#Alkhawaja one case .. one hashtag ! #Bahrain

Alkhawaja was the Middle East and North Africa Protection Coordinator with Front Line Defenders before he leave his post in February 2011 to devout himself entirely for the sake of revolution in Bahrain

 

Abdulhadi Alkhawaja is a Bahraini human rights defender hero. On Feb 12, 2012 he started open-ended hunger strike until freedom or death refusing his unjustified sentenced for life imprisonment and the violation for human rights in prison

The last known location for Alkhawaja is the military hospital, he has been transferred as the side effects of hunger has dramatically escalated damaging his health, after being on his for two months. Alkhawaja’s case attracted international attention starting from global NGOs, Denmark and the UN not only because he is a pioneer rights activist in the GCC are but also because he hold a Danish passport. However the daily visits from the Danish ambassador in Bahrain to Alkhawaja called of for the past two days. Therefore, his lawyer is afraid that he’s passed away as no body have seen or talked to him in two days.

The government in Bahrain refused a formal danish request to transfer Alkhwaja to Denmark to get the medical treatment he need. However the Danish P.M said that according to trusted sources Alkhawaja is still alive yesterday. Also many reports said that Alkhawaja is subjected to forced feeding which considered as a type of torture.

The demand of changing the regime was adopted by Alkhwaja earlier before the revolution in February 2011 when he called to replace the the slogan “Death to Alkhlifas” with “step down the ruling gang”. And he was very clear in that when was giving his speeches in Lulu square last year. which may be the cause of subjecting him to extensive torture to the extent that, according to his daughter, when they arrested him, he has been taken from home unconscious due to the beating he received from the arresting officers.

The prison didn’t meant to Alkhwaja the end of his battle. he is fighting with the only weapon he got, and he’s so far succeeding in performing pressure on the government and its not a surprising to be himself the reason to call off Bahrain F1 grand prix which is scheduled later this month.

On twitter many tweeps are putting a lot of effort on tweeting about Alkhawaja, when he entered the danger stage

last released picture for Alkhawaja , in this stage he lost quarter of his weight

and his health started to collapse they tried to trend the hashtag #DontForgetAlkhawaja and they failed which is every predictable for several reasons first because the population of Bahrain is not big enough and second the world is not fully supporting Bahrainis like they Egyptians or the Syrians for example which means there are no much of tweets from the rest of the world to help trending the hashtag. There is one blame on the Bahrainis though. As they, maybe, don’t consider Twitter as a tool to send a message to the world but a new fashion of chatting and spamming the world wide web. Its very possible to count at least five hastags related to Alkhwaja case .. but why?  #SaveAlkhwaja , #DontForgetAlkhawaja , #FreeAlkhwaja have the same meaning and add nothing to the case, its only confuse the tweeps and lower the chances of trending a hashtag or even having a top tweet ! in a personal opinion the hastag #Alkhwaja is good enough, and its short ,so it gives a chance to write longer tweets. I honestly don’t know why people don’t focus on tweeting with this hashtag instead of creating a new one every few days only for the sake of change!

This is a honest advice from a person who don’t know better, to focus on one hastag and tweet about Alkhwaja as much as possible, so people know that Bahrain has a hero who is welling to give his life just to put Bahrain back on the surface and make the international community busy.

Mapping My Social Media Accounts

Forget about the key bored, take a paper and pen for a while and draw your "online" map

I just done mapping my accounts on the internet, discovered I have too many of them by the way. Really glad that I just did that, I feel really organized and have some space for more productivity now.

I was doing this task as a part of “threat assessment” in order to enhance my security online. However I discovered Its useful to spot and evaluate the content I post online. more importantly it gave me the impression about the time I spend on social media and weather if its needed or not.

during this task I found that some of my activity has minor priority but I always do it because it is fun and easy to do. Also I came to conclusions that I should use certain language for certain account. I also after this task take a decision  to stop a blog that I think is really achieved its goals and dedicate the time i spend on it to start writing my first book. Last but not least I hope that reorganizing my priorities online will help me focus on new types of new and social media such as Youtube and podcasts

I personally encourage the people who spend long time online to do this mapping, of course everyone can do ti on his own way, and this is the way I did mine

1. I listed all the accounts I have online
2. under each account I stated what I currently use the account for
3. in front of that, I stated what goals I wanted to achieve with each account
4. accordingly I rated the priority of each account.
5. Finally I listed any new behaviors should be adopted while using each account, in order to accomplish to goals ( cancel the account, change the language, the subject matters, give it more time, etc .. ) \

If you did similar task, you are more than welcome to share you recipe ..

 

Bahrain Police Be Carful … Angry Girl Behind Your Bars

When ur in chains, living with no dignity or rights, bowing to criminal dictators, the first step is to forget ur fear & realize that its ur right.. to be angry

Police officer shout on Zainab after Handcuffing her upon her refusal to the arrest ( Photo by Reuters )

Said Zainab AlKhawaja in her Twitter account profile. She obviously felt in chains living under violent, dictator regime, although she was free and not behind actual bars. This feeling was enough to justify his anger and human rights activism. This feeling, This anger led finally to create a brave, talented Bahraini young lady that considered since the Lulu revolution a first class human rights fighter.

She’s a daughter of a family involved totally into human right activism, her father is Abdulhadi Al Khawaja, the founder of Bahrain Center For Human Rights, who has been arrested as well as Zainab’s husband, uncle, and brother in law in the current crackdown.

Since February 2011, the super stars and the well respected public are now the human rights activists, not the politicians anymore, in result to their outstanding effort in delivering the message, the case and the fight of Bahraini people to the rest of the world.

Zainab was part of team who went to many world capitals and participated in several human rights events and seminar related to the situation in Bahrain, However she took the lead of two significant actions, demanding the release of her family members. She established a hunger strike in April 2011, during that she wrote through her blog a letter to the President of United States :

When you were sworn in as president of the United States, I had high hopes. I thought: here is a person who would have never become a president if it were not for the African-American fight for civil liberties; he will understand our fight for freedom.

,

I ask of you to look into your beautiful daughters’ eyes tonight and think to yourself what you are personally willing to sacrifice in order to make sure they can sleep safe at night, that they can grow up with hope rather than fear and heartache, that they can have their father and grandfathers embrace to run to when they are hurt or in need of support. Last night my one-year-old daughter went knocking on our bedroom door calling for her father, the first word she ever learnt. It tore my heart to pieces. How do you explain to a one-year-old that her father is imprisoned? I need to look into my daughter’s eyes tomorrow, next week, in the years to come, and tell her I did all that I could to protect her family and future.
For my daughter’s sake, for her future, for my father’s life, for the life of my husband, to unite my family again, I will begin my hunger strike.

And  again, in June 2011, she protested with three young ladies inside United Nation Development Programme office for the same reason. She participates in the marches and filed events, and live tweet, blog from there. She considered a prefect citizen journalist who covered most of Lulu events using wide offline and online professional and social networks.

Zainab (left) Live tweeting from UNDP last July

Yesterday, Zainab protested on one Budaiya Street roundabouts, as one of those was a part of the event Occupy BudaiyaSt. She was in the middle of the roundabout, she wasn’t blocking the road or doing anything that could be voilent. Police wanted to arrest her, she refused the arrest with siting on the ground, Later two youtube clips showed police shooting tear gas directly to her, and arresting her aggressively.

International Media such as Washington Post, New York Times, Aljazeera English, and BBC wrote about Zainab’s case today, while as expected regional media and activista mostly ignored her. Therefore Zainab needs the most support of human rights defenders, and from bloggers and tweeps. This is a call to start a camping supporting Zainab as a blogger and an activist, this is call to put hand in hand to help the brave fighter who went to serve her case totally till the end.