Stifling online critics

GOVERNMENTS in the Middle East are getting increasingly twitchy about their citizens' activities online. In Egypt, on Sunday April 10th, a blogger, Mikael Sanad Nabil, was sentenced to three years in prison for "insulting the military" in his blog postings, after a brief trial by a military court with no defence lawyers present. Other bloggers worry they may be next. Campaigners say the mainstream media are already fearful of criticising the army.

In Bahrain, two months after anti-government protests began, bloggers have been caught up in a sweeping crackdown in which at least 450 people have been arrested for being "political activists". Zakariya Rashid Hassan, who ran a online forum for residents of his village, Al Dair, died in custody last week, six days after being arrested for "spreading false news". His forum has been taken down and replaced with a picture of the Saudi and Bahraini kings. Human-rights groups allege he was tortured; the authorities say his death was due to anaemia.

Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based lobby, says three other "netizens" remain in custody in Bahrain. At least three other bloggers have been arrested, including two who campaign against sectarianism, Mahmood Al Yousif and @redbelt, the founder of #uniteBH, an online campaign. A similar movement has sprung up in Lebanon. These three have now been released, but at a time when hundreds have been fired from their jobs for taking part—or on suspicion of taking part—in protests, their arrests have sent a clear warning to Bahrainis. Even the country's national football team has sacked four star players for being "against the government".

In the UAE, where protests are virtually unknown, three bloggers were arrested last weekend. Two of them, Ahmed Mansoor and Fahad Salem Al-Shehhy, were contributors to an online politics forum, UAE Dialogue, which is banned in Dubai. Mr Mansoor, a human-rights campaigner, was among 133 Emirati citizens who had signed a petition calling for the Federal National Council, a government advisory body, to be developed into a directly elected parliament with legislative powers. He said he had been receiving anonymous death threats. UAE officials said on Wednesday that he was arrested for possessing alcohol, but the ban on alcohol—which technically applies even to tourists buying alcohol in Dubai's opulent hotels—is not usually enforced. The third man to be arrested, Nasser bin Ghaith, a lecturer in international economic law at the Sorbonne campus in Abu Dhabi, had recently written an article saying that economic handouts would not quell demands for political reform in the Gulf.

Mr Ghaith's arrest should worry other Western universities that have set up shop in the Gulf. Academics in the region routinely face censorship and, more insidiously, self-censorship, in everything from politics and history to art and literature. Gulf nationals want and need good education and would like their countries to be less dependent on imported talent. But authoritarian rulers, looking towards Tunisia, with one of the best education systems in the Arab world, might conclude that a little education can be a dangerous thing.