Oh well, that didn’t last very long:
“After a meeting of four hours, during which we debated this issue, Marwan Barghouti sends this message to the Palestinian people and its fighters … He calls on the members of the movement to support the movement’s candidate, Mahmoud Abbas,” Fares said.
After the announcement, Barghouti’s daughter Ruba, 15, began [...]

I meant to post this a week ago: both the BBC and Haaretz have interesting guides to who’s who in Palestinian politics. Worth bookmarking for reference as events unfold in the next few months.

A must-read article on how the press failed to play its role in giving an accurate portrayal in Iraq.

Now things get interesting:
RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Firebrand uprising leader Marwan Barghouthi has decided to run for Palestinian president from his Israeli jail cell, an official of his Fatah faction said on Thursday.
The candidacy could throw the Jan. 9 election wide open and pose a dramatic challenge to current front-runner Mahmoud Abbas, a former [...]

I hate to imagine what kind of case this guy makes for democracy:
Those looking for clues about President Bush’s second-term policy for the Middle East might be interested to know that, nine days after his reelection victory, the president summoned to the White House an Israeli politician so hawkish that he has accused Ariel Sharon [...]

This group of people have apparently placed a full-page ad in today’s New York Times. They been doing that for nearly three years now in several major American papers, and should be commended for their public stance. It would be great if a similar organization would enable all Americans, no matter their ethnic backgrounds, to [...]

Juan Cole, of the foremost Middle East blog juancole.com has been threatened with a lawsuit by MEMRI, the infamous “media research” think tank that seems to find most of its time misrepresenting the Arabic press by picking out the worst articles and calling them representative. Read the original post and Cole’s follow up — they [...]

The conference on Iraq in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, is over. Yesterday was a flurry of press conferences, with everybody finally wanting to talk, and with several interesting things being said. For some of the offiicial highlights, you can check out my story for VOA.
Basically, the final statement was identical to the [...]

There is an interesting if rather confused piece about takfir movements in Morocco in this month’s English edition of Le Monde Diplomatique. It’s interesting because these movements have drawn little attention in Morocco, since they were born in Egypt in the 1970s and for the most part have not had a very public role elsewhere. [...]

Islam Online, the Sheikh Youssef Al Qaradawi-backed website that often has a surprisingly good content, ran an article on a recent talk on Islam and the internet. One interesting tidbit:
Amongst the top 150 most popular Arab Web sites, there are 50 religious ones. Arabs seem to have a vivid interest in religion. This number is [...]

Aretz Sheva, the far-right Israeli website and radio station, seems to be implying in this article Egypt of deliberately doing nothing to stop last week’s locust invasion to ensure they would reach Israel. You gotta love the paranoia.

I find the following incredible, if only because it comes after more than a decade of sanctions that have killed at least several 100,000s of Iraqi children because of malnutrition and other ailments:
BAGHDAD — Acute malnutrition among young children in Iraq has nearly doubled since the United States led an invasion of the country 20 [...]

A little excerpt from an interesting story on a meeting of Arab satellite TV broadcasters:
Mouafac Harb, director of news at the US government-funded al-Hurra TV, said it was a myth that pan-Arab TV channels were free and independent.
“Pan-Arab media are mouthpieces of Arab governments… they are all linked, money-wise, to one or other Arab state,” [...]

Why is this idiot saying this:
BEIRUT (AFP) - Faruq Qaddumi, who succeeded Yasser Arafat as head of the mainstream Palestinian Fatah movement, reaffirmed his belief that the Palestinian leader had been poisoned.
“He died due to poison. All the treatments and medical examinations have ruled out all the illnesses that you could think of, like leukaemia [...]

Following Ursula’s recent post from the Sharm Al Sheikh conference — and her revelation that Iraq may publicly accuse neighboring countries of aiding the insurgents — I’d like to add a little informed speculation about another possible outcome.
I read Middle Eastern news pretty thoroughly on a daily basis, and there is an important item that’s [...]

Nasser Al Qidwa, Yassser Arafat’s nephew, is not being very clear about what he found out from the medical report:
After receiving the medical report on his uncle’s death, Qidwa said there was still no clear cause of death and the poisoning theory could not be ruled out definitively, even though there was no clear evidence [...]

If you need another proof of why putting faith in fatwas is stupid:
Faced with an invasion of locusts, the highest Islamic religious institution in Egypt has reportedly issued an edict allowing people to eat locusts.
The independent al-Masri al-Yawm newspaper said al-Azhar Institute has decreed it is permitted by religion to eat the red desert locusts [...]

Salon’s Eric Boehlert has a good wrap-up of William Safire’s history of agit-prop, including a long section on Safire’s Likudist leanings:
Safire admitted to going easy and “pulling his punches” in a 1987 column about his old friend Bill Casey and the major role he played in Iran-Contra during the Reagan administration. (Safire ran Casey’s unsuccessful [...]

It’s 1 am so I’m not sure this post will be too coherent. I’m covering the conference on Iraq in the Red Coast town of Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt. The conference is being attended by all of Iraq’s neighbors (Syria, Jordan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Turkey) as well as by the US, France, [...]

Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the Egyptian-American activist who spent well over a year in jail between 2000 and 2003 before a case against him was dismissed by Egypt’s highest appellate court, is backing an unlikely amendment to the Egyptian constitution that would allow multiple candidates to be selected:
“If given the chance, I personally want to run [...]