When Saudi activists Abdullah al-Hamed and Mohammed Fahad al-Qahtani headed to the Criminal Court in Riyadh on Saturday morning, they knew what was waiting for them. The two founding members of the banned Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association (ACPRA) have been on trial since June 2012, and the judge was expected to hand down his ruling at the session scheduled on Saturday. As the defendants arrived to the court, they were received by more than 100 activists who came to show their support and attend the hearing which was also marked by a heavy presence of security officers with truncheons hanging from their belts.

The government has been accusing al-Hamed and al-Qahtani with a series of charges that include founding an unlicensed human rights organization, seeking to disrupt security and inciting disorder, undermining national unity, breaking allegiance to the ruler, disobeying the ruler, and questioning the integrity of officials. These are considered serious charges in Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy where political dissent in not usually tolerated. It does not allow protests, political parties, or unions. Saudi Arabia is also a main ally of the United States in the Middle East. 

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Oman's Basic Law (Implemented November 6, 1996)

Article 18: Personal freedom is guaranteed according to the Law, and it is unlawful to arrest, search, detain, or imprison any person or have his place of residence or freedom of movement or residence restricted except in accordance with the provisions of the Law.

Article 29: The freedom of opinion and expression thereof through speech, writing or other forms of expression is guaranteed within the limits of the Law.

Article 32: The citizens have the right to assemble within the limits of the Law.

It started with a road trip.

On May 31, two Omani human rights activists, Ismail al-Muqbali and Habeeba al-Hina'i, and a prominent local lawyer, Yaqoub al-Kharousi, drive to Fahud, a major oil facility about 217 miles southwest of Muscat.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of oil workers had taken part in strikes across the country demanding better working conditions and pay over the previous few days, and they were keen to see for themselves how the strikers were being treated by the police.

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"Long live Al Jazeera!" chanted Egyptian protesters in Tahrir Square on Feb. 6. Many Arabs -- not least the staff at Al Jazeera -- have said for years that the Arab satellite network would help bring about a popular revolution in the Middle East. Now, after 15 years of broadcasting, it appears the prediction has come true. There is little question that the network played a key role in the revolution that began as a ripple in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, and ended up a wave that threatens to wash away Egypt's long-standing regime.

"We knew something was coming," Mustafa Souag, head of news at Al Jazeera's Arabic-language station, told me Monday. "Our main objective was to provide the most accurate and comprehensive coverage that we could by sending cameras and reporters to any place there is an event. And if you don't have a reporter, then you try to find alternative people who are willing to cooperate because they believe in what we are doing."

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I don't have a lot of time this morning before the panel discussion I'm hosting at GW on Tunisia -- webcast here, if you can't make it to the Elliott School! But I do want to make a few quick comments on Egypt. The images and stories of protests today have been impressive, both in numbers and in energy and enthusiasm. The Egyptians are self-consciously emulating the Tunisian protests, seeking to capitalize on the new mood within the Arab world. Their efforts are not new, despite the intense Western desire to put them into a narrative driven by Twitter, WikiLeaks, or demonstration effects. Egyptians have been protesting and demonstrating for the last decade: massive demonstrations in support of Palestinians and against the Iraq war from 2000 to 2003; Kefaya's creative protests for political reform and against succession which peaked in 2004 to 2006; lawyers and judges and professional associations; the Facebook protests and April 6 movements; the plethora of wildcat labor strikes across the country.

One key factor was missing, though, at least early on. Al Jazeera has played a vital, instrumental role in framing this popular narrative by its intense, innovative coverage of Tunisia and its explicit broadening of that experience to the region. Its coverage today has been frankly baffling, though. During the key period when the protests were picking up steam, Al Jazeera aired a documentary cultural program on a very nice seeming Egyptian novelist and musical groups, and then to sports. Now (10:30am EST) it is finally covering the protests in depth, but its early lack of coverage may hurt its credibility. I can't remember another case of Al Jazeera simply punting on a major story in a political space which it has owned.

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In the winter of 2004, a treatise called da'wat al-muqawamah al-Islamiyyah al-alamiyya (The Call of Global Islamic Resistance) first appeared on jihadi forums. The 1,600-page document, written by al Qaeda's arch-strategist Abu Musab al-Suri, called for a radical restructuring of global jihadism. Suri, having observed that the post-9/11 era was distinctly uncharitable toward organized and hierarchical jihadi groups, wanted to transform al Qaeda into a diffuse international movement connected mainly through Islamic solidarity and ideology.

The terrorist network, Suri had already written in 2000, "is not an organization.… It is a call, a reference, a methodology." Accordingly, he now recommended that al Qaeda focus on projecting its ideas and solutions around the globe. By encouraging this new, decentralized version of al Qaeda, Suri hoped to see the creation of numerous "self-starter" individuals and terrorist cells with no organizational connections to the group. These self-starters, he hoped, would be just as eager to kill as any well-trained terrorist and would also be better protected from detection by enemy security services.

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The last time you visited your favorite blog, how wide of a cross-section of public opinion did the comments represent? It probably depended on the blogger, on the article, and on the mood of the day.

Yet these limitations haven't stopped advocates from trying to discern Palestinian public opinion from bloggers' views. Last week, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) presented to Congress a new report that puts Palestinian public attitudes, in contrast to polling data, in a decidedly hostile light. "P@lestinian Pulse: What Policymakers Can Learn From Palestinian Social Media," by Jonathan Schanzer and Mark Dubowitz is the first published study which attempts to ascertain Palestinian public opinion exclusively from web sources. But is the report accurate?

FDD contracted out to ConStrat, a D.C.-based communications firm, which mined an array of content, and then FDD drew broad conclusions such as Hamas "supporters showed no apparent disagreement with Salafists such as al-Qaeda" and "Palestinian reform factions are weak and have little influence online." But the study's methodology leaves much to be desired: it's impossible to confirm whether the sample only includes Palestinians; there isn't a clear theory of how to analyze this content or how FDD reached these conclusions.

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The raging questions about America's role in Iraq came to a boil earlier this year with "Arqoub's Promise," a controversial music video which captured public debate. Invoking Arqoub, a legendary character infamous for his unfulfilled promises, the Iraqi singer Shadha Hassoun bemoans both her affair with a U.S. soldier and the U.S. invasion of her war-torn country. Double-entendre lyrics about love and betrayal combine with images of the singer crossing wind and sand-swept streets to end up in a poignant post-lovemaking confrontation with her lover in the back of a U.S. military truck, with a large screen playing images of military hardware, explosions and torn bodies. As the U.S. soldier walks away, the video concludes in black and white, with a street strewn with dozens of shoes -- in homage to Bush shoe thrower Muntazher al-Zhaidi -- and a haunting close-up of a fright-stricken baby face encircled with barbed wire. The release of the video in mid-January, 2010 set the Iraqi and Arab press ablaze: "Shadha Hassoun glorifies the occupation of Iraq!" accused one columnist; "A political or romantic message?" wondered another; "Shadha Hassoun expels occupier," wrote a third, reflecting multiple and contrary readings of the video. 

In the polemic spawned by the video, fans and critics opined and rebutted each other in mosque sermons, political speeches, op-ed pages, and social media, fuelled by rival campaigns in the March, 2010 Iraqi elections, against the backdrop of the ongoing Arab trauma over Iraq's tragedy. Eight weeks after the video's release, an Arabic Google search yielded more than 4000 hits, ranging from adulation on fan blogs to invective by Iraqi insurgents, showing that various publics -- young and old, secular and religious, pro-and anti-U.S. -- found in the video an invitation to argue and advance competing visions of Iraqi womanhood, patriotism, and identity.

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Nearly nine years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States still has 100,000 troops fighting and dying in Afghanistan, and another 50,000 holding down the fort in Iraq. One hundred seventy-six inmates remain at the U.S. prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A number of disturbing near-misses -- the attempted Christmas Day bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253, the Times Square fizzle, and various other plots -- have put the threat of terrorism back in the news. In a Gallup poll conducted in late August, 47 percent of Americans surveyed said that terrorism would be "extremely important" to their vote for Congress this year, with another 28 percent rating the issue "very important."

Yet there's also a sense that terrorism has faded as a political issue as the economy and general dissatisfaction with Washington have crowded out all other concerns. The intense debates on the op-ed pages and in the blogosphere of the war on terror's go-go years have quieted. The military tribunals in Guantánamo have evoked little public interest. Anti-Islam fervor may be rising, but terrorism just doesn't seem to elicit the passions it once did. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine outgoing Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria, always a reliable barometer of conventional wisdom, writing this sentence in, say, 2008 -- "Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat?" -- and barely making a splash.

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Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al-Saud is a man who wears many hats. One of the richest men in the world, he has recently been accused of being one of the financiers behind the planned Islamic center in downtown Manhattan by Fox News -- which is owned by a company in which, ironically, he is also a major stakeholder. Jon Stewart's Daily Show lampooned the incongruity of this earlier in the week, joking that the only way to stop Al-Waleed from funding the Islamic center was to stop watching Fox.

Given that the prince is the frequent subject of magazine profiles and even an authorized biography, it is strange that we seem know so little about him -- and get so much of it wrong. The following is a brief, irreverent, account of everything you need to know about Prince Al-Waleed.

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"This BlackBerry Messenger rumor mill in the UAE is getting out of hand." I had posted this tweet several days before the UAE announced a ban last week on BlackBerry services by next October if Research In Motion (RIM), the smart phone's manufacturer, didn't meet the country's regulatory conditions.

The truth is there are legitimate concerns behind the UAE's surprising decision. After all, sinister individuals have taken advantage of the country's modern infrastructure as well as its lax regulatory environment before, especially leading to the September 11^th attacks.

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Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, the energetic octogenarian who is in his fifth year as head of the oil-rich kingdom, will visit Washington on June 29. Abdullah has overcome divisions within the royal family and proceeded to restore stability to the kingdom, which just a few years ago was under siege by local radicals and wracked with fears about the possible regionalization of the Iraq war. For all his considerable political acumen, however, Abdullah has turned to an old playbook to consolidate the House of Saud's authority -- leaving important questions about what comes next for the kingdom unanswered.

Amid political uncertainty, Abdullah has taken measured steps to transform his country. Abdullah's Saudi Arabia is a remarkably different place than that of his immediate predecessor. With his blessing, the Saudi press, while hardly free, is occasionally vibrant and sometimes even critically introspective. Some of the kingdom's most sacred institutions and practices, including the reactionary religious establishment and the draconian restrictions imposed on women, have come under fire in the media by a growing number of Saudi journalists, intellectuals, and activists. Saudi citizens have been taking their cues directly from the king, who has worked to rein in the clergy, which has enjoyed tremendous power since the kingdom took a conservative turn in the late 1970s.

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Neda Soltani is the ordinary Iranian woman whose image spread last summer in an instant around the world. She's a symbol of the brutality of the Iranian regime and the resilience of Iran's movement for democracy. She's also still alive.

A woman named Neda did indeed die last summer on the streets of Tehran, gunned down by members of an Iranian militia. Her full name was Neda Agha-Soltan. But mixed in with the tragic footage of that Neda's death, broadcast around the world in a viral video that galvanized world opinion against the Iranian regime, was a compelling Facebook snapshot of a smiling young beauty in a flowered headscarf.

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In June 2009, Iranians took to the streets to protest what they saw as their country's stolen presidential election. It was a story that seemed to write itself. But it was also a story that the West -- and the American media in particular -- was destined to get wrong in ways both large and small. A year later, Foreign Policy asked seven leading Iranian-American writers to reflect on the events. Here's what they told us.

"What the West Isn't Hearing About," By Azadeh Moaveni
To understand the big stories of the last year in Iran, we need better access to the little stories.

"What We Got Wrong," By Reza Aslan
How the media both overestimated and underestimated the Green movement.

"Iran's Hidden Cyberjihad," By Abbas Milani
Taking a cue from the Soviets, the regime is creating a new Iron Curtain - online.

"A Forgotten Civil Society," Azar Nafisi, Interview by Britt Peterson
Reading Lolita in Tehran's Azar Nafisi discusses Iran's cultural crisis - and how the West got it wrong.

"What We Got Right," By Nazila Fathi
Against terrible odds, the foreign media did a remarkable job covering the past year's turmoil in Iran.

"The Real Impact of the Elections," By Haleh Esfandiari
Far from being a wipeout, the Green Movement was a historic success. Too bad no one was watching.

"The Twitter Devolution," By Golnaz Esfandiari
Far from being a tool of revolution in Iran over the last year, the Internet, in many ways, just complicated the picture.

Israel's cringe-inducing PR offensive isn't doing much to improve the country's international reputation. However, it does provide an insight into how Israelis misunderstand the nature of the conflict they face.

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