Mideast Peace Starts with Its Students
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Lauren Barack -- School Library Journal, 5/26/2008 9:49:00 AM
A Web site run by college students, hoping to foster conversations about peace in the Middle East, was one of five winners of a $10,000 Berkman Award for its efforts to celebrate and embrace diversity in one of the most polarized regions of the world.The 21-year-old director of Mideast Youth, Esra’a Al Shafei, from Bahrain, received the cash award from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society last week. The Harvard University-based research center is celebrating its 10th year, and is now a multidisciplinary program focused on fueling discourse about cyberspace.
MideastYouth.com hopes to create a similarly animated dialogue as well, but instead focuses on ways to both educate and inspire tolerance in the Middle East. The site hosts open criticism of the United States’s decision to invade Iraq, as well as posts that express anger over women’s rights—or lack of—in the Islamic world.
Anyone who lives in North Africa or the Middle East is invited to contribute to the site, which features podcasts, forums, even an online television channel. While the site is predominately written in English, entries also appear in Arabic and Farsi.
Among the ongoing projects on the site are mefaith.com, an interfaith blog that explores the multiple religions practiced in the Middle East, along with a blog, Free Kareem!, which documents the imprisonment of 23-year-old Egyptian blogger Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman, sentenced to four years in an Egyptian jail last year.
All contributors give their time and services free of charge, according to the site, which solicits donations along with selling T-shirts with slogans such as, “No Sunni, No Shi’i, Just Muslim” to raise resources to support its efforts.
