Well, to most of us bloggers, there’s really nothing surprising about what Jane Novak is doing in her (as the New York Times put it) crusade for imprisoned Yemeni journalist Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani, the now somewhat infamous dissident she has been blogging about for several years now.  You see, bloggers tend to scrape beneath surfaces that ordinary news sources won’t touch, or won’t touch for long.  Novak has been writing about Yemen, its corrupt government, and the injustices that government inflicts on not just al-Khaiwani, but on all of the Yemeni citizens.  Would any “real” journalist have spent so long on this subject?  Even if said journalist did, they would likely do so through the blogging medium.  After all, regardless of the intentions of the journalists themselves, the mainstream press is mostly out to make a buck.  News is business, after all, and you have to cater to the lowest common denominator, which happens to be a population with no attention span whatsoever.

Bloggers have a different audience, one that can be somewhat obsessive compulsive.  Most bloggers are niche bloggers, who find a subject and stick to it.  Take Jane Novak for example.  Her efforts to help a single, courageous journalist have led her down a most extraordinary path.  She’s been featured in the New York Times, and her blog is banned in Yemen.  She writes exhaustively on Yemeni politics and the failures of that government to provide for her people–I mean, where else are you going to find this sort of information?

Why would you even bother, except that, thankfully, Ms. Novak bothered, and now we have to pay attention.  This is the beauty of blogging.  We suddenly have more flavors to choose from.  And we get opinions and discussions rather than just pundits wagging their fingers, and parading around as though their opinions were the only ones worth a damn.

My heart goes out to Abdulkarim al-Khaiwani, and I hope the exposure he is getting now, thanks to Jane Novak, will lead to some sort of happy ending for him.  There are many brave men and women like him across the globe, fighting for freedom with their pens, waging a war of ideas armed only with ink and intelligence.  Ms. Novak has taken up his cause, and has used the very same assortment of weapons.

This sort of warfare is the most dangerous to tyrants.  Ideas cannot be bombed.  Truth cannot be jailed.

Kain's major subjects of focus at NeoConstant are international strategy; support of Israel; the failure of the international community to stop genocide; the spread of American power and democracy; historical analysis; and current events both domestically and abroad. He writes here, Newsvine and his blog, IndiePundit.