Iyad el-Baghdadi at the Oslo Peace Forum, 22nd October 2014
The Arab Spring Manifesto
I watched this speech some time ago, a year after it came out, in fact.
I still remember the amazing quality of the speech and the impact that it had on me.
The speaker is of Palestinian descent, based in the United Arab Emirates. His Twitter account on the Middle East is widely read. He grew up in South Arabia but was expelled from his country and sent to Malaysia; on leaving, his wife was 7 months pregnant with their first child. From looking at his web site, Norway has given him asylum.
These are a few of the things that I took from the speech at the time:
At the time of giving the speech, Baghdadi had a 4 month old son who he had yet to meet. Fortunately, that situation has now changed with his asylum in Norway.
He can still be followed on Twitter and amusingly, was recently confused on social media for the leader of the IS movement, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (because of the similarity in names). This was in an Indonesian newspaper ‘Republic’ and the ‘New York Post’. The speaker mocks IS frequently on social media. During this time, his Twitter account was temporarily shut down for approximately half an hour. The link for this story, on the BBC, can also be seen below and at the time of writing, this was a recent event; it happened in December 2015 and was published on the BBC online on 1st January 2016.
LINKS
https://oslofreedomforum.com/speakers/iyad-el-baghdadi
The above is the speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2014
http://www.el-baghdadi.com/index.php/aboutiyad
This is a link to his web site
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-35210527
BBC article, as described above
Comment On Middle East Politics: ‘If they don’t let us dream, we’re not going to let them sleep’
Too much content for me to understand.