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.

Activists in Egypt launched a campaign to blog and tweet about sexual harassment on Monday, June 20. The team behind the Adventures of Salwa joined the campaign as well with a parallel blogging day in Lebanon. Please join this very important cause – you can make a difference by adding your voice to ours on June 20!

Bloggers

Put up a blog post on Monday with a personal story, an opinion, an illustration, a rant, a call to action – anything that raises awareness about sexual harassment in your city.

Tweeps & Facebookers

Help spread & share the blog posts using the hashtag #EndSH. Tweet and status your experiences and opinions too.

Useful Links

• Qaweme Harassment – a blog gathering reports of sexual harassment around Lebanon.
• Adventures of Salwa – the campaign against sexual harassment in Lebanon.
• New Video: Resist Harassment – raising awareness on everyday racist & sexist behavior on the streets of Beirut.

I haven’t written up a blog post in a long time. So I’ve set my Firefox home page to my blog’s Add New Post page. Perhaps, if it opens up in my face every day, that will inspire me to write up more blog posts more regularly. Will it work? What other strategies do bloggers use?

Labor Day is coming up, 3eed Al 3ommal, on May 1st, and we are recognizing on this day the illegal, outrageous, and unethical working conditions of migrant work in Lebanon – and across the Arab world. The campaign initiated by @simby is called Twenty-Four-Seven and it highlights the fact that domestic migrant workers in Lebanon work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Yes, they do. Can you imagine working with your boss 24/7? It is called slavery.

So this week, I, along with many friends, will be blogging and tweeting to raise awareness about migrant work. I thought I would start with an honest attempt to deconstruct my own racism and think about how I, Nadine, really view race. Often, activists are quick to adopt causes just because someone they admire said so, or because the theory of it sounds logical and in line with their politics. But we cannot deal with issues in others, my friends, until we have deconstructed them in ourselves. And so, I, while claiming to be active on the rights of domestic workers in Lebanon, still have a long way to go to undo all the racism (blatant and invisible) embedded in my head. I will start this process of deconstruction by writing out things I have done that I consider racist. Here is the first story:

The nawateer (concierges) of the building where my parents live are a couple from Sri Lanka. I have bumped into the woman hundreds of times over the past few years, and when I do, I smile and say hello and she does the same. Earlier this month, I was passing through the building and saw her a little far away and wanted to call her to ask her something about the electricity. That’s when it occurred to me that I don’t know what her name is. I tired to search my memory as I was sure I must know her name, having known her for many years, but there it was: no name. I didn’t bother, all these years, to even ask or learn what her name was. I felt so ashamed of myself. Is it even possible to look at or treat someone as an equal human being if you never learn their name? If they have no name to you? No. Think of how offended people get when you can’t remember their name. It is insulting.

But it is a widespread practice in Lebanon. We call migrant women by their nationality “Sri Lankiyyi!” or by their country “Sri Lanka!” or by a nickname “Saki” instead of “Sakthipriyah,” for example. One common practice is to call migrant women by a different name all together, such as “Mary,” because their real names are difficult to pronounce for Arabs. Well, we can exert just a tiny bit of effort to learn to pronounce Sinhala or Tagalog or Nepalese names instead of ripping people of their individual identities and lumping them all into the same person: the migrant woman. Otherwise, we are perpetuating racism.

But I am not one to talk before I go to my parents’ house and find the woman who takes care of the building and apologize to her for not knowing her name and ask her what it is and tell her it is a beautiful name and write in on my hand until I learn to pronounce it properly and then use it when I say hello to her.

Maybe that is a first step in deconstructing my own racism towards migrants. I will write more about it this week as we campaign around #24seven. I urge you all to do the same. Let us talk about our own racism, even those of us who think we are progressive activists.

Some of the banners from the 2009 Women's Day Protest for Migrant Rights. The purple one reads: "My name is Lata, not 'Sri Lankan'"

I thought “Tweet and Blog” was too long, so I made it Twog Ok, so Simba Russeau and her fellow activists on migrant rights are organizing some events in Lebanon to raise awareness in the lead up to Labor Day. Migrants from South Asia, South-East Asia, and Africa come to Lebanon to work and often find themselves toiling under inhuman conditions without the possibility of an exit. It is, without a doubt, modern day slavery. And although there is more and more talk around it in the region, we have done little on the ground to fight the oppressive system.

And so, this Labor Day 2010, as we celebrate our right to a day off from being such hard workers, let us work to raise awareness about migrant rights in our Arab countries by blogging and tweeting. Here’s what you can do:

1. Tweet thoughts, ideas, links to articles, and information about migrant rights intensively the week of April 24 – May 1st. Use the #migrantrights hashtag. We are not trying to trend, but we are trying to raise lots of awareness and get conversations going.
2. Write up a blog post during the week and publicize the link on your Facebook and social networks. Send a link to simbarusseau@gmail.com who will be aggregating all blogs for the week.
3. Recruit your friends to do the same.
4. Think of more creative ideas like a Facebook action, shared profile pic, twibbon, etc.. and post them here in the comments or send to Simba directly.
5. Anyone who’d like to design a badge for this campaign is very welcome.

Also, here are some ideas I had for blog posts, so that we make sure that they are not all the same:

• Interview a migrant worker. Ask him/her about their journey here and their work here.
• Interview a migrant worker on camera. Post his/her interview on YouTube.
• Analyze the problem with migrant labor from a political or social perspective. Focus on either the gender aspect, the class struggle, or our inherent racism, to cite a few examples.
• Talk about the situation in your country in particular.. what is it like for Sudanese workers in Egypt? Egyptian workers in Lebanon? Sri Lankan women in Dubai? Nepalese women in Jordan?
• Propose solutions. Write up brainstorming posts where you think of campaigns, projects, events, programs, organizations that can work on ending the injustice.
• Elaborate on the feminist analysis of migrant worker rights: household work as unpaid work, gender dynamics in the household, violence from women against other women, domestic violence & violence against domestic workers, sexual assault on migrant women, trafficking of migrant women, violence against women within the migrant communities, and other examples.
• Celebrate the culture of a non-Arab country from which many migrate to Arab states. I can think of Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and the Philippines (but that might be just from a Lebanese experience). Post a tribute  by raising your friends and followers’ awareness about the richness of these cultures, histories, languages, and music.

If you’re interested in helping to organize, get in touch and I will add you to a google ground we’ve just created for Twog organizers.

Within hours of my posting a blog on Top 12 Reasons Why the Billboard Campaign, “Sois Belle et Vote,” Is Offensive to Women, I had already received more comments, phone calls, and messages than any time I’d ever done anything feminist before. This is undoubtedly because it was the first time I made feminist remarks against Lebanon’s politics in a targeted manner besides “all Lebanese politics sucks.”

The post spread more widely than I initially thought it would and attracted both the supportive and the angry. If you browse through the comments on the post, you will see some very pointless, angry, ad hominem arguments, which I really don’t know how to (or if I should) respond to. It got me thinking.

It is mind-blowing how we got the same attacks that feminists across the globe have been getting for years: that’s we’re “angry,” that we’re “ugly,” that we need to get laid, that we’re missing the point, that we should just shut up, and that we’re taking sides. Ad hominem par excellence. At one point, after too many disgruntled phone calls from my friends (who are mostly FPM supporters), I began to question whether or not the Feminist Collective should have spoken up at all. I wondered if I actually was pushing it too far or making a big deal out of it. I saw Deems working from the kitchen when I went in to make some coffee (I don’t know why, but she seems to like working on the kitchen table) and asked her: Are we right, Deems? Or are they right?

Concise and matter-of-fact as always, she replied: Of course we’re right, Nadz.

Of course we’re right. I have always criticized women’s and “peace” organizations for not speaking up about happenings specifically and for presenting themselves too guardedly, fearing that anyone might stop liking them. They hide behind the “apolitical” stand and the obviously humanitarian slogans in order to keep friendly ties with everybody. But friendly ties never get us anywhere. They maintain the power dynamic and fear factor as it is. We are scared of politicians and men of power. We don’t want to piss them off. We want to ask them kindly for our rights.

I knew in my head that no power is ever given up easily. It is taken by (preferably peaceful) force. I have always known that, but to experience it is a totally different ballgame.  To put one’s opinions out there as radically against something that enjoys much popularity is more tough than I had imagined. But in the midst of my personal discomforted thinking, two things came out as crystal clear:

1. We must always put our opinions out there, even at the risk of being misunderstood, ridiculed, and called names. We must speak up even at the risk of making enemies. It is having enemies that shows us if we are being taken seriously.
2. A lot of women had a gut-instinct that something was wrong with the ad campaign, but didn’t know how to put their discomfort into words. They are feminists, whether they know it or not. And putting our feminism out there makes them feel supported enough to speak up as well. We may be few, but we will grow in numbers, and the more we grow, the stronger we become as a Collective.

And so I believe, with a much deeper understanding now, that we, as feminists, must stand up for the voice of the minority – no matter how tiny it may seem right now. And right now, to me, it seems really really tiny. I leave you with a quote from Audre Lorde:

I have come to believe over and over again, that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood…. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you…. and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.

- The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, Sister Outsider