Cyberdissidents.org co-founder Nir Boms wrote for the Wall Street Journal on the continuing conflict in Syria:

“They come in every day now, the body counts from Syria, consistent and painful: 141, 201, 152, 81 (a lucky day, that was). This past Sunday, 566 bodies were found, 483 of them in Damascus and its suburbs alone, according to the Local Coordination Committees of Syria, a network of opposition activist groups. Twenty-three bodies were found in Aleppo, 21 in Idlib, 15 in Homs, 12 in Daraa, seven in Deir Ezzor, five in Hama.

This is the highest number of dead discovered in a single day since the war began two years ago. But it is...

Last week, CyberDissidents.org’s Arabic Program Manager, Ahed Al Hendi, presented at the 2013 Milton Wolff Conference in Vienna, Austria.  He highlighted the Syrian liberal movements and the failure of major news outlets to cover it objectively.   

Al Hendi said that there have been four competing narratives in Syria since 1970. He divided the narratives into two categories: Islamic and secular. According to Al Hendi, pro-Assad Islamic voices included clerics and scholars who supported Assad up until the recent conflict.  They believed Assad supported “resistance” in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories and so the regime should...

It’s known as the “hair crackdown,”  and is the latest campaign in stifling people’s freedom of expression in Gaza. As many as two dozen young men donning long locks or wearing gel in their hair have been targeted in recent weeks en masse. Hamas police are forcing the young men out of their cars and shaving their hair, and in some extreme cases, are beating them as well. Hamas officials have played down the campaign. Gaza deputy prime minister Ziad al-Zaza said the head-shaving “was a very limited, isolated behavior of the police and is not going to continue.

The hair crackdown comes on the heels of the country’s recent...

CyberDissidents.org Blogger Board Member Kacem El Ghazzali was featured in article on Spiegel International for his role as a blogger, Atheist and dissident in Morocco. The article says “At a time when many young people go to college, he saw no choice but to apply for political asylum in Switzerland, where he has spent the past two years.” It continues:

Ghazzali’s problems began soon after he started an anonymous blog where he wrote about his atheism. Though Morocco is often recognized as being one of the most “moderate” of Muslim countries in terms of religiously influenced laws and customs, Islam is the official state religion, and...

In 2008, in the midst of writing about a new law concerning Iranian women requiring a male guardian’s permission to leave the country, I stopped for a moment, closed my eyes and listened to my surroundings. The fast, mechanical sounds of typing took me back to the newsrooms in Iran before I left in 2006. A voice startled me from my reverie and returned me to my small living room that I shared with my husband and another journalist friend, who had recently come to the US. During that time, that tiny living room served as our “nerve-center,” our intimate newsroom; a backdrop that held sway over a process that involved waking-up,...

The Daily Beast recently featured Cyberdissidents blogger Maikel Nabil as one of six best Egypt bloggers to follow. They said:

“While he’s not actually on the ground in Egypt anymore, Maikel Nabil remains an influential—and highly controversial—figure in Egypt.

“A lot of Egyptians don’t see eye to eye with his policies, since he’s pro-normalization with Israel,” Messieh says. When Nabil was in Egypt, he was known for meticulously documenting the numerous human-rights violations the military carried out during the months following Mubarak’s ousting. That endeavor, combined with his history advocating against military...