Tom Spurgeon brings us an item in The Comics Reporter, featured at BBC News, about a Syrian cartoonist struggling to have his work see publication there, in the face of opposition from the totalitarian regime's mostly state run media industry. Although no one will yet dare publish Ali Farzat's work in Syria, the laws are slowly changing there and an awareness of the virtues of freedom of speech is slowly brewing at the grass roots level in that country - and perhaps in other such regimes in the Arab world, as well. One of the factors sited in the BBC report is the proliferation of the internet and the electronic age into the culture, which the authorities are apparantly helpless to block out, try as they may. Ali Farzat, who puts forth some hard lined criticism of the regime's characteristics, along with other such cartoonists and creators, are taking advantage of this situtation to help bring about some long needed legistlative change which will eventually open doors for their work to see wide publication and distribution. 
Ali Farzat and one of his editorial cartoons, waiting to see publication in syria.
Interestingly, this dissemmination of ideas espousing the virtues of civil rights and basic humane social values, through the cultural tools available to the people, be they art, literature or music, has been effective in recent history against such regimes. It's this same force which caused the eventual fall of the iron curtain raised by a similar regime in the Soviet Union, which began to also topple in the 1960's - in great measure thanks to the Rock Music scene rising in Europe and America in that era, led by none other than the Beatles. Most Russian immigrants in Israel and America, whom I've heard describe that era, agree to this basic analysis of what caused the rise in the public awareness within Russia, which eventually enabled the overthrow of the oppressive rulership there.
With the presence of such good creative power in the cartooning and comics field in the Arab world, well...who knows. But it is a good sign - and would be a much more preferable way to bring about a change there, than the military attrocity currently being perpetrated in Iraq.
