The Mahalla bosses are resuming their crackdown, not only on the factory workers, but also on labor journalists.
The state-appointed CEO of Ghazl el-Mahalla has filed a lawsuit against Ad-Dustour editor Ibrahim Eissa and the paper’s labor correspondents Mostafa Bassiouny, as well as worker leaders Tarek Amin and Gehad Taman, accusing them of libel and inciting the October 2008 factory protests.
The case will be looked into by a Mahalla court next Wednesday.
Via Lenin’s Tomb:
Over 100 supporters of Scottish Stop the War Coalition and Palestinian groups have occupied the BBC headquarters in Glasgow. They say they will not end their occupation until the BBC has reversed its decision not to broadcast an emergency aid appeal for Gaza. The protesters are demanding to meet with a senior representative of the BBC.
And as for Mark Thompson, the BBC’s director general who refused to broadcast the appeal, it turns out he “is actually a deeply religious man. He’s a Catholic, but his wife is Jewish, and he has a far greater regard for the Israeli cause than some of his predecessors.”
I agree:
Take this article by Michael Slackman. It contains the oft-repeated cliche that Arab regimes use and misuse the Palestinian question. Let us dispel this cliche once and for all. This was true back in the 1960s and early 1970s but not anymore. It is no more true that Arab regimes use the Palestinian question to divert the attention of the population. It is now the reverse: the Arab people insist on keeping the flame of the Palestinian problem alive, and the Arab regimes all want the issue to go away because any reference to the issue exposes Arab regimes’ incompetence, defeats, weakness, and duplicities. Arab regimes now focus in their media on sleaze, sports, and Danish cartoons. In other words, anything except Palestine. Get that?