English as well as Arabic - and the bloggers are women as well as men. "I think young people see the Internet as a way of expressing themselves easily and in an uncensored fashion," says Mr Abou-Alsamh.
The Saudi kingdom is still in many ways a closed society. "The media here are controlled," says blogger Fouad al-Farhan, who is 31 and runs an IT company in Jeddah. "We can't express our thoughts on TV or in newspapers or magazines." Unusually, he includes his mobile phone number, as well as his full name, on his Arabic blog (www.smartinfo.com.sa/fouad/). He uses the blog to comment on political and religious issues. Others call him a conservative - a term he dislikes. His views are certainly very different from those of liberal young bloggers who attack the religious police - or discuss their love lives.
(snip)
/Shameless Plug
If Mo didn't have a blog, then these morons shouldn't be on the computer either.
I guess the Koran doesn't forbid blogging as long as women aren't involved. However aren't they, like the Nazis, worried about using technology springing from "Jewish" science.
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