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 [...]

When you’ve been living in a military dictatorship for several years, this kind of thing sends a shiver of recognition:
House Republican leaders blocked and appeared to kill a bill Saturday that would have enacted the major recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission, refusing to allow a vote on the legislation despite last-minute pleas from both [...]

Choice quotes from Meet The Press with Michael Scheuer, the rather bizarre author of Imperial Hubris:
MR. RUSSERT: Let me show you and our viewers from your book this quote: “U.S. leaders refuse to accept the obvious: We are fighting a worldwide Islamic insurgency–not criminality or terrorism–and our policy and procedures have failed to [...]

Moritz left a comment in a previous post asking about the locust swarm that came over Cairo a couple of days ago and is making its way to the Mediterranean. I didn’t see it myself — they didn’t come to my neighborhood — and I think it was pretty localized. My pals over at Reuters [...]

Some recent developments on the causes of Arafat’s death story:
The French government has said that Arafat was not poisoned.
“If the doctors had had the slightest doubt, they would have referred it to the police. I note that permission was given for him to be buried,” government spokesman Jean-Francois Cope said after the weekly French cabinet [...]

It would seem weird if an Arab prince and business would save Fox News from slipping from Rupert Murdoch’s hands, wouldn’t it? Well, that may very well happen:
The Australian Financial Review said Thursday that Prince Alaweed bin Talal, listed by Forbes as the world’s fourth-wealthiest individual, had thrown his support firmly behind Murdoch.
The prince [...]

In this dark, tenebrous world, a little piece of good news: the New York Times’ leading conservative editorialist, William Safire, is retiring. Over the past few years there has been nothing as consistently infuriating as a Safire column. There are many reasons for this — his dogged pursuit of a mythical Iraq-Al Qaeda meeting in [...]

This is from last week, but worth mentioning. Jonathan Steele in the Guardian reviews a new book by Olivier Roy called “Globalised Islam.” According the the review, Roy offers a comprehensive snapshot of Islam as it is practiced (in Muslim and in European countries) across the world today, with all its contradictions, nuances and [...]

There have been a few responses on the recent post on the causes of Arafat’s death, so I thought I’d post this here rather than in the comments:
Palestinian prime minster Ahmed Qorei has asked France to provide him with a medical report detailing the cause of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s death, his office said.
“We officially [...]

From the Committee to Protect Journalists:
The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply disturbed by a new directive from Iraqi authorities that warns news organizations to reflect the government’s positions in their reporting or face unspecified action.
The warning came in a statement released Thursday but dated November 9 by the government regulatory Media High Commission. The [...]

The Arab Times reports that Kuwait, perhaps America’s most unflinching ally in the Middle East since it was liberated from Iraqi troops in 1991, is becoming increasingly fundamentalist:
In the past, men and women mingled and dated in Kuwait. The country had mixed beach clubs for nationals. No longer. Most now have separate swimming days for [...]

Michael Ignatieff (that philosophical vagabond: he went from Oxford to the London School of Economics to Harvard in just a few years, and from Isaiah Berlin to war, peace and terrorism in even less time) offers an essay on the terrorist as an auteur, and draws the lesson that he is tempting us to join [...]

As I look out of my window, a dense, soupy fog envelops the city. At least half the people I know are sick with some kind of flu, and since I’ve moved to Cairo nearly five years ago I’ve gotten an average of four flus a year. When I leave the city, exposure to clean [...]

The independent newspaper Masri Al Youm is reporting that over 700 members of Gamaa Islamiya have been released in recent days.
This is the second large release of Gamaa members over the past two years, after the fundamentalist renounced terrorism and denounced the killings it was responsible for during the 1980s and 1990s. This [...]

The Spectator, the British conservative magazine, has a fine piece on Iyad Allawi.

Take it with a grain of salt, but Danny Rubinstein of Haaretz has an interesting theory on who was behind last year’s attack on three American security guards in the Gaza Strip, which he says was intended to kill Muhammad Dahlan. Dahlan, of course, is the Palestinian security supremo that is favored by Israel and [...]

The New York Times explains the Pentagon’s plans to build a “Global Information Grid” that will put instant coverage of the entire world in the hands of military commanders:
Many new multibillion-dollar weapons and satellites are “critically dependent on the future network,” the agency reported. “Despite enormous challenges and risks – many of which have not [...]

The Washington Post has a rare insight into the life of a Yemeni man who left his country to fight the occupation of Iraq in Falluja:
Abu Thar turned 30, and might never have tried to reach Iraq again but for the photographs that emerged of U.S. military police abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib [...]

Marc Lynch takes a look at the Bush administration’s efforts to spread democracy in the Middle East:
The problems with Bush’s approach to democratic reform in the region run deeper than a lack of seriousness or poor execution. The core problem lies in the administration’s clear contempt for Arab public opinion, a contempt which is [...]

As I watched today his funeral on TV and then went to see the protests after the Friday sermon at Al Azhar mosque (which were surprisingly small, but then again the mood of the day was sadness rather than anger), this question kept coming back: what is the cause of Arafat’s death. As this story [...]

I just received some news that three members of Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi’s family were kidnapped today, including his wife.
This is not confirmed yet, but it just keeps getting worse and worse, doesn’t it?
Update: Here’s the first item I see. It’s not his wife, but his cousin and his cousin’s wife, as [...]