Letter from Joey Coon concerning the Washington DC rallies for Kareem:

Dear friends,

February 22nd is an important anniversary: the first anniversary of the sentencing and imprisonment of a peaceful Egyptian student for comments on his blog. I’d like to ask you to join friends of free speech in supporting freedom for Abdelkareem Nabil Soliman. People in or around Washington, D.C. can join us at the Egyptian Cultural Office in Washington, D.C. on Friday February 22nd to show support for Kareem and for freedom of speech. Click here to contact me for more details. (A friend has agreed to treat attendees to lunch at Baja Fresh afterwards.)

February 22nd marks one year since Kareem’s sentencing and imprisonment.

Kareem has been defended by many who disagree with his views, but who defend his right to express them. No one should be imprisoned and beaten for blogging. I invite those who live in the Washington, D.C. area to join us for a brief, peaceful and respectful rally. We ask only that you join us during your lunch hour to support Kareem and free expression. Those of you who are interested in signing a petition, providing information on your blog, or writing respectful letters to Egyptian officials, can find other suggestions on how to help Kareem here.

For more information on Kareem, his sentence, how he has suffered, and the campaign to free him, please visit www.freekareem.org.

Sincerely,
Joey Coon

The Free Kareem website has been on a hiatus for a short while as we were very busy planning a set of actions that will be carried out on the 22nd of February. We expect many people around the world to be involved on this day, which is intended to bolster support for Kareem Amer.

Why the 22nd of February?
This is the day that Kareem’s sentence was finalized and announced. You can read all the posts we wrote last February here.

Has he spent one year in prison?
No, Kareem has spent more than a year in prison. As our Kareem counter shows, he has been in prison for 466 days now, since the 6th of November.

How is Kareem doing?
The last letter indicated that Kareem was doing much better than he was in previous months. However, it has been at least 3 weeks since we last heard from him, and we are not sure what could’ve happened since then. We are doing our best to remain in close contact with him, although we are not certain whether or not our letters are actually reaching the intended destination. Close friends will do their best to visit him soon and we hope to write an update concerning his status.

What is a worldwide op-ed day?
We are trying to get as many people as possible, in many different parts of the world, and in as many different languages, to write about Kareem in their local papers (whether it be student papers or internationally distributed and respected papers such as the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NY Times, and more. Op-ed is short for “opinion/editorial,” and authors/journalists who publish articles in such columns tend to be more personal and opinionated than the average report. If we succeed in getting the intended number of papers involved, this will be a very powerful step for the Free Kareem campaign.

Why are you holding a worldwide op-ed day for Kareem?
Our strategy is intended to put Kareem’s story back in the papers. Due to lack of updates, and general lack of awareness, a lot of people seem to have forgotten about Kareem’s case. We are doing our best now to alarm everyone around the world that Egypt cannot be respected if this young man is still being unjustly imprisoned.

What can we do on the 22nd of Feb?
You can involve yourself by posting a message for or about Kareem on your blog, website, journal, or if you’re in the area, attending a rally that will take place in the 3 following locations:
- Paris, France
- London, UK
- Washington DC, USA

We have chosen 3 strategic locations as opposed to conducting a worldwide rally this year. The reason for this is that we are trying to shift our strategy a bit and focus more on media-related events that will put Egypt back on the human rights agenda. We will resume with our worldwide rallies when we feel that the time is more appropriate.

Please contact us if you would like to find out more information concerning these rallies (or our future activities in general.) We are working hard on making this all possible for Kareem and we will soon follow-up with an update.

In this latest action alert by RSF you will find information on the latest events concerning Yemeni websites, including the blocking of FreeKareem.org, which apparently has been lifted on the 3rd of February:

Online programmes for circumventing censorship, or “proxies,” are also inaccessible from within Yemen and several opposition websites are regularly blocked. They include al-Shoura (www.al-shora.net) and the Yemeni Council (www.al-yemen.org) and Yemen Sound (www.yemen-sound.com) discussion forums, which are among the most popular in the country. The support site for Kareem Amer, an Egyptian blogger who has been arrested for almost a year for using his right to online free expression, has also been inaccessible since 28 January.

The new information and communication technologies seem to be subject to severe restrictions in Yemen. We learned in June 2007 that your ministry had banned several mobile phone news distribution services, such as those proposed by Nass Mobile and Bela Qoyod Mobile. The reason given was insufficient control over the SMS messages. Reporters Without Borders finds these measures to be disturbing for free expression.

Read the full letter to Yemen’s information minister, Hassan Ahmed Al-Lawzi, here.

Update / Feb 3rd: Thanks to the many people who wrote Yemen Net, this site is now unblocked in Yemen! Unfortunately, Sami’s blog got blocked in return! Spread the word and help him unblock it. Sami is a staunch supporter of this campaign and was very instrumental in helping us unblock this website.

—–

Unfortunately, this website is blocked in Yemen, notes Sami.

When Yemeni readers try to visit, they get this error:

Blocked URL

Your request was denied because of its content categorization: “Sex”

For assistance, contact Yemen Net’s team.

If you feel this website should be opened, please send us email to open_site@yemen.net.ye

There is nothing particularly “sexy” about this campaign, so please join us in writing the Yemen Net administrators about this and inform them that there’s no reason why this site should be blocked.

Thanks!

Thanks to the help and hard work of Sara H, the campaign is proud to announce a newly launched French version.

Please check it out and subscribe to it here.

More languages coming soon!

We are conducting a podcast where everyone can literally voice their support for Kareem.

If you wish to get included in this podcast (and we highly encourage you to!) please send us a brief MP3 file of you saying supportive things to Kareem and demanding his immediate release (respectfully!) from the Egyptian government.

This can be done in as many languages as possible – not necessarily English.

Please e-mail your file to editor@freekareem.org and spread the word on your own blog/websites in order for us to gather as many voices as possible to help increase awareness on Kareem’s case.

Kareem has been in prison for over a year. Please don’t forget him. Help now in any way that you can!

The good folks behind the Committee to Protect Bloggers have generously helped organize a Twitter day for Kareem which will take place on the 6th of November. If you use twitter, please consider joining us in spreading further awareness on Kareem’s case. You can read all about this event here:

As we mentioned before, we are co-sponsoring a protest on November 6 with FreeKareem. On that date, the Egyptian blogger Kareem will have been unjustly incarcerated for one year, due to communicating his opinions on his blog. There are physical marches and other activities set to coincide with this date. On our end, we are asking everyone to use their Twitter account to talk about Kareem, free speech, imprisoned bloggers and have related conversations for the whole day. We’re offering the badge above that you can download on your blog or site to indicate your belief in free speech for bloggers worldwide and for Kareem in Egypt in particular. (The bluer version is available in our Flickr account in the sidebar.)

When you write about this aspect of the day, please use the tag twitter4kareem.

Go to original post.

Unfortunately, there are many people who claim that this website is either owned, funded, or managed by HAMSA or the American Islamic Congress.

Nothing can be further from the truth.

This is an independent campaign, run solely by a group of students who volunteer their time to blog about, publicize, and run this website and its many activities.

HAMSA provides neither the counseling nor funding for us, but did play a role in discussing Kareem’s situation with media outlets, because they were the first to start a petition for him. But that petition is not part of this website. In fact we have a separate independent petition as well, which actually belongs to this website. This shows that HAMSA and the Free Kareem campaign are not related, in any way, or else we wouldn’t have created a separate petition about it.

This campaign is hosted by Mideast Youth, also completely independent of outside efforts and influences.

As for me, Esra’a, I did this campaign because I consider Kareem to be a good person and a good friend despite disagreeing with everything he wrote about (I’m proudly a Muslim.) That is as far as the reasoning goes for why this campaign exists and why we managed to create a lot of noise with it. Dalia Ziada, despite her activities with HAMSA and AIC, occasionally works on this campaign as she was the person responsible for giving me all of Kareem’s news for publication on this website as well as any relevant translations. This was before her official involvement with AIC, and she did it independently… just another friend helping Kareem out.

As far as our donation goes, contrary to popular belief we are not personally gaining anything from it and it’s quite disgusting to stomach these rumors. The money is handled by Chris Kilmer, a student in New York (also not part of AIC or HAMSA), who will transfer the money to Shahinaz (Wa7damasrya) who will then take the money to Kareem. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to realize that we cannot act upon the money as soon as we get it simply because we need to think of the strategy on exactly how much we should send, where to, and how often. That’s why we took a while to find both a reliable person to handle the money as well as an effective plan, as well as asking Kareem what he wants to do with the finances. We wanted to make sure that we raised enough money before sending the money on a monthly basis. We weren’t using the money to vacation in Hawaii like some people made it sound like. Please do your research before defaming and undermining our work like this.

As far as sending the money to Kareem’s lawyers, this is not pay for such services. The donation option is for Kareem and Kareem only, and HRINFO has neither contacted us about this option nor did they ever reply to our attempts to contact them personally. In any case, they are not entitled to this money. It is meant to keep Kareem as comfortable as possible by sending him basic needs as well as any amount he requests for. If HRINFO is concerned about the donation option – they are more than welcome to contact us, but they have yet to do so. Therefore we cannot be blamed for not being clear enough when people spent more time feeding rumors than to actually research this themselves, by simply calling or e-mailing us about the issues that they don’t find clear enough.

If you would have noticed, for those who actually were responsible enough to contact me and my fellow campaigners, you’d soon realize that any decision went solely by me and was not approved or run by anyone else. That proves that I hold complete responsibility for this campaign, not HAMSA, not AIC, not Bush, not Ghandi. This is independent. It will always be independent, and we will never ever attach this to any other NGO because we want to lead it ourselves the way we see fit. If you care about Kareem you are more than welcome to join us and find out how the management truly works. If not, then please be decent enough not to link us with any organization without having any basis for such claims. Receiving an organization’s occasional help, especially in gaining press contacts, does not mean we are a part of them.

In other words, spare us the rumors, and let’s all focus on freeing Kareem instead.

Read Shahinaz’s post as well for further clarifications.

CPB is back and we are honored to be their sponsors for this very important project. You can read their latest article about Kareem here.

It’s no wonder why we jumped at the opportunity. With Kareem still in prison, and the disappointingly silent regional blogosphere turning a blind eye, thus forgetting the fight for this brave, innocent, and deserving young man, we can anticipate more bloggers being thrown in prison. Our governments are now assured that they can get away with it.

It’s important for our readers to realize that we are not fighting merely for an individual; we are fighting for the rights of everyone within the region to be able to express their opinion in the condition that they do not preach and incite violence or racism (and Kareem did neither.)

A great way to get involved in the fight for the basic right of free speech and blogger freedom is to get involved in the next worldwide rally for Kareem, where supporters from all over the world can spread their concerns directly to the authorities via Egyptian embassies and offices in its various locations.

We just set up a Free Kareem account on Twitter (a new social networking site.) If you use Twitter, please consider following the campaign’s latest updates and activities. The Committee to Protect Bloggers also has an account which you should consider using if you are interested in bloggers worldwide who are in the same position as Kareem.

We also have a Facebook account, and a MySpace one, both of which were set up by helpful volunteers. Please add either or both if you use these services.