Who would have ever thought that text messaging could be so powerful. When it comes to a protest for Women’s voting rights in Kuwait, you might be surprised. Now, keep in mind that this could be seen as an expensive way to do this. But as we already know from Flash mobs, text is effective!

Rola Dashti’s cell phone buzzed on the heady evening of March 7, hours after she had helped lead the largest demonstration for women’s voting rights in Kuwait’s history, a clamorous protest that ended when hundreds of activists were expelled from parliament for shouting from the gallery.

She pressed her phone’s text message button and read an anonymous insult circulating on hundreds of Kuwaiti phones, digital graffiti that attacked her family’s Persian ancestry and disparaged her Lebanese-born mother. “Here’s what voters will gain if they vote for Rola Dashti,” the text message read, as she recalled it. “They will learn the Iranian accent. They will learn a Lebanese accent. And they will learn how to work with the American Embassy to get money.” [Read the rest]