Before I say anything, I am publishing Khaled’s message here:

Statement

On December 30th 2006 when Jordan Planet decided to shut down, it took me 24 hours to come up with an alternative portal in a genuine attempt to keep all Jordanian Blogs together. And although I’m going through a major step in my life, I gave Jordan Blogs a lot of my effort, time and money. It was all for the spirit of keeping us together in one spot.
Lately, I have been battling issues with certain Blogs, some that has to do with politics and some with morals.
Anyone can raise the flag of “Freedom of Speech” but I for one usually look into matters and don’t take it for granted. I think “Freedom of Speech” was created to help the weak, and never to promote hate speech or immoral issues. OK, I admit my mistake in not having a clear policy, but again I started this on my own and when established a committee and assigned tasks, people have jobs and lives outside the blogsphere, so things take time. I have no problem with someone criticizing the government, religion or anybody for that matter. I do have issue with somebody slandering and throwing stones without offering a real solution. When it comes to morals, if you are going to post X rated materials, you are banned from JB regardless you put a disclaimer or not.

And today I find out that I’m being crowned as the enemy of “freedom of Speech” side to side with the Egyptian government. Well, frankly, it is not worth my time or effort. I never planned for this, when I started JB I did not think things will get to this. So as a result, I would like to see about closing JB. If you guys want this to stay rolling till Jordan Planet comes back, fine! And I will release the committee from its responsibility. If not I will just shut it down, and you guys can use other aggregators.
Salam and God Bless,

Khaled

Ever since JP was paused, Khaled has stepped up and took it upon himself to provide Jordanian bloggers with a substitute solution. Single handedly; he built it up and had it running without even being asked to do so. The level of proactivity and initiative he showed is admirable and must be respected.

The main concern was to get the aggregator up and running to give everyone access to their favorite blogs and not lose their daily input and read. This was more important than setting up a policy or a committee but that was not far to follow. Khaled recruited a diverse group of bloggers to give objectivity to decisions and actions taken and I believe that the group was reasonable and mature enough to be in the position they were in.

We all have avoided discussing this issue on our blogs because Khaled spoke on our behalf when it came to JB and that’s how harmonized the committee was, and when we were faced with the case of blog deletion, we were all supportive of the committee’s decisions and actions because that is the way things should go.

We read on many blogs how everyone was confusing moderation with censorship. Khaled said it best when he said that slandering and hate speech is not categorized under freedom of speech and this is a general rule in the whole world. There are limits and there comes a time when some cross the line, therefore; action was taken. It was not a sole decision; we all voted and the result of the voting drove the action. No one was manipulated into his/her vote; we were all free and responsible and that’s how it went.

We could have continued to ignore all the campaigns and motions to classify us as enemies of freedom of speech because we know better and the majority of the blogosphere knows better, but to be compared to and resembled to the Egyptian government in the case of Kareem, now that was over the top and no one can put up with this.

We are not the government, we did not stop anyone from writing or saying whatever they want to say on their own spaces, we did not delete their posts or moderate them, we did not persecute them legally, we did not threaten them to delete and take back what they said or else, we did not do any of those things. What we did is that we took a stand and agreed that we are not going to promote hate speech and slander no matter who it was directed against, we took a stand and agreed that we are not going to promote X rated material on JB, we agreed that we are not going to create a war with these bloggers by telling them what to do with their blogs because that would have been censorship. Instead; we elected to quietly stop the feed and move on just like any newspaper or publishing house elects who to publish for and who to promote for.

We were bending our time and schedules to meet online and try to organize things the right way, we were about to publish the policy and refer everyone to it to get out of these situations, but we were not given the time by our dear friends the bloggers, therefore; I respect and support what Khaled is doing and I think that when you do something for the people, the least you should expect is some appreciation to the effort, time and dedication in the least. When this is not there; I think it is not worth it to begin with!