Thanks (yet again) to Esra’a Ahmed, the director of the Free Kareem Coalition, this website has been written up in The Daily Star (Egypt), sadly one of that country’s few independent voices. The paper is distributed by the International Herald Tribune, so the story is certain to see some daylight. Here’s a sample:

“It was from watching the success of freekareem.org that we began to think that we could make a difference here in China. I contacted some friends who knew the people behind Freekareem.org and they seemed to understand at once how important our project in China was,” the New Youth 4 Coordinator who asked to remain anonymous told The Daily Star Egypt in an email interview.

Esra’a Ahmed, director of the Free Kareem Coalition told The Daily Star Egypt that the right to free speech is an “incredibly important cause to fight for,” leading her team to help set up the New Youth 4 only days after receiving the request.

Furthermore, Ahmed emphasized the importance of networking between activist communities in different parts of the world.

“Networking is extremely powerful. Today these Chinese activists need our help, tomorrow we might need theirs. We help each other and that will strengthen our campaigns and hopefully help us achieve our goals,” she said.

Both Egypt and China have come under strong criticism from rights groups for alleged web censorship and crackdowns on the countries’ so-called “cyber dissidents.”

Also a big word of thanks to Richard at the incomparable Peking Duck blog for his post on our project. His blog is consistently one of the most engaging of the English-language China blogs. In the next day or so I’d like to comment on Richard’s closing thought on the relative futility of our effort. I understand his point, but as one would probably imagine, I hold a different opinion.

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