The 3rd Arab Bloggers Meeting is currently being held in Tunis, Tunisia. The meeting gathers around 100 bloggers, journalists, techies, and experts from the Arab world and international organizations. You can learn more on the Arab Bloggers website and follow the live tweeting on the #AB11 hashtag.

Here’s a list of the Arab blogger tweeps who are currently at the Arab Bloggers Meeting in Tunis. Palestinian bloggers were outrageously denied visas by the Tunisian government and were not able to make it to the meeting.

Tunisia

Sami Ben Gharbia @ifikra
Slim Amamou @slim404
Malek Khadhraoui @malekk
Sarah M @sarah81m
Fairouz Ben Jemia @rouza

Qatar

Abdurahman Warsame @abdu

Bahrain

Jordan

Mohammad alQaq @moalQaq
Ramsey George @ramseygeorge
Naseem Tarawnah @tarawnah
Nadine Toukan @nadinetoukan
Ola Eliwat @Ola_Eliwat
Jaber Jaber @jaber87

Egypt

Randa Aboeldahab @randoshka2000
Manal Hassan @manal
Alaa Abdel Fattah @alaa
Mohamed El Gohary @ircpresident
Ahmed Awadalla @3awadalla
Tarek Amr @gr33ndata
Lilian Wagdy @lilianwagdy
Wael Abbas @waelabbas
Ahmad Gharbeia @aGharbeia

Morocco

Hisham Almiraat @__Hisham

Saudi Arabia

Ahmed Al Omran @ahmed
Hasan Almustafa @halmustafa

Oman

Syria

Leila Nachawati @leila_na
Razan Ghazzawi @RedRazan
Yazan Badran @yazanbadran

Palestine

Saed Karzoun @Saedkarzoun
Irene Nasser @almagdela
Dalia Othman @DaliaOthman (didn’t make because Tunisia rejected visas of Palestinians)
Saleh Dawabsheh @Dawabsheh (didn’t make because Tunisia rejected visas of Palestinians)

Iraq

Hayder Hamzoz @Hamzoz
Noof Assi @noofasee
Dina Najem @dina_najem

Lebanon

Liliane Assaf @funkyozzi
Nadine Moawad @nmoawad
Mustafa @beirutspring
Jamal Ghosn @jamalghosn
Racha Ghamlouch @LebaneseVoices
Assaad Thebian @beirutiyat
Angie Nassar @angienassar
Mansour Aziz @AlAkhbarEnglish
Abir Saksouk @abirsasso
Thalia Rahme @Thalloula

Mauritania

Nasser Weddady @weddady

Libya

Ghazi Gheblawi @Gheblawi
Ahmad Bin Wafa @AhmadBlog
Ahmad El Bokhari @el_bokhari

Sudan

I have undoubtedly forgotten some people, please tweet me at @nmoawad so I can add them.

Guest post by Christine @czahm

Yesterday, while having a coffee at Colombiano in Sassine Square, Ashrafieh, this is what I witnessed:

A shoe shiner came up to one of the customers and asked to shine his shoes. The customer being the super important person he is shoos away the guy with: rou7 min houn wla! (Get lost!)
And then, almost out of nowhere, Elie, one of the waiters, grabs the shoe shiner from the back by the shoulders and violently hurls/ pushes him. The shoe shiner barely has time to gain balance, when Elie slaps him very hard on the head!!!!!!!

I was ENRAGED! I couldn’t wait for Elie to walk back past my table, I got out of my chair and walked up to him. I’ll admit, I was scared; Elie is much bigger than I am, and I had just seen how violent he can be. As I stood in front of him, I had to put my hand on his chest, and push him back a little, otherwise, he would have walked right passed me.

I can’t remember what I said exactly, but something along the lines of: What’s wrong with you? Who gave you the right to hit someone? Who do you think you are? Shame on you.
His immediate response was: You don’t know what this guy has done before!!!!

My friend and I filled out a comments card, and asked for Zeina, the manager’s phone number. My friend called her a couple of hours after the incident, and I called her today.

Not so surprisingly, she was pretty chill about it, saying lines like: Well, I can’t undo something that was done already. This guy has stolen from our customers a couple of times before. I agree with you that Elie should not have been violent, I have talked to him, and we have taken corrective action. What we care about is that our customers be comfortable!!!! (Oh yeah, seeing a waiter act violently with a passerby, did put me at ease!!!)

I am grossed out… I am! I don’t mean this as a personal attack on Colombiano, Zeina, or even Elie. This incident could have happened at a different place, with a different waiter and handled by a different manager. But I just couldn’t let this go by unnoticed, and undocumented. The attitude some people have in this country is just disgraceful! Thinking they are better than someone with a less paying job, or from a poorer country… SHAME! Shame on them.

We were on a mission this weekend to raise global twitter awareness about the Freedom Flotilla heading towards Gaza with tons of aid supplies. The organizers were doing an amazing job with social media, tweeting live from the boats, video live streaming, as well as Google-mapping their locations in the sea on the hour. We wanted to amplify those efforts.

Before the Attack

We tweeted and tweeted and #flotilla did not trend, although it was technically ahead of many trending topics over 24 hours. Even the Jerusalem Post recognized the phenomenal effort we put. I flipped through the TV channels and found no news covering the topic, except for occasional updates from Al Jazeera. By 5am Beirut time, over 13,000 viewers had been watching the live stream continuously for hours. The flotilla had been surrounded by Israeli warships and air force. Nobody reported about it. I stupidly thought there was no way Israel would attack the activists, who all appeared in positive, high spirits on the live stream. One young woman, an Arab American laughed and said to the camera she apologizes to her family for not telling them she was going to Gaza again. She was really cool. Max, I thought, the Israeli warships would block the flotilla near Gaza and escort them to the tents they had prepared in Ashdod. How else does one deal with a peaceful, non-violent protest?

And so, I went to sleep, waiting to hear the news of the flotilla in the morning. I woke up to the horror that 16 activists had been killed and that the flotilla had been captured by the Israeli military. I was shocked and speechless for a good hour. #Flotilla had risen to over 0.7% on twitter but still wasn’t trending. It is undoubtedly a case of censorship. I challenge anyone to tell me it wasn’t. I saved all the graphs. @ShantDotMe suggested that we try and trend another term since twitter must have blocked #Flotilla. I figured they also had the excuse of flotilla being a common noun, so I suggested we go for #FreedomFlotilla. An hour later, both “Gaza Flotilla” and #FreedomFlotilla were trending and have been for the past couple of hours.

We did not mean for #Flotilla to trend because of a massacre. No, that was not our purpose at all. We wanted #Flotilla to trend while the boats were on their way towards Gaza so that the world could follow what was happening.

The Wrong Kind of Trending

But all of that doesn’t matter. We did not mean for #Flotilla to trend because of a massacre. No, that was not our purpose at all. We wanted #Flotilla to trend while the boats were on their way towards Gaza so that the world could follow what was happening. We wanted the world to follow the facts, to meet the faces on board the boats, to see the situation unfold in front of their eyes. The Zionist propaganda machine is extremely powerful and it was on full speed last night with arguments like: people on the flotilla are armed, they are on their way to murder thousands of Israelis, they are smuggling guns to give to Hamas, all bullshit accusations. The Gaza Freedom Flotilla was an international group of over 700 people from 40 different countries, carrying thousands of tons of aid to the Palestinians who have been under siege for over 1080 days. Do you think they would be brave enough to sail to Gaza, knowing the threat they were under, if their purpose was to smuggle arms? Of course the point was not only to deliver the aid; they were on a political action to break the siege. Their action was brave and courageous and pacifist and non-violent. The world continues to be silent about the siege. Gazans continue to suffer. And so the activists wanted to wake the world up by sailing straight to Gaza through international waters.

And so, what is Israel to do in the face of non-violent protest? First, of course, Israel tries to play the innocent helpful role: give us the aid, we will deliver it ourselves, knowing the organizers would not agree because this is not an isolated incident of sending aid to Gaza. This is a political message to break the siege. Second, of course, Israel tries to delegitimize the non-violence, accusing the activists of “provoking” the Israeli warships. But who provoked who really? Israel taunted the activists, circling them by sea and sky, in international waters, signaling and threatening to take action. The flotilla boats then huddled close together and diverted their course a little in order to avoid the clash with the Israeli warships, and their spirits remained high. The Zionist taunting did not work. Israel weighs out the options:

1. Attack the flotilla, kill a few people, scare everyone from ever attempting such actions again, take a tiny bit of criticism, remain protected by impunity, whitewash the crime with excuses of self-defense, and come out of it unscathed; or
2. allow the activists to reach Gaza, break the siege, deliver some aid, and give hope to thousands of other activists that non-violent marches (or sails) actually work?

Meen Irhabi?

The choice is obvious. The Israelis thus act ruthlessly – even in the face of such non-violence – to scare the hell out of these activists and any others. Their message is clear: you cannot resist Zionism, not even non-violently. They will shut down every glimpse of it lest it grow too powerful. And no, my dear Arab leaders, you are not getting off the hook so easily. All of you are racing now to denounce the attacks on the flotilla. Where were you a few days ago when the mission needed your support? Where are all the other boat and ships from all the other countries to join the flotilla? Astankir, nastankir.. shut the fuck up!

*Calms down*

So. Israel knew exactly what to do. The question now is: what are we to do? Our choice is just as obvious.

Today, a bunch of us arrived in Cairo, Egypt in preparation for our meeting to design and launch a network of peer support for young feminists in the Arab world. Exciting!

I have big hopes set for this meeting (organized and led by women under 30) and for a new wave of young feminism that is of and for our region. The first thing I want to share with you is that we set out from the beginning to be a network that depends very little on money. Indeed, you can see it reflected in our choice of venue for the accommodation of our meeting participants, the Lotus Hotel in Cairo,which also housed participants of the Gaza Freedom March last December. We have grown accustomed, in the NGO world, to put our participants up in fancy hotel rooms and conference halls. This is the first time that I am actually spending my nights in a youth hostel that costs $25 a night for a double room. Who said we need to raise tens of thousands of dollars to hold a regional conference? Take a look at these simple rooms in the pictures. This is what a feminist meeting looks like!

The radical feminist organizing in the MENA region emerged 20, 30, 40 years after the similar movements in the West. In Turkey, for example, it didn’t start until the late 1980s. This is not because the women in our region were stupid or were not politically engaged or did not have demands. It is rather because we were under autocratic regimes or in the middle of wars and post-colonial struggles that there was no space for any of these movements to rise. The moment a small space became available, you immediately saw these initiatives taking form. The problem is that by that time, there was already an international discourse at the United Nations around gender and development. So when these movements rose, they clashed with these existing structures of funding and NGOs and civil society that were already in place. Most of the initiatives were thus quickly institutionalized and tamed. And from this clash rose the whole debate on whether feminism is authentically local or a Western import.

My non-verbatim account of a comment made by Pinar Ilkkaracan at the GFW meeting in Jordan: Feminisms in the Middle East and North Africa

Most of the 54th CSW sessions were packed, and I mean PACKED. They were filling up 30 minutes before the sessions started. So I couldn’t blog much from inside the sessions (believe it or not, I couldn’t take my laptop out because the rooms were so packed). I will sum up my notes later tonight. In the meantime, here are some pictures I took today.

Some pics taken by the awesome @69mirs from @naeema‘s fantastic workshop on optimizing images for the web at Nasawiya happening live right now. Special thanks to @monajem and @smexbeirut for lending us the projector.

@naeema is very funny when giving workshops

participants learning how to optimize images

me laughing so hard at @naeema's workshop jokes

The Shorty Awards finale is here! We’ve got until 7pm (Beirut time) on Friday, February 5 to vote for Ali Abunimah al molakkab bi @avinunu on twitter. I don’t need to go into the details of why this is important, but to recap: it raises awareness, it fights back the slander (and since last week Ali has been getting TONS of online slander by zionist propagandists), it brings activists for Palestine together, it gives us hope that small actions on our part can fight the seemingly all-powerful zionist machine. And all it takes is really a couple of minutes.

Ali is leading now by a small margin of votes but his opponent (who has 55,000 followers!) is always making comebacks. So even if we’re leading, keep on voting! Here are some of the basics:

1. To vote, tweet this: “I vote for @avinunu for a Shorty Award in #politics because…” and put a reason after “because..” or else it won’t count. Also, your reason must be unique & real. Don’t put anything hateful towards the opponent or anything silly. Lost for a reason? Google Ali. You can also do this at the voting page.
2. If you voted during the nomination phase, you don’t need to vote again – you will still only count once. You can, however, re-vote to updated your reason if you feel your reason wasn’t that good. They take the last votes.
3. Now is the time to RECRUIT actively to get others to vote too. Shorty Awards are monitored by real people, so they will check the accounts voting. If an account was just created, it is disqualified or if it never tweets, it is disqualified too. So take a few minutes please to recruit friends and supporters of Palestine to vote for Ali (and to recruit others in turn). You can do this by tweeting something like “Please encourage your friends to vote for @avinunu in Shorty Awards. We need 100s more people to win!” or DM-ing them (don’t spam). Or you can go back to traditional methods and call them, email them, or tell to vote when you bump into them in a cafe.
4. Use other channels like Facebook and blogs to tell people about this campaign.
5. Monitor the results live! It’s really exciting

I made some edits (in red) on December 28.

We did it! We trended #Gaza on twitter on the day that commemorated the start of the brutal 22-day Israeli war and siege on Gaza. It was an incredible day. #Gaza trended into the Top 10 for a good 9 hours at least (at the time of writing this post). Wow. So a quick recap of how it went:

• By Sunday morning, we had 74 people signed up to tweet for Gaza between 5pm and 9pm.
• I got online around noon and saw that Gaza had already risen to 0.4% Many tweeps were already online tweeting heavily for Gaza. @gyonis suggested that we try and get half-way up the trending chart by the start of the campaign. @justicentric and @smileandsubvert were tweeting insanely. Spirits were high and more people were getting online and tweeting for Gaza. Some had prepared tweets beforehand, which was very smart. And then, around 1.30 pm, #Gaza appeared on the Top 10 Trending Topics of Twitter! Of course, @justicentric was the first to notice it, cos he was monitoring all the stats like a hawk. A bit before 2pm, it was at #9:

#Gaza coming into 9th place on Twitter Trending Topics

• We went insane! We ran around (metaphorically, on twitter) not knowing what to do. We had broken into the Trending 10 already, so we couldn’t stop. We had to keep on going. Everyone was nailed to their computers or phones, tweeting, re-tweeting, linking, sharing. And @Palaestina who had AMAZING tweets lined up, including the names of every child who was killed in Gaza, got blocked. Barely after s/he warned us about it, other active members, included myself, also got blocked. We opened new accounts immediately and tweeted from there until they unblocked our accounts (which was an average of 45 minutes later). @uruknet and other tweeps reported getting blocked for up to 3.5 hours. The blocking was fishy and didn’t make a lot of sense, so you can see some ideas being bounced in the comments about why this happened. I definitely think we were being reported by people who didn’t want #Gaza to trend.
• Very quickly, #Gaza fluctuated between #7 and #8 on twitter. Hopes were very high! We couldn’t believe we had made it so early on. Over 300 tweeps had signed on to the #Gaza twibbon.

#Gaza at #7 at 2:14pm (+2GMT time)

• Everything was going great.. It was close to 4pm and we were at #5! We were figuring out the techniques of trending something on twitter. Multiple hashes don’t count. The new RT function doesn’t count. Too many RTs get you blocked or helps your rivals report you as spam. Zionist assholes started showing up and promoting us all as anti-Semites. People were waking up and asking what #Gaza meant. It was awesome! This screenshot is me tweeting from my other account (cos twitter blocked me, remember?) That’s why it’s in blue:

#Gaza at number 5!

• People were logging in and feeling so energized to see Gaza trending already, so they boosted with great tweets. I was so sure we were going to hit number one any second. And then came Hayley.

And then came Haley. Screenshot courtesy of @zalface - thanks!

• Who Hayley is I don’t know and I don’t care to google. It was her birthday today, so suddenly (and very illogically), HappyBdayHayley shot to number 1. It didn’t make any sense! Look at the difference between #Gaza and #HappyBdayHaley on trendistic in the screenshot below. That’s us in red. How could #HappyBdayHayley shoot to number one? What made it even weirder is that @zalface discovered many spam bots like this one: @carolmeatsix that were spamming twitter with #HappyBdayHayley for hours at very high rates. How come they didn’t get blocked? This adds to our suspicion that we were being reported by people.

#Gaza vs. #HappyBdayHayley on Dec.27, 2009

• The only sense we could make was that twitter didn’t want #Gaza to trend. And after HappyBdayHayley came HappyBdayHayleyBR – the Brazilian version – also trending! Ridiculous! But still, the tweeters kept signing on, news, links, videos, feelings, thoughts, cartoons, blog posts, stories, all sorts of expressions kept flowing onto twitter, all for Gaza, the Gaza Freedom March, and Viva Palestina. Eventually, we made it to #3. Yep. We hit Trending Topic Number 3 on twitter at 7:39 (+2GMT). Here’s the screenshot!

• We tried really hard after that, but couldn’t get it past #3. I believe we were stopped there on purpose. Further proof is that twitter never allowed #Gaza to appear on its main page for before you sign in. I watched it for more than 10 hours. Even when we hit and stayed on the top 5, #Gaza never showed on the main twitter.com. I was actually corrected about this by @Stand4Liberty who sent me a screenshot (below) of #Gaza appearing on the sign-in page briefly when we were top-trending. Did twitter block #Gaza from getting to #1 on purpose? Maybe, maybe not. I really don’t know. I do, however, think it is pointless to waste our time wondering if it did. We still trended for > 10 hours!
  

• We kept on tweeting through the night. By 11pm, #Gaza had dropped off the Top Ten Trending completely, but is still going pretty well. All in all, the feeling of being part of this campaign was amazing! We trended by the time the tweeters in North American (twitter’s largest demographic) woke up. Lots of people said they learned a lot about Gaza and Palestine today. We outnumbered the Zionist tweeters by far. By the time of posting, people who supported the #Gaza twibbon were 460 and their total followers were 379,307. @justicentric says he got over 10,000 clicks on the links he put out today, not including the links from re-tweets. @Razaniyyat and @uruknet‘s tweets were loaded with informative links and resources. @MXML wasn’t online but s/he scheduled beautifully thought-provoking tweets about Palestine and Gaza. @GhadeerM tweeted for Gaza from all her heart – although only last week she didn’t know what twitter was. There was something beautiful in all of us, strangers, coming together, from all over the world, talking collectively about a cause that matters to us, achieving a goal together. Solidarity. Using a new, creative, youthful strategy. Away from the usual rhetoric, the usual groups, politicians, and religions that hijack the Palestinian cause.
• What comes next, I’m not sure. But we’ve found each other and we’ve accomplished something together with the help of very little: a couple of blog posts, a few tweets, and a google document. Let’s all watch and tweet for the Gaza Freedom March for the next week, and all ideas of what activism we can come up with using this new network we’ve created are welcome. Make sure you join the Palestine Action Network on Facebook so we can contact you later for other campaign ideas! Thank you everybody!

I end with a beautiful tweet from @ajit8uk that just came up:

“We got to 3. We are the people. No one owns this earth. NO ONE. #GAZA”

…

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At the Collective Work on Women’s Rights meeting in Cairo – December 8, 2009, Ms. Ebba Augustin, GTZ consultant, gave a run-down through important practical needs of networks. A veteran of many network start-ups, Ms. Augustin is on top of the game when it comes to the criteria for successful networking among organizations. She was also cool enough to share her powerpoint presentation, which you can download here.