I did a piece on the latest Bin Laden video yesterday (I’ll add the link later, right now it’s not working, but you can find it on th VOA website). The Al Jazeera transcript of the video is here . People I talked to in the Arab world mentioned that the [...]

Abu Aardvark notes that there is some support after all for Bush in the region:
Man, Lee Smith was really on to something with that whole “many Arabs like Bush” thing. Newsweek reports that “Randa Fahmy Hudome, who just this month signed a $1.4 million contract to represent the Libyan government, served as a behind-the-scenes ‘media [...]

There is now an online petition for Columbia University Joseph Massad, who is being slandered as an anti-Semite by the people who brought us CampusWatch. I am the 877th signatory, so let’s at least get it to 1000.
Update: Simon sends me this link to a Haaretz story that may provide more background.

You may have noticed that the site is occasionally flooded with comment spam. I think I’ve fixed that now (thanks to this) so hopefully it won’t be a nuisance anymore.
Apologies if any of the spam was offensive.

Abu Aardvark mentioned this study on women in Egypt [PDF] a few days ago. While he highlighted the bit about how the study finds no one reads, listens or watches US-sponsored Arabic media (no big surprises there) I found the next finding more telling:
Women’s political rights: a hollow equality. Women have equal rights to [...]

Two important reports have been issued recently by Human Rights Watch. One is quite timely in light of yesterday’s vote in the Israeli Knesset to pull out of Gaza is about Mass Home Demolitions in the Gaza Strip:
Over the past four years, the Israeli military has demolished over 2,500 Palestinian houses in the [...]

This story about Algeria’s Harkat Al-Islah Islamist party brought a smile…
Algerian Islamists Rattled by Sexual Scandals, Resignation of Leaders
Scandals surrounding the party broke out earlier this week when a member of the leadership, who must remain anonymous for legal reasons, filed a lawsuit claiming that his wife had been “sexually assaulted” by Sadiq Sulayemah, another [...]

Hizb Al Ghad (the Party of Tomorrow), was approved a few hours ago by the Higher Political Parties Committee (HPPC) of the Egyptian Shura Council, the upper house of parliament. The HPPC has, for the past two decades, routinely denied new parties licenses on the spurious grounds that they did not bring anything new to [...]

A few things that I picked up around the web but I have nothing special to say about:
A fun story from the October 1854 issue of Harper’s called The Oriental Merchant. Rummage around the site and there are some great 19th century orientalist stories.
Mona Baker’s site, which leads with an important appeal to defend Columbia [...]

Egypt’s pro-democracy movement is gathering some steam:
More than 650 people – Islamists, Communists and 30 lawmakers – signed a petition in the name of The Popular Campaign for Reforms, to try to amend Egypt’s constitution to limit a president to two terms.
The petition, a copy of which was faxed to The Associated Press, called the [...]

There has been a rumor going around Cairo that President Mubarak has decided to grant the Hizb Al Ghad (Party of Tomorrow) and Karamah (Dignity) party licenses, and that this will be carried out within a couple of days. Now, I don’t take too much stock in rumors, especially as, at least in the case [...]

Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson take Robert Kagan and others to task in The Sources of American Legitimacy, an article why the Iraq war and the Bush doctrine of ignoring international law, the international community and the United Nations has imperiled the US. They take aim, notably, at Kagan’s argument that
“Contrary to much [...]

The Washington Times on Al Manar and Znet on Al Hurra: they could be talking about the same thing.
There has been a spate of stories on Al Hurra recently, none of them particularly enlightening. A few weeks ago I met one of their reporters who was coming through Cairo. That person told me that the [...]

As anyone who has lived in the Arab world during Ramadan knows, this is the time of the year when new TV series come out and families crowd around their TV set from sunset to the late evening, watching the latest on offer from Egypt, the Gulf and elsewhere. In Egypt, for instance, the big [...]

Mona Makram Ebeid, a former Egyptian MP turned leading opposition figure, had penned a new editorial for the Daily Star. She reviews the unwillingness of her country’s ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) to move ahead with even limited political decompression. It’s all worthwhile, but I am a big taken aback by the following paragraph:
Among [...]

Go read A Diamond in the Rough, a front-page LA Times story by my friend Ashraf Khalil, who is taking a break from Iraq in Cairo before he goes back in two weeks. It’s a wonderful little gem.
This is the kind of story is what foreign editors love these days, especially if it comes from [...]

AP did a tally of foreigners taken hostage in Iraq. Sobering.
A Look at Foreigners Taken Hostage in Iraq
By The Associated Press
Insurgents in Iraq have kidnapped more than 150 foreigners:
HELD HOSTAGE:
_Margaret Hassan, director of CARE international in Iraq and a citizen of Britain, Ireland and Iraq. Abducted Oct. 19. A videotape issued Oct. 22 shows her [...]

Remember this in January:
If free and open Iraqi elections lead to the seating of a fundamentalist Islamic government, “I will be disappointed. But democracy is democracy,” Bush said. “If that’s what the people choose, that’s what the people choose.”

Charles Krauthammer, neo-con editorialist extraordinaire, does his part for the Bush re-election campaign today in Sacrificing Israel, a piece that I suppose is meant to scare supporters of Israel into voting for Kerry. This is his premise:
Think about it: What do the Europeans and the Arab states endlessly rail about in the Middle East? What [...]

I’ve always thought that one of the most astonishing about the way the Bush administration handled 9/11 is that no one was held to account. Not the people who didn’t get the warnings to the president, not the White House for ignoring that warning if it did get to it, not the Air Force personnel [...]

Micah Sifry tells us of a Bush campaign “Jewish outreach” message that “really made his blood boil.” It reported that John Kerry had received endorsements from the PLO. Here’s an excerpt:
Last spring, John Kerry boasted that a number of foreign leaders supported his campaign, but refused to name them. This week he received his [...]

A disturbing report from the New York Times:
From Oct. 11 to Oct. 17, an estimated 208 Iraqis were killed in war-related incidents, significantly higher than the average week; 23 members of the United States military died over the same period.
The deaths of Iraqis, particularly those of civilians, has become an increasingly delicate topic. Early [...]

It’s always good when an establishment newspaper points out the obvious even when it’s not part of the current election talking points. The NYT did so when it penned an editorial on the criminal neglect of the Middle East peace process, which should have been a priority after the 2000 election, after 9/11 and should [...]

The Middle East Forum yet again confirms its intellectual and moral bankruptcy — and attachment to racist stereotypes of Arabs — by reprinting the foreword of the 2002 edition Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind, the book that the New Yorker’s Samuel Hersh revealed was behind neo-conservative ideas of the Arab world and may have [...]

Although its intention is worthwhile, I disagree with Tom Lantos’ bill requiring the State Department to prepare an annual report on global anti-Semitism that has been signed by President Bush.
Lantos, the sole Holocaust survivor in Congress, pushed the idea amid reports of increased anti-Semitic incidents in Europe and continued propaganda against Jews and Israel [...]

This just in from the BBC: Oil wealth ‘can cause corruption’.
Good to know they’re on top of things. Actually, to be fair this is a story about the latest report by Transparency International, the corruption watchdog. The Arab world, as always, does not fare particularly well. The least corrupt Arab countries are Oman and the [...]

Mahmood of Mahmood’s Den has an interesting rant against a bunch of Bahraini MPs who want to distribute the extra income from high oil prices to the population. The aim, of course, is to buy votes. See how fast these newly “democratic” countries learn?

Iraqi academics are in peril:
Since the war ended 18 months ago, at least 28 university teachers and administrators have been killed, while 13 professors were kidnapped and released on payments of ransom, according to the Association of University Lecturers. Many others have received death threats.
The result: an exodus of academics and other intellectuals, who are [...]

Kamil Mahdi reports that construction projects around Najaf are destroying the core of the old city:
The destruction of Najaf which is now under way is drastic and irreversible. A statement by the head of the Shia Waqf Diwan dated on 8 September shows clearly that the whole matter was only an idea a month ago, [...]

The Washington Post has an article about an as-yet-unreleased report on Radio Sawa, one of the Bush administration’s attempts–along with Hi Magazine and Al Hurra TV station–to change the hearts and minds in the Arab world. The article says the report–which was commissioned by the State Department’s inspector general– is highly critical of [...]

Martin Kramer writes in his blog, Sandbox:
The Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt, held a conference on the fate of the ancient library of Alexandria. To the organizers’ credit, they invited Bernard Lewis, who couldn’t attend, but who sent a paper, read in his absence. The correspondent of the Ahram Weekly, Amina Elbendary, tied herself in [...]

That wishy-washy liberal,Brent Scowcroft, tells the Financial Times what he thinks of the relationship between Bush and Sharon:
But speaking to the FT, Mr Scowcroft, 79, went a step further in
attacking some of the president’s core foreign policies. “Sharon
just has him wrapped around his little finger,” Mr Scowcroft
said. “I think the president is mesmerised.”
“When there is [...]

Qadhafi is canceling Libya’s “day of revenge,” when the country
celebrates its independence from the its former colonial master, Italy,
and replacing it with a “day of friendship.” And he’s also agreed to
allow former Italian pieds-noir who were exiled to come back:
Giovanna Ortu, born in Libya in 1939 and head of the
association of exiles, said: “For six [...]

The International Crisis Group has a new report out on “Who are the Islamists?” It makes some important points about making a distinction between the types of Islamist groups operating there, a particularly important thing in a country where everybody, including (or rather especially) the regime claims to be Islamic. There are also some interesting [...]

In these times when leftist intellectuals are accused of defending Islamic fundamentalism out of misguided anti-American feelings (see this Christopher Hitchens interview), this New Politics article on Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution makes for interesting reading.

In an important new essay in the Boston Review, Time Out of Joint, the Syrian philisopher Sadik Al-Azm looks at some of the root motivations behind the nihilist Islamist movements exemplified by Al Qaeda and predicts that the current violence around the world is its death throes:
I predict this violence will be the prelude [...]

I barely have anytime left before I run to catch the plane, but I wanted to put this down now: Elias Khoury and Tahar Benjelloun — respectively some of Lebanon’s and Morocco’s most respected and best-selling writers — were just discussing Arab pulbishing. Benjelloun launched into a tirade against Syrian publishers especially, calling on Syria [...]

Because of the peculiarities of air travel in the Middle East, which seems to take place mostly at night, I arrived this morning in Frankfurt from Casablanca at 6am and headed groggily to the book fair for a few hours until I take the plane to Cairo this afternoon. (There will be a long post [...]

After a seven-year hiatus, terrorism is back in Egypt. After you read below the fold, do check out this radio transcript from ABC. A Jihadist group has claimed responsibilitz, but the Egyptian government is saying it could be related to the current fighting in Gaza.More later.
Blasts kill 30 on Egypt-Israeli border
- – – – [...]

Mithal Al Alusi, a former Iraqi exile close to Ahmed Chalabi and former head of the de-Baathification effort, has been indicted by an Iraqi interim government court for attending an anti-terrorism conference in Israel and suggesting that Iraq should establish ties with the Jewish state. Seems that not everyone got the neo-con memo on Iraq-Israeli [...]