Go on the Internet to make friends — and world peace.
That was the message on Thursday from a New York conference on the potential power of Internet social networking tools like Facebook to counter terrorism and repressive governments.
“New technology gives the United States and other free nations a significant advantage over terrorists,” US Undersecretary of State James Glassman told Web entrepreneurs and human rights activists at New York’s Columbia University Law School.
An extraordinary example of e-power was the success on Feb. 5 this year of a grassroots march organized on the Internet against Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) leftist guerrillas.
Oscar Morales, founder of “One Million Voices Against the FARC,” described how his rallying call to 100 Facebook friends multiplied to 1,500 in less than a day.
“The next day there were 4,000, then 8,000. In just one week it grew to the amazing number of 100,000,” he said.
Within a month the anti-FARC movement was able to field 2 million demonstrators around the globe, including 1.5 million in the Colombian capital Bogota.
Supporters believe Internet-based communities are exactly what violent underground groups and repressive regimes fear.
“The Internet world of the extremists is one of direction — ‘think this, do that,’” Glassman said. “Extremists can’t adapt to the social networking because it shakes their rigid ideologies.”
Even countries with heavy censorship can’t resist, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz said.
“China pours billions of dollars into the firewall only to have its citizens develop new ways to circumvent it,” Moskovitz said. “Control of these mediums is, in the long run, not a battle they can win.”
Still, for all the talk, it appeared clear that worldwide justice is a little more than just a click away.
An Egyptian journalist, who asked not to be identified because he fears for his safety, told the conference that Facebook had been crucial in the organization of rare protests in April.
“It allowed us to have a platform to convene, because we are not allowed to meet otherwise,” he said.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the