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    | 48 notes

    In April last year Ahmad Mohammad left his village in northern Syria filled with its pomegranate trees, figs, and goats, and moved to Lebanon. He came back five months later with a certificate in mobile phone maintenance – a weapon more powerful than Bashar al-Assad’s helicopters and tanks.

    While he was away Mohammad learned how to upload videos to YouTube – a website banned by the Syrian regime. “Nobody in Syria knew how to do this,” he said.

    From ‘Syria’s video activists give revolution the upper hand in media war’

  2. ‘If there were global justice, Nato would be in the dock over Libya’

    | 24 notes

    Seamus Milne writes for Comment is Free:

    A year after the western powers tried to make up for lost ground in the Arab uprisings by tipping the balance of the Benghazi-led revolt, Libya is in the lawless grip of rival warlords and armed conflict between militias, as the western-installed National Transitional Council (NTC) passes Gaddafi-style laws clamping down on freedom of speech, gives legal immunity to former rebels and disqualifies election candidates critical of the new order. These are the political forces Nato played the decisive role in bringing to power.

    See more of Comment is free on Tumblr.

  4. ‘History haunts Egypt’s revolution’

    | 35 notes

    Magdi Abdelhadi writes:

    Unlike Libya, where the removal of the brutal Gaddafi regime is complete, Egypt has so far managed only to get rid of the Mubaraks and a few around them. The regime itself, with the army and the security apparatus at the centre, remains largely intact. And no more so than in the shape of Scaf – the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces – whose members were handpicked by Mubarak and whose chief, Field Marshal Tantawi, is now de facto head of state (…) Does this make Egypt’s revolution failed or incomplete? Possibly yes, if you consider revolutions to be a point in time. But if you believe that a revolution is a more complex process than removing a dictator, then the jury is still out. And the Egyptian revolutionaries cling to that hope.

    Read ‘History haunts Egypt’s revolution’ in full.

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