About our resistance to the government’s ban
March 17th, 2008As many of you may know, after the ban of yemenportal.net, the website initiated a nation-wide resistance movement online. It is an effort to neutralize the advantage of the Yemeni government in restricting access to specific websites due to news or opinion content that it may dislike.
This resistance is starting to yield results with more people becoming familiar with it.
The idea was to basically set up a robot on the website blocked.arabiaportal.net to retrieve the content of all blocked websites and list them according to their sources and category. There are articles belonging to forums, news websites, and opinion websites. All of those stories can be viewed in full at: http://blocked.arabiaportal.net/yemen/
However, this resistance movement must have offended the regime so the website (blocked.arabiaportal.net/yemen) itself was banned. Hence, we established yet another domain yemenportal.org and put the blocked content of all those websites at yemenportal.org/blocked.
This is what the resistance is all about: never give up. It will be like this, i.e., they ban a website and we establish another, until they give up on this chase and let the people in Yemen browse banned websites freely.
Thus far, we have been able to get close to a thousand emails of people who subscribed to our service at http://yemenportal.org/?signup=1 and other websites that have already been in touch with us before.
Every time the government blocks our alternative website, we will open another. The attack on the car of yemenportal.net, which took place after we set up the second alternative domain, had only proven to us that there are elements unhappy with our acts and are willing to go to extreme lengths to deter us. However, this has not achieved their objective and we decided to close down the office and have no representative in Yemen to avoid any clashes by those people.
In brief, our resistance now is fully 100% online. But this resistance cannot grow and be more effective unless you help out and participate.
Therefore, the best you could do to help this resistance grow is to put up the below graph in a convenient location on your blog or website and have it point to the following link: http://yemenportal.org/blocked.
You can also add one of the below campaign’s logo pointing to this website: http://freeyemenportal.org:
You can make a difference. Please help our movement grow and free yemenportal.net and all other Yemeni websites.
Walid Al-Saqaf
Admin, founder
YemenPortal.net






April 3rd, 2008 at 4:34 pm
[…] These Tools Are Being Used: The site is asking bloggers to post Free YemenPortal.net banners on their sites. In addition, Mideast youth has posted a Free YemenPortal.net petition on their […]
July 6th, 2008 at 1:27 am
As the previous owner of yemenmax.com I was shut down a day after I went live. well I emailed every minister i could find and I had to get a dedicated IP address asigned to the site. becuase if you are on a shared sever and go thru yemen’s filter most probably they will filter yours if another site with same ip address is bad. well i dont know what did it but i was back up in a couple of days.
I do have to say that yemens censorship is way more lenient than say UAE. they dont allow myspace, most bloggers, and way more sites. Its crazy they solicitate foriegners but block loads of web sites and the expates are complianing. They dont even allow skype! thank god Yemen allows skype!
Its a very sad thing what happened to your car and I can just imagine how it must be trying to run a news agency there. However your site looks like the basic portal as mine was with news comming in on feeds. If your site has not stepped on any toes, im really do not understand the why they are blocking it.
I wish you all the best, Yemen needs as much web presence as it can get.
KNOWLEDGE CAN ONLY HELP A SOCIETY. ARROGANCE IS THE ENEMY OF ALL.