Signs of Dissent Becoming More Visible among Saudi Arabian Youths
THE WASHINGTON POST: JIDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA - It is 9 p.m. on a Monday, and the Jasur bookstore cafe in Jiddah's chic Hamra district is hopping. Upstairs, Saudi men and women pack a poetry reading, while downstairs a book club discusses Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller, "Blink." Nearby, a team of young comic writers is hashing out the latest in a series of YouTube episodes that satirize Saudi politics and society.

"Don't get me wrong," Hasan Eid, the editor of a poetry anthology, reads from a new collection. "I love my country to death. But what I see every day makes me sigh under my breath."

With some Saudi men in jeans, others in traditional thobes, and women in black abayas, the emergence of the trendy literary scene is nothing short of groundbreaking in this conservative kingdom, where the mixing of sexes is largely prohibited and movie theaters are banned.

A growing frustration with Saudi political and social behaviors has been visible throughout the kingdom in recent weeks, as measured in budding protests, bolder blog posts and petitions asking King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz to loosen up his rule.

But the discontent is particularly palpable among the young and educated in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia's historically most progressive city, which has long been at odds with the more religiously conservative capital, Riyadh. The new cafe has become a hub for young intellectuals to share ideas as the Middle East undergoes the most sweeping period of change in their lifetimes.

Inspired by their counterparts in Tunisia, Egypt and other parts of the Arab world, Jiddah's 20-somethings are ablaze on Facebook, blogs and Twitter, tweeting away on iPhones and BlackBerrys about government corruption and the need for political reform, while organizing social gatherings such as those at the bookstore that have long been taboo. >>> Janine Zacaria, Washington Post Foreign Service | Friday, March 11, 2011

Forget Gerontomullocracy! Give Youth a Chance!
Image: Flickr

The Facebook Revolt of Iran's Youth Isn't Over Yet
THE SUNDAY TIMES: For a few days it seemed Iran’s long-repressed youth were on the brink of freedom; then came the brutal reality

Photo: The Sunday Times
A young woman in a thigh-length tunic tightly bound with green ribbon danced down the middle of Tehran’s main boulevard last week. She was nominally campaigning by tossing leaflets into cars backed up for miles, but mostly she just gyrated joyously to pop music blasting into the summer night.

Six young men riding two-up on motorcycles trailed green streamers, hooted and took photos of one another on their mobile phones, then roared off the wrong way through the cars.

Thousands of other young Iranians wove through the traffic jam they had created, blowing whistles, waving green balloons, throwing campaign handouts into the air like confetti. Tehran had never seen anything like last week’s “green wave”.

Sara Siadatnejad was up until 7am loading her photos and video of the demonstrations onto Facebook.

“We were singing, dancing in the streets, boys and girls together. We had never done this before. No one wanted to go home,” she said later, sitting in an outdoor cafe and picking at chocolate cake with green-painted fingernails.

“It seems people were half dead before and suddenly everyone felt alive.”

Half dead because they were brought up in a society patrolled by religious police with the power to beat them for holding hands in the street. Alive because it was the first election in which women played a potent role, demanding an end to the inequalities they endured.

What happens now that the all too brief “Tehran spring” has been abruptly curtailed by the election result? Thirty years after Iran’s Islamic revolution, are the conservative male forces that control the country immune to the demands for reform?

The beatings by riot police, closure of universities and clampdown on foreign news websites yesterday, after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed an overwhelming victory, were targeted at the Facebook generation.

Will these women give in? Under Islamic law as it is enforced in Iran, a woman’s word counts only half as much as a man’s in court; a woman can inherit only half as much as her brother; and while men can divorce easily, a woman who wants a divorce will typically spend three to 10 years in court and automatically lose custody of daughters over the age of seven and sons over two.

“Changes have to be made,” said a 34-year-old political activist who asked to remain anonymous. Her first target would be headscarves, which are mandatory in Iran. “The least of the freedoms we need is the ability to choose what to wear. For women this is really an issue. Whenever you go out, you have to be vigilant because the moral police may not think it is appropriate and they may even take you to jail. A woman’s integrity is judged by the colour of your dress – well, isn’t that stupid?” THE symbol of the demand for reform is not so much Mir Hossein Mousavi, the 67-year-old main opposition candidate, who complained of election fraud yesterday, as his wife. >>> The Sunday Times | Sunday, June 14, 2009

Tehran Youth: I'll Never Vote in Iran Again
YNET NEWS: Frustrated and outraged by election results they believe were rigged, Tehran's young take to streets, spread messages and videos on internet and via mobile phones calling on world to intervene

Iran's youth responded with frustration and anger to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad electoral win, which many believe was obtained by fraud. Some of them were able to voice their outrage through instant messages and video clips sent via mobile phones, or on blogs, forums, Facebook and YouTUbe before these websites were blocked by the authorities.

One of them, a young man from Tehran, told Ynet on Sunday: "I swear to God I'll never vote in Iran again. Mousavi received 25,000 million votes, but they changed the names (on the ballots)."

However he said that he was still hopeful in light of the great numbers of young Iranians who have taken to the streets in protest of the election results. Tens of thousands of people clashed with security forces in the capital of Tehran on Saturday, and at least two were reportedly killed in the violence. >>> Dudi Cohen | Sunday, June 14, 2009

YOUTUBE: Tehran – Vanak Square


YOUTUBE: Violence - Vanak Square


YOUTUBE: Clashes in Vali Asr Avenue