News roundup: RAND symposium, CMC campaigning

[qatarperegrine]

Apparently RAND's Initiative for Middle Eastern Youth had a symposium on "Creative Use of the Media for Tolerance and Understanding" here yesterday. It sounds like some very interesting issues were raised, including:

• Bahrain's "muzzling" of reporters and particularly bloggers,


• Disparities in freedom between young men and women in the Gulf,


• Honor killings in Jordan, and


• The role of the Internet in exposing youth to new ideas.

In more local news, there have been a spate of articles relating to the upcoming Central Municipal Council elections here in Doha. For example, two candidates have made public statements about how to solve the problem of the masses of single male workers living in Doha. (Al Emadi: Make them live elsewhere. Al Jefairi: Recruit single women expats. Al Jefairi has also publicly disavowed the face veil.)

Today's article on the election is most interesting for the subtext on the role of tribes in these elections.

Comments

Gay activism

[shmuelisms.livejournal.com]

Considering you have spoken on the topic of gay advocacy before, I thought the following news-item would interest you:

The Palestinian Gay Women group ASWAT is having a conference in Haifa, Israel at the end of the month. Some of the news coverage this is generating:

Advocate: Gay Arab activists in Israel forge ahead with plans for conference and
Ha'Aretz: Islamic Movement condemns Palestinian lesbian conference.

The two things that I find interesting about this story is that 1) according to their own web-site their members are from the "Occupied Territories" yet "occupier" Israel is enabling them to have the conference within Israel (obviously they can't have it in the PA for political/safety reasons), and 2) that one of the Arab MKs most outspoken against this conference, MK Ibrahim Sarsur, has a last name that literally means "pimp" (which is apparently OK). This last issue could merely be an issue of "transliteration", as I've also heard his name pronounced as "Tsartsur", which is much closer to "grasshopper".