Sami Ben Gharbia writes:

On February 22, the Egyptian court sentenced the 22-year-old blogger Abdel Kareem Soliman (aka Kareem Amer) to four years in prison for insulting Islam and president Hosni Mubarak on his personal blog. Furthermore, on the March 12, Judge Abdel Fattah Mourad, head of the Alexandria Appeal Court, upheld Kareem’s four-year prison sentence and prepared to launch a lawsuit to block 21 blogs and websites for “defaming Egypt’s image and insulting the president.” Hossam el-Hamalawy republished on his blog the following message from blogger Amr Gharbeia:

The list, 21-websites-long, includes the blogs and sites that took part in the discussion around the book the Judge has written, and the wide plagiarism evident in the book copying HRInfo’s report on Internet Freedoms in the Arab World, and a how-to-blog guide written by blogger Bent Masreya.

Of the 21 blogs and website, I was able so far to confirm Kifaya’s and HRInfo’s websites, in addition to the blogs of Bent Masreya, Yehia Megahed, and my own.

However, and despite the power and the unity that characterize the Egyptian blogshpere, many believe that the Egyptian regime, using the stratagem of sowing discord by condemning Kareem Amer, has succeeded in dividing Egyptian bloggers into two camps: the Islamists, who criticize the way Kareem was writing about Islam and Muslims and, in a way, support his condemnation; and the liberals, who are defending Kareem’s rights and campaigning for his release. According to Elijah Zarwan, a Cairo-based researcher for Human Rights Watch, “many of the people who defended Kareem in the Egyptian blogosphere strenuously objected, publicly or privately, to some of his writings. But they still defended his right to express his views. In any case, as the Egyptian blogosphere grows, it is becoming more reflective of the diversity and pluralism of Egypt itself. Kareem didn’t divide the blogosphere. It wasn’t unified to begin with.”

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