NightBlogger

“[…] The world looks very different through the window that Google provides, in China, than through the window on the world that you have available to yourselves here. In fact, it’s not the picture window on the world, it’s a distorted lens that has been built, custom-built by Google to Chinese specifications.

Now how did that happen. Google is the company, whose mission is to organize the world’s information, and to make it universally accessible and useful. How did it come to be in the business of creating the distorting lens, rather than the picture window on the world. Well, in 2004, Google was entering the international market, it wanted to be the number-one search engine in the world, it started to do business in China. And the Chinese said, we don’t want you to show our citizens the world as it really is, with all of its complexities, and its contradictions, and its inconsistent sources of information. We want the Chinese citizens to know the world the way we want them to know the world. And, Google said, okay, we’ll give them that world instead of the world as it really is.” More

Photo Indigo Goat

In her study, “Women In Pre-Islamic Arabia”, the outspoken rights advocate argues women in the pre-Islamic period enjoyed considerable rights in the Nabataean state, an urban Arabian kingdom centered in modern Jordan, south Syria and northwest Saudi Arabia during the Roman empire. Most controversially, Fassi says women in Nabataea — whose capital was the famous rose-red city of Petra in south Jordan and which was at its height during the lifetime of Jesus Christ — enjoyed more freedom than in Saudi Arabia today because clerics have misunderstood the origins of Islamic law. She also suggests some Saudi restrictions on women may have their origins in Greco-Roman traditions.
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