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Latest Updates: NGOs RSS

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  johnpi 9:22 pm on January 26, 2010 | 6 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: civil society (6), NGOs, nonprofits, Syria (25)

  Syria’s first lady calls for civil activism.

  Syria’s first lady has called for the country’s citizens to play a more active role in the country’s social and economic life.

  Syrian First Lady Asma Al-Assad encouraged her fellow Syrians to become more involved in non governmental organizations (NGOs) during a recent conference in the Syrian capital Damascus, according to local media outlets.

  Civil society organizations are relatively rare in Syria due to the lengthy and difficult process involved in securing permission from the government to establish an NGO.

  “There is a maturation of the whole trend in Syria towards the empowering of what we call civil society,” Dr Samir Al-Taqi, Director of the Orient Center for International Studies in Damascus, told The Media Line.

  “Previously the use of civil society in Syria has been used not as a link to empower [social or environmental] aims but rather used on a political basis,” he said. “Syrian society is now elaborating on a new trend towards the formation and multiplication of civil society bodies.”

  I’m tagging this ‘nonprofits’ because in the US that’s the term used instead of ‘NGO.’

   

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  johnpi 8:16 pm on December 3, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: civil rights (42), Extremism (166), extremists (14), hate speech (6), human rights (381), NGOs

  Egyptian human rights groups disagree over ‘Islamic hate channels.’

  Egyptian human rights activists submitted a report to the Egyptian government this week demanding it ban aggressive religious Islamic channels from broadcasting.

  The activists, who include lawyer and human-rights activist Nagib Gabriel, described these channels as extremist and said they were disseminating “subversive ideas that call for discrimination against women and Copts and lean towards radical behavior that is far from the spirit of Islam,” according to a report in the Kuwaiti Al-Jarida.
  ….

  Human rights activists are not all in agreement over how to deal with these stations.

  “The stations are very problematic,” Ahmad Samih, director of the Andalus Institute for Tolerance and Anti-Violence Studies told The Media Line. “It’s not an easy decision for a human-rights activist fighting for freedom of speech to ask them to take it off air, but I think they need to be punished and they need to understand what responsibilities they have.”

  Bahey Eddin Hassan, director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies told The Media Line that “with all due respect to the good intentions of those NGOs, I’m afraid this will indirectly help the government limit the freedom of satellite channels in Egypt and other parts of the region.”

   
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  johnpi 9:22 am on November 8, 2009 | 7 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Afghan Taliban (41), afghanistan (396), Hamas (53), hizbollah (5), Mullah Omar (5), Muslim-on-Muslim violence (76), NGOs, Pakistan Taliban (124), Pakistani Taliban (126), social justice (4), taliban (260)

  Reading Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid’s “Taliban” the much-praised book about the ’student movement’ that was published just prior to Sept. 11th.

  An observation: It’s interesting to note how different the Taliban are as an Islamic movement in control of a population from other Islamic movements with similar responsibilities. Hizbollah and Hamas essentially made their names and established their ’street credibilty’ through focus on social welfare and improving a population’s well-being.

  Hamas funds schools, orphanages, mosques, healthcare clinics, soup kitchens, and sports leagues. “Approximately 90 percent of its work is in social, welfare, cultural, and educational activities,” writes the Israeli scholar Reuven Paz. The Palestinian Authority often fails to provide such services, and Hamas’s efforts in this area—as well as a reputation for honesty, in contrast to the many Fatah officials accused of corruption—help to explain the broad popularity it summoned to defeat Fatah in the PA’s recent elections.

  The Taliban, in contrast, were distinct for their extraordinary lack of interest in the social welfare of the populations it came to control. Here’s Rashid’s description of events after the Taliban kicked the NGOs out of Kabul in the summer of 1998:

  With more than half of Kabul’s 1.2 million people benefiting in some way from NGO handouts, women and children were immediate victims when aid was cut off. Food distribution, health care and and the city’s fragile water distribution network were all seriously affected. As people waved empty kettles and buckets at passing Taliban jeeps, their reply to the population was characteristic of their lack of social concern. “We Muslims believe God the Almighty will feed everybody one way or another.”

  Since the Taliban had dubbed Mullah Omar Amir of all Muslims, not just Afghans – demonstrating transnationalist aspirations – I guess they felt they could use the ‘royal we.’ Tagging this post ‘Muslim-on-Muslim violence’ since the Kabul victims of Taliban indifference were probably all Muslims.

   
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  thabet 10:32 pm on September 2, 2009 | 12 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: activism (4), Feminism (26), human rights (381), international law (143), Muslim women (80), NGOs, politics (765)

  A bunch of white men debate how best to save the eternally oppressed Muslim woman…