The Mixed Emotions of Young Syrian Bloggers

Kevin Sites continues to report from the Middle East for Yahoo!. His latest stop is Syria, where he sat down with some young bloggers. For context, it's worth reading the whole piece, as it depicts the outspoken bloggers fluctuating between protest (over state repression) and defensiveness (about how they perceive Syria is demonized in the world's opinion). It's intriguing yet painful to watch as they struggle between the two emotions.

Anyway, here's an excerpt:

Majd hasn't needed much more encouragement than that. His blog, called Hawa (http://hawa3.blogspot.com), Arabic for "air," is written in Arabic as well as some English.

And even though he and the other two bloggers, Ghalia and Sara, have made great efforts to emphasize to me they are not political, Majd's blog has already garnered the blogger's badge of honor: enough notoriety to prompt authorities to block access to it. For Majd, this happened at work.

"My blog got banned at the office," he says, after he posted "Calm Tsunami," a fable of sorts.

Calm Tsunami, Majd explains, is a story about a man and a woman in a relationship. But there's trouble. The woman wants the man to put up a picture of her in his house, but the man says it's unnecessary because her picture is in his heart. The man, Majd says, is the Syrian people, the woman, a government that feels loyalty must be displayed by obvious outward acts, like flying the flag.

While it seems a rather tame tale, Majd takes pains to make sure I don't misconstrue his intentions. 

"I like to make social critiques," he says, "but I have to play with the words."

Playing with words and complex contradictory emotions is what these young Syrian bloggers seem to specialize in.

BONUS: Sources in the Middle East explain that several local Internet filters block Kevin Sites's reports. Evidently "In the Hot Zone" sets off the morals alarm.

Comments

[Jane]

Always nice to hear the bloggers in the MSM, its very hard to get an idea of the voices on the ground inthe ME with that wall of censorship where they all make it illegal to criticize their own leadership and the leadership of other muslim states.