Blogger in KSA Blocked Within the Kingdom

Sand Gets in My Eyes is one of my favorite reads among the blogs coming out of Saudi Arabia. It is written by an American woman with grown children who has lived in Saudi Arabia for several years with her American husband who works for Aramco. Her posts are always well written and thought provoking. She writes with passion about important topics regarding women's and children's issues and societal problems.

Her blog has been blocked from viewing within Saudi Arabia. This happened to my own blog about a year and a half ago. Websites that are blocked are usually blocked because they contain pornography or show too much skin, religious (especially when they are critical of Islam), or sites that are critical of the Saudi government or culture. Many people do not realize the stress that bloggers in the Middle East are under because there is no freedom of speech here like in the West. Saudi blogger Fouad Al-Farhan was imprisoned in KSA in December of 2007 for criticizing the corruption in this country and advocating for change. No charges were ever brought against him, he had very limited contact with his family, and he was thankfully released four months later.

Above is the page that people within Saudi Arabia see when a website is blocked in the country. This situation can often be rectified by the government department which blocked it in the first place, likely the result of receiving a complaint and going ahead and blocking the blog without really looking into it. If enough people send in requests to unblock the website, then someone at the Saudi government internet office will physically go in and look at the site and hopefully come to the conclusion to unblock it.

Here is the link to the page where you can file an "Unblock Request." It's a very short and easy to fill out form. Please help FREE Sand Gets in My Eyes!

Awesome Arabic TV Commercial

Most commercials here in Saudi Arabia are lame and incredibly annoying (like many elsewhere in the world) but once in a while they get it right. The commercial below is for a phone company here called Zain. Every time this commercial comes on the TV here, I always stop whatever I'm doing to watch it. Zain named this commercial "Silent Beauty," which I believe is the name of the accompanying song. The graphics are colorfully creative and awesome, and the music is elegant and haunting. The version here has English subtitles, and I've also included the written lyrics below. I don't know who wrote the words of the poem/song, but poetry is a huge part of Arabic culture and history.



Did you see the sun lighting up the sky,
Nourishing life with its radiance and rising above?
I called out to it with the songs of my voice...
But it wouldn't speak.

Did you see the flowers bloom in spring?
Their beauty captivates the heart,
and quenches its thirst.
I reproached them for being away too long...
But they wouldn't speak.

And then in the distance I see
A beautiful girl playing with her dolls.
I asked her why she plays alone,
But she couldn't speak

Then I realized after all of this...
That we've become blind to the truth.
So much beauty is around us
But it cannot speak.
Beauty everywhere.

Open Mouth, Insert Foot

Acouple of weeks ago, one of the religious leaders here in Saudi Arabia declared a fatwa (a religious ruling) which demands the death penalty for people in the Kingdom who condone or promote gender mixing within the country. In particular, Sheikh Abdul-Rahman al-Barrak, 77, denounced men and women working together because it would encourage "sight of what is forbidden, and forbidden talk between men and women." With the opening last fall of KAUST (the innovative King Abdullah University of Sciences and Technology), where the progressive King's vision came to fruition in a place where highly educated men and women work and attend classes together, it appears as though this Sheikh is taking aim at the King himself. Not a very smart thing to do. Especially in view of the fact that last October the King took the action of promptly firing a top Islamic cleric after he spouted off against the mixing of the sexes at KAUST.

The Sheikh's website, albarrak.islamlight.net, has been blocked from viewing now within the country. But allegedly, using modern technology to his advantage, he merely opened up under another website.

There has been a backlash of objections from many people here who want to see progress and change in this ultra-conservative religious country, with fellow blogger Ahmed al-Omran of SaudiJeans calling the Sheikh a "caveman" and Saudi female blogger Eman al-Nafjan of SaudiWoman condemning Al-Barrak as "the last living member of the traditional, misogynist eighties rat pack of sheikhdom" and aptly branding his type of barbaric thinking as "Gender Apartheid."


However, about thirty other conservative clerics rushed to Al-Barrak's defense by signing a petition upholding their support of his ruling in favor of strict gender segregation.

The greatest fear among these religious scholars is that mixing of the sexes socially here in Saudi Arabia, in the work force, or in education will result in rampant fornication and other immoral behavior. Here are a couple of more quotes from Al-Barrak taken from this Reuters article: "Whoever allows this mixing ... allows forbidden things, and whoever allows them is an infidel, and this means defection from Islam ... Either he retracts or he must be killed ... because he disavows and does not observe the Sharia ... Anyone who accepts that his daughter, sister or wife works with men or attends mixed-gender schooling cares little about his honour, and this is a type of pimping."    Really? This guy is actually calling Saudi men who allow their female relatives to work or attend school side by side with other unrelated men PIMPS!!!

For those of you who read my blog regularly, you know that one of the things that I really dislike about living here is the gender segregation. Going to a family function, or a wedding, or some other kind of party where there are only women allowed or where I am separated from my husband and my son upon arrival is not my idea of fun. It's okay once in a while, but time after time after time, it gets really old for me. I admit it - I enjoy being in the company of BOTH men and women! And the fact that people here cannot be trusted on their own to conduct themselves with the utmost of decorum and virtue - despite all the morality that is drilled into them from birth - so much so that there is a need for religious police to enforce strict moral codes and punish those who do not adhere to the rules - is just beyond my comprehension.

Muslims in other parts of the world seem to successfully incorporate living and working amongst the opposite sex without much trouble or fanfare. Why can't it be that simple here in Saudi Arabia? It's more than just religion at play here - it is deeply engrained in the culture, and there is a long way to go to bring this country into the 21st century with regard to its social limitations on both men and women (but mostly on women). The people here have been brainwashed by so many lop-sided images about the decadent and immoral West that there is a mentality of great fear for change or opening up this society to more freedom. My take on the whole situation is that the social restrictions placed on the people here are extremely insulting to the Saudis and make the assumption that the Saudi people simply cannot control their animalistic urges and conduct themselves accordingly. The Saudi people are better than that. All they need is a chance to prove it.

HACKED! A True Story

The past few days have not been very good ones. Someone out there - more than likely a total stranger - tried to wreak as much havoc on me as he possibly could. He hacked into my computer and took over my personal email accounts as well as my Facebook account and pretended to be me online. As a result, I've decided to post about it to help others avoid this from happening to them or to fall for such a scam. I had no idea what to do initially since my online security had never been compromised before. But I quickly figured out what I needed to do, even though finding the information about how to go about it wasn't really that easy.

I actually had made it easy for The Hacker to do his dirty deeds - I went the lazy and careless route and hadn't changed my passwords for quite a while and actually used the same password for many of my accounts, just to make it easier for myself - which actually made it a lot easier for The Hacker. So recommendation #1 is change your passwords frequently and don't use the same password for your accounts. And don't make it something easy that a Hacker can figure out from any personal information you have posted online. Also the longer the password, the better, and mix it up with numbers and letters. And for heavens sake, don't store any of your passwords on your computer!

The Hacker sent out bogus emails to everyone on my contact list, making up an absurd hifalootin' story about how I was stranded in London, had been robbed at GUNPOINT, and needed money to get back home. Lucky for me, I have smart friends who didn't buy into this ridiculous tale; and if they had a thought that it might in any way be true, they asked The Hacker questions to verify my identity. Questions like: Where or when did we meet? What is my father's middle name? At what company did we used to work together? These are questions that only I would have known and that isn't information that I had put out there online somewhere. If you are contacted like this, protect yourself by verifying the identity of the person who has contacted you to ensure that it is the person you think it is. A true friend would only appreciate this and not at all be insulted by being asked questions to confirm their identity. Once I regained control of my accounts, I removed a lot of the personal information I had stored online, like my children's names, my phone numbers, etc. I have ensured that my security questions are up to date and that the questions are something that only I would know and that there is only one possible answer for, in case - heaven forbid - one day I really am in a tough situation and I am upset and can't really think straight.

Now think about this for a moment: think about all the private information you have in saved emails or out there on Facebook that a stranger could use to pretend to be you if he had the chance! I am trying to go through old emails now that I really don't need anymore and delete them, and at the same time, I am trying to regain my email address book, one by one because The Hacker deleted all my email contacts! Once I regained control of my account, I realized that The Hacker was also having any new emails forwarded to another email address - I didn't even know I could do that! He also tried to delete all email messages between himself and the people on my list that he contacted, so I couldn't see what he had done. Another thing he did on Facebook was to change my birthday - I don't know why, but he did.

If you receive an email like this from someone on your email list, just stop and think to yourself... If this story were true, would this person really be contacting me, of all people, like this? In truth, I would have turned to my family personally and not in a generic sounding email. I think most of us would. Honestly, there are some people on my email list that I have never actually even met in person - I have many cyber-friends that I have befriended online - and I wouldn't approach them about sending me money if I were in a situation like this. So an important thing to remember is to use your common sense and don't immediately think a story is true just because it appears to have come from a friend.

Another tip-off that someone is trying to rip you off is in the grammar and spelling of the emails or chats that you receive. When I read through some of the chats and emails that The Hacker had written, it was obvious to anyone who knows me that it was not me just by the way he wrote. I am a native speaker of English and The Hacker obviously isn't. Sure I make mistakes here and there when I am typing fast, but a typo is far different from bad grammar and improper sentence formation. Would I sign off an email to my mother with "Regards - Susie"? And wouldn't my relatives and friends know ahead of time if I were taking a trip to London? The Hacker also stupidly told people to send the money to "me" via Western Union and to send it using my "exact name" on my passport. He provided my name but he assumed incorrectly that this is how my name appears on my passport, and anyone who really knows me would have known that this was wrong. Again, using your common sense is key.

Current anti-virus software is a must, although it didn't help me this time. Run virus scans frequently. I was online myself when I got hacked and was immediately called on the phone by a friend - Thanks, Veeds! - who had just received this strange email from me. So I found out about it pretty quickly. But in all honesty, previously I often would carelessly leave my computer unattended and online for extended periods. Now I make sure that I disconnect my computer from the internet when I am not using it, so there is no chance of penetration by a Hacker. I am also limiting my online time.

I'm sorry I had to write this post at all. I hate the thought that the rest of us have to share this beautiful world of ours with scumbags like Hackers. But in today's world, it is reality, and if this post will help anyone from falling victim to an online scam or getting hacked, then I will be happy. If any of you have any more good advice on how to protect yourself online, please feel free to add it in comments.

For more information about protecting yourself online, here are a few good websites I found with some sound advice:

Top Ten Passwords You Should Never Use

UNC Information Technology Services

How To Protect Yourself Against Hackers