Have you been to this site yet? I am, of course, biased, but please - if you check it out and enjoy it, post a link on your blog!

Although I posted reactions to Fouad Mourtada’s release at Global Voices last night (a story broken by bloggers and then, Global Voices Advocacy), several more English-language bloggers have expressed their thoughts on the matter since.

Hisham of Al Miraat shares my sentiment; that Fouad Mourtada’s release is only a start:

 The news from Morocco is a real sigh of relief for many bloggers, and HR activists who campaigned hard to make the case of Fouad known and widely published. But this is not a victory for democracy nor for HR (as the Moroccan writer Laila Lalami rightly pointed out on her blog) because the institutions of the monarchy have acted in clear subservience to the central power. And I don’t think that one can feel comfortable yet in a country where people are being imprisoned and later released according to the will and whims of one single person. Anyway, Fouad is now a free man. Until Mourtada’s arrest, Moroccans have enjoyed reasonably free access to the internet compared to the regional standards. They rightly spotted the danger of imprisoning Mourtada and they succesfully named and shamed the Moroccan government for what it did. Throughout the Arab World, though, many bloggers and other prisoners of opinion still languish in prisons sometimes without due process or any legal recourse.

The Arabist feels that Fouad’s release is better late than never:

 The Moroccan who was jailed for putting up a fake profile of Prince Moulay Rashid has been freed. This is great news, and while it should have never gotten to this, better late than never. I suppose the king wanted to make sure the message got across that the royal family is a no-go area for satirists and critics.

I will continue to post reactions, both here and at Global Voices Online, as I find them.  I can’t wait for mainstream news to pick up the story!

Global Voices, in partnership with Reuters, has launched a new site that I’ll be working on; Voices without Votes is a project of Global Voices commissioned by Reuters.

Americans are the only ones who can elect the United States president, but the 2008 election offers a unique opportunity to harvest global commentary on America’s politics and foreign policy and how it affects the rest of the world.

Voices Without Votes highlights conversations in non-American blogs and citizen media, with emphasis on the regions covered by Global Voices: Africa, Asia, Europe, South America, and the Middle East.

Please: if you are a blogger in that category or spot any posts that would fit Voices without Votes, please submit them here or e-mail them to me at: themoroccoreport@gmail.com

I’ve barely kept up with Global Voices posts, Arabisto has fallen by the wayside, and sadly, this blog has practically gone defunct. I’m in the process of designing a new blog (okay, my friend Mykal is designing, I’m giving input), which should hopefully inspire me to post more often (since there’s only so much one can say about Morocco when one is 3,000 miles away). I also am without internet at home again.

Given that it’s the last day of the year, I’d like to take just a moment to reflect…I started this year in Haarlem, Netherlands, and am ending it in Boston, Massachussetts. It feels like I’ve come a long way…from starting the year out as a newlywed English teacher to ending it in a job I love, back in my own country and near my family. And yet, I don’t know which life I prefer. I miss Morocco dearly - from my family (in-law), to my job to my students, to the smell of the air…But I also love my freedoms here - going to the movies (in English!), the bars, feeling free to walk down the street in whatever I like without being harassed.

Living in Morocco felt like being on some sort of frontier - by no means was I the first (or last) to do it, but comparing my life there with that of the people I grew up with, or what I was used to, it felt like I was always pushing some sort of boundary (if only my own), finding some new edge. Adventure, even. Being here feels like the status quo - my New Year Resolution, incidentally, is to push that boundary - find something here that touches on that. It’s funny - in Morocco it felt so difficult at times to mobilize, get things done. Here, I have all of the resources I could possibly need, but no idea where to start. Things are too busy, there’s too much. It’s the “American way,” I suppose.

Needless to say, we’ll be back in Morocco as soon as we can. We’ve already talked about going back to live - not in Meknes, mind you, but Rabat or Marrakesh. Somewhere we can have the best of both worlds.

And so, I wish you and yours the best of this coming new year - make the most of it.  Choose resolutions that truly speak to you, and that you may keep.  Work on fulfilling your hopes and goals.  I know I will.

Having been quite some time since my last post, I have surprisingly little to say - mainly, I miss Morocco and at the same time, haven’t been following the news or politics all that much and so have nothing to say…

Except, of course - happy holidays, whether Eid al-Kabir, Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa or any number of others.

Insha’allah, regular posting will commence when this season ends.

Laila Lalami blogged today about trampling Marrakesh. She made the point that, with all of the recent articles about Morocco, more and more tourists are visiting the country (and Marrakesh in particular). Lalami said:

When we were there last spring, I saw a moronic British tourist sticking his ass out of one of the windows of the Ben Youssef Medersa. The floors of the seminary’s student rooms were damaged by all the activity, and one of the guides kept touching the exquisite plaster work in the inner courtyard with his bare hands… The tile floors at the Bahia palace were completely falling apart, and people had no regard for the artifacts. The Menebhi palace was also starting to show signs of wear. Sad.

I don’t disagree - it’s unbelievable how disrespectful Western tourists visiting Morocco can be. While it’s one thing for French women to sashay around in miniskirts, it’s another thing to completely disregard artifacts. When visiting the Jardins Majorelle last April, I saw that many of the bamboo trees had people’s names scratched into them (although one of the best photos I took was of “Rajae + Mehdi”).

I would also like to point out, however, that the responsibility is not entirely on the tourists. Foreign tourists bring extraordinary revenue into cities like Marrakesh, yet little is done to maintain buildings. If the floor in the Bahia Palace is showing signs of wear (a normal effect of the millions of feet which walk across it), then it requires restoration and regular upkeep which, sadly, I believe few Moroccan sites are getting.

p.s. Here’s the article which Ms. Lalami based her post on (if you ask me, it’s disgusting).

A far more positive article (than the one about the dates) on the coexistence between Moroccan Muslims and Jews is here.

They even managed to find an anti-Zionist Communist Jew to quote!

Today it is with honor that I share with you the blog of a poet: Nasamat min bilady, who went to all the trouble of writing a (wonderful) poem about my husband and I in the comments of my last post, here.

Thank you!

Oh, how I love articles like this. Every foreign Jew I’ve met in Morocco has had little or no problems, Moroccans are quick to point out their history with their own Jews (which is not as pretty as they make it seem), and Morocco and Israel have all sorts of ties.

But God forbid they send Israeli dates to Morocco!

Cheers to blogger Larbi, who was recently named one of 100 people who move Morocco in TelQuel magazine!