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We are one shaky country

Kuwait is an oil filthy rich country, and that’s pretty much all about it. Every week I read about a 5 year plan to change the face of the country, and make Kuwait a worldwide business centre. We read about big millions and billions being assigned for such projects, those projects we never hear or see later.  I tend to avoid getting into those things, as they ruin my mood, and raise my blood pressure. The problem comes when these silly thigs I try to avoid come in my way. Or our way should I say. Our way of life.

 

Every day, we use YouTube to watch the news, soccer goals, Islamic lectures, technical presentations, visual tutorials for How To stuff that otherwise are difficult to explain with words, my kid loves it for watching cartoons and I use it to encourage him with educational kids shows. All of that and more. Such a service has made YouTube part of our lives, and a life changer as well.

 

And then, one day a guy got an email with links to some videos he didn’t like. That man happens to be in a vital position for deciding what’s right and what’s wrong. Driven wih Islamic motives, and taking the prides of a nation on his shoulders, that guy fires up a direct letter to all ISPs to block this whole service, the good and bad of it. We suddenly read about it in the newspapers, YouTube is being blocked. The order gets canceled by the minister, as it was not signed from him, and the individual effort bypassing all authorities goes unpunished. Not only that, but perliment members have adapted the story, backing this individual, and are demanding from the ministry of communications to devote time, effort, and money to fight those videos. When people are celebrating the Ramadan Eid, the perliment members have made it their top priority on the schedules after Eid already to demand an act on those videos, and have expanded their demands to reach other sites as well, or else, they will put the minister for interrogations. 

 

The next day we hear, the ISPs are receiving letters from the ministry of communcations, which are really nothing more than individual efforts by normal people surfing the net, sending partial links to YouTube, and other offensive partial site links, such as Flickr and others, and the ministry does nothing more than stamping and forwarding them to all ISPs for implementation! To make the matter worse, the minister of communications makes an official statement that they are forming an official committe to unite their vision and statement, then start arranging with Gulf countries, then reach out for the whole Arabic and Islamic world for one big united move against the offensive bunch of videos.

 

Wooho… We have never seen or heard of such Islamic real uniting, and when was the last time we saw the minister really active and caring? Only when it comes to ministry money, or his chair. I wonder how dare we speak of country opening up for western world, and becoming a worldwide business centre, when few bunch of people on the other side of the world are able to manipulate our priorities, and shake our stabilities and focus, by simply uploading few silly videos.

 

What message are we really giving back to them? That we are weak and easily shaken country, or as a matter of fact, whole region. And what will happen if we block YouTube and other sites? Guess what, those offensive content will keep coming, and will increase as a matter of fact. People who want to use YouTube and the like will find ways around it, and those who don’t will not know about it, just as if they are looking the other way, and they will not be able to request for those videos to be removed from YouTube anymore. since they don’t know it exists. So blocking is just a fake pretending this problem doesn’t exist, and trying to disbelief the problem will always be there, you cannot stop it.

 

Did anyone of those demanding fight for offensive videos try to report the video as offensive to the concerned people, YouTube them selves? I have. And so have many others who are as caring and offended by the video, as those people trying to show off. They have a bit more sense of logic though. They try to address the problem, not panic and shout out loud. And guess what, the link I reported got deleted. I even tried to proxy to make sure it’s not only removed from Kuwait, it’s still deleted.

 

One might think this country is not moving forward, or at least not fast enough. But I believe they’re wrong. We are moving backward full speed and there is no stopping us.

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