Freedom of speech

It’s amazing to se the massive support that the international blogosphere is giving to freedom of speech in general and Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer in particular these days. Kareem Amer, or Abd al-Karim Nabil Sulayman is a 22-year old law student from Alexandria, who, like many other bloggers, has expressed his thoughts on everyday life, politics and the world he sees around him in his Blogspot blog.

However, most of us aren’t as brave as Kareem. We live in counties where freedom of speech is a natural thing, as expressed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). In Egypt expressing any views on the government, your university, or the prime minister is a prave thing to do.

I fully support the two campaigns and petitions for his immediate release.

I don’t care what Kareem’s views are. I only defend his rights to express them. I don’t know Kareem, but I have a feeling I would like him. I tend to do that, when people have the guts to express their oppinions - whatever those oppinons are.

I see it as every blogger’s duty to run to Kareem’s defence. If we don’t raise hell when one of us gets into trouble for doing what we all do, who will do it for us if and when we get into trouble?

Repressive regimes, such as the Egyptian, tend to scare of their critics now and again by setting examples. And four years in prison for saying that you thinks that your university is run as a terror regime and that Ahmed Nazif, the Egyptian prime minister acts as a farao? That’s a pretty strong message to every potential blogger to just shut up.

But I don’t think the Egyptian regime has counted in the international blogosphere. We are, quite able to send just a strong a message. A message of support for free speech. Kareem’s blog, has never been more popular. Even I have tried to read it, even though I don’t read arabic (and the translation tools are as useless as ever). It is getting more links than ever from everywhere, and I don’t think Blogger will ever shut it down after all the attention it is getting. Read the rest of this entry »

Share This

This is one of the rare occations when a story evolves by itself. When I published the text below back in mid December I did it to mock Uday Hussein, who claimed his Yahoo! mail account had been withdrawn by Yahoo!. I also did it to have a good place for linking to Human Rights Watch’ and Amnesty’s pages about his crimes against humanity. Of course, the links to Babil and iraq2000 doesn’t work anymore (what does in Iraq these days?), but I thought the story was dead and gone (just as is probably Uday himself).

Then, some joker calling him-/herself snowpups2003 posts a link to a Yahoo! News message board claiming Uday’s account is active and that his password is “babil”, adding a link to this page. That, my friends, is just bogus, a prank and a mini hoax. I even tried it, it didn’t work.

So why is somebody making up a hoax and linking it here? I don’t quite know. It could be to discredit me/my site/the original article or it might just be that snowpups2003 misunderstood the text below. I don’t quite understand it, but a couple of hundred of surfers has clicked on the link from Yahoo! today, and I just felt I wanted to try to give you some kind of explanation.

Update It seems as snowpups2003 has left this link in as many boards as possible on Yahoo!, thus providing us with another explanation of his/her behaviour. To discredit Yahoo!
Here is my original article from December 15, 2002:
2002-12-15 Oh isn’t this stupid? So, Saddam Husseins son Uday has a Yahoo! e-mail account. Big deal! So has millions of Indians, thousands of Swedes and quite a few kurds as well. Still I care enough about the news that he has been kicked out of Yahoo to right this text…

So who is Uday Saddam Hussein, besides being the eldest sone of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein? Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both, over the years, reported him responsible for mass murder, mass rape, torture. They hol him partly responsible for the attac against Halabja in 1988 where 5000 kurds died from a gas attac. Read more about this in amnesty.org and hrw.org

His address, udaysaddamhussein@yahoo.com, was published in Wired News on November 11, and I guess he has received his fair amount of spam to that address by now. No wonder his very own, very pro Iraqi, newspaper Babil published the news that Uday Hussein now couldn’t be reached by his Yahoo! e-mail address anymore. Babil strangely enough reports that the account was closed by orders of U.S. officials allthough it was a payed account. Now, I wouldn’t go pay for a Yahoo! account…

  The mailto link at the bottom right of the Babil site (both the Arabic and English versions) still points to udaysaddamhussein@yahoo.com. There is also a static html-page that might contain e-mail addresses, but the English version is missing and the Arabic version is … right, in Arabic, a language I haven’t got the handle on yet. I do, however read html, and in the code I found the following three addresses: babil@uruklink.net, inoc@uruklink.net (I think that is the webmaster at the Iraqi National Olympic Committe, who officially owns the site) and contact-us@uruklink.net. There are also a few links still pointing to udaysaddamhussein@yahoo.com.

Well, I tried the udaysaddamhussein@yahoo.com address, and it has been discontinued for sure.
This is the bounce I received half a second after I send a query:
This is the Postfix program at host nw-smtp.wineasy.se.

Final-Recipient: rfc822; udaysaddamhussein@yahoo.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; host mx2.mail.yahoo.com[64.156.215.5] said: 554
delivery error: dd This user doesn’t have a yahoo.com account
(udaysaddamhussein@yahoo.com) - mta129.mail.scd.yahoo.com

So who has the edge on this story? It could be Uday, the poor guy who was policed by the US officials out of his e-mail account. But I don’t think so. After just a few searches over the web, I for one found enough about this guy to want him tucked away for good in a very cold cellar, as far away from humanity as possible. Besides, as mentioned in the Wired News article, US intelligence probably were really happy about him having a known e-mail account they could intercept.

Other related links:
Uday Hussein Biography

For those of you reading a language where Uday is transcribed Oday. here’s a little something so that you will catch this page. The above article is about Oday Saddam Hussein.

Share This