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April 26, 2004
Monday
 
 
ASI Blog update
Perry de Havilland (London)  Blogging & Bloggers

The Adam Smith Institute's blog has moved, so update your links to:

www.adamsmith.org/blog

Comments

Perry, completely beside the point but talking about bloggers, here's one from Saudi Arabia ('The Religious Policeman') which you should definitely add to your links:

http://muttawa.blogspot.com/

The Religious Policeman (or 'Alhamedi') got a great write-up on page 28 of The Sunday Times yesterday, in a full page article on the Saudi 'revolution' by Tony Allen-Mills. Here's the extract on Alhamedi:

[...]
“The activities of the religious police – a Taliban-like agency known as the “mutaween” – have paradoxically inspired an unexpected source of Saudi dissent. In a country where satellite dishes are theoretically banned and internet access is closely monitored, an English-speaking “blogger” – writer of an online diary – has been making waves around the world with what he describes as “a Saudi man’s diary of life in the ‘magic kingdom’, where the religious police ensures that everything remains as it was in the Middle Ages”.

The blogger describes himself as a US-educated member of a senior Saudi tribe unrelated to the house of Saud and “not trusted by the royals”. Calling himself Alhamedi, he casts a sceptical eye on claims of antiterrorist success by Nayef’s interior ministry.


In response to one claim that eight terrorist suspects had been arrested, Alhamedi wrote last week: “Call me a cynic, or has this come from the Ministry of Truth’s ‘Good news, not necessarily 100% correct, maybe even fabricated, but it’s good for morale’ department?”

On another occasion he noted that terrorists who were initially said to have been “surrounded” were subsequently reported to have “slipped away”. He added: “There are some scurrilous suggestions that the security forces don’t want to catch the terrorists.

American sources insist that last year’s Riyadh attacks persuaded the royal family it could not be soft on Al-Qaeda. Yet Alhamedi repeatedly cites official accounts of gun battles with police where “the ending is always the same – the terrorists escape”.

He adds: “Many of us believe that we are witnessing a ‘fault line’ between the relatively moderate policies of Crown Prince Abdullah and the darker motives of other members of the royals, and parts of security forces themselves, who would like to see the terrorists succeed. And it’s very scary.”
[...]

Clearly, Tony Allen-Mills knows where to get a freebie. Note also that the word 'blogger' is put in inverted commas and followed by a definition ...



Posted by Karol Kaplan at April 26, 2004 12:27 PM
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