This was today's sunrise from my hotel room.. I am in Louisville, Kentucky, home of the Kentucky Derby, Muhammed Ali Clay and where Edison first lighted his lightbulb. This is the home of great ideas: among them the Idea Festival, which I am attending this year, for Global Voices Online.
I had my first talk today in a slot vacated by no other that Iranian Nobel Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi after the Mullas in Iran refused to give her permission to leave the country and attend an Idea festival. Ideas are dangerous as you all know.... My panel included double-Pulitzer Prize winner Nick Kristof from the New York Times and Professor Stempel, who was actually in Iran during the 1979 revolution! Since the panel was a general discussion which encouraged questions from the audience, our talk naturally covered everything from censorship to freedom, human and women's rights to terrorism and whether it is safe for Americans to travel in countries which chant Death to America.
That's all from me.. off I go.. and Ramadhan Mubarak to you all too :)
PS: My colleague Georgia Popplewell has more + pix
GV's Founding Father Ethan Zuckerman live-blogged the session here
7 comments:
>> As the conversation turned towards Kristof’s talk on Darfur, Amira offered an interesting perspective: “As an Arab, I feel strangely distant from the Darfur situation. Yet it’s happening right on our border. Do we blame the media - yes, it’s not in the local media, but it’s right there on the Internet. If we want to look around, we can find out easily what’s happening.”
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I have always wondered about the same thing. I think it is the fault of the Arab media - as it is biased to the Sudanese government. However, that does not mean that I am not guilty of ignoring to find more about the situation.
its pretty cool to have a bahraini woman represent us in events like this :)
way to go silly!
way to go :) and lovely sunset!
i always wondered this about kentucky; are there more KFC's around?
Wow. Its great to hear that spoke in that event, and also that you said what you said. Keep going, girl.
Sensible is the word for Firefox.
Thank you all for your comments. The Idea Festival rocked. I will have to write about it some more .. after the dust settles!
Congrats on representing at the Idea Festival. You are a very strong individual indeed. Keep on keeping on. You are my hero.
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