The headline reads “The Tainted Visit: Albright Invades our House”
I thought I would include the picture Issandr referenced from al-Osbua. This is a most unflattering picture. But the article that accompanies it on page three is more unflattering still.

The Ibn Khaldoun Center, the institution which hosted last week’s meeting with Madeline Albright (and others) in Cairo, has published a press release on the event. Since there has been some discussion of this meeting over the past few days, I am posting it in full here.
I also wanted to mention something else that might [...]

I spoke to Ayman Nour’s wife, Gameela Ismail (who is a journalist and in charge of public relations for Hizb Al Ghad) tonight. She told me that the case against her husband was expedited with highly unusual alacrity, on a day that would normally have been a holiday. State Security notified the Prosecutor General [...]

Ehab Hashish & others working for the Kuwaiti Daily, al-Rai al-Aam, published a story on the front page of their newspaper (27th of January 2005) detailing an Albright-led delegation’s visit to Cairo’s Ibn Khaldun Center. If Chatham House rules were in effect, this is a violation because they names names and cites direct quotes.
To [...]

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about Hizb al-Ghad (Party of Tomorrow) in Egypt.
They have been publishing things from local press to Daily Star, entertaining foreign embassy staff, and visiting delegations. Mona Makram-Ebied is the party’s the spokesperson. I have been arguing with anyone I can get ahold of that she, in [...]

Bush gave an 40 minute interview to the NYT which was published this morning as a sort of prelude to the State of the Union Address next week.
Apparently, he does not have time to read Foreign Affair articles - even if written by Condi. He also ready to use Iraq as a jumping point for [...]

The AP has a story, seemingly mostly sourced from Saudi dissidents based in London, on how Saudi clerics in “the Kingdom” are encouraging wannabe mujahideen to fight in Iraq rather than at home. In other words, they are encouraging a split between Al Qaeda, which calls for the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy, and local [...]

You will find below the first post by Simon Kitchen, a new occasional contributor to arabist.net. Simon comes from an economic and risk analysis background, a perspective that I am sure will enrich the debate. [issandr]
In all the current discussion of political reform in the Middle East, and a possible dynastic succession in Egypt, the [...]

I just read in The Note that the results for Iraq’s elections won’t be known for at least two weeks. Can anyone explain to me why that is the case?

As Issandr indicated, Bush’s inaugural speech covertly unleashed the “freedom” doctrine. For those of us studying and living in the Arab world this meant the GMEI. In what feels like the film Groundhog day, Bush 43 admin 2 is looking about reviving the Greater Middle East Initiative (whether they call it that or not) which [...]

The press attache of the Egyptian embassy in Washington has replied to the scathingly anti-Mubarak Washington Post editorial of a few days ago. Note that he makes use of the recent demonstrations to prove that Egypt is free after all:
The editorial concluded that the elections would be fraudulent before they were held. Ironically, the Cairo [...]

I just saw the much talked about movie Bab Es-Shams (Door of the Sun), Egyptian director Yousri Nasrallah’s adaptation of a the novel by Palestinian-Lebanese director Elias Khoury. The ambitious five-hour saga is a cooperation with the French ARTE TV channel, as well as with companies from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Morocco. It has a [...]

As Americans rush to study Arabic in order to become spies, the Pentagon makes sure to filter out the gay ones. Because, as everyone knows, gay Arabists have never amounted to much.

Hassan Fattah, the former editor of the sadly defunct Iraq Today, has resurfaced in the NYT, writing about Mecca’s unlikely liberalism.
Update: Related is this report by Brian Whitaker.

Abdel Moneim Said, director of the Al Ahram Center for Strategic Studies and a key mentor of Gamal Mubarak, penned this piece on Egyptian-Israeli relations for the Daily Star:
Yet Egyptian-Israeli relations are a function not only of Palestinian-Israeli, or even Arab-Israeli relations. The domestic economic and political situation in Egypt plays its part. It is [...]

…in President Mubarak’s recent attempts to explain how little power he actually has. At a meeting with writers and intellectuals earlier this week (he has one every year before the Cairo Book Fair), the president was asked some “direct” questions about democratization and the concentration of power in the presidency. According to Masr Al-Youm newspaper, [...]

The NYT has a story (published yesterday) that more or less brings the deteriorating situation in Columbia’s Mealac department to date. The center of the storm is Joseph Massad who has been attacked by certain right-leaning interest groups. If anything, the Times piece erred on the side of being too balanced.
Massad, for his [...]

After a longer absence than expected, I am back in Cairo and to work. Look forward to contributing to the Arabist network’s activity.

The excellent folks at electronicintifada.net and electroniciraq.net — perhaps some of the first activist/news sites focusing on these regional conflicts — are worried that they’ll soon have to work on electroniciran.net too. No doubt that was inspired by Seymour Hersh’s story, which gets top billing on the site. There are also links to background info [...]

The Washington Post has another strongly anti-Mubarak editorial on the forthcoming elections in which they call President Bush to task for not keeping his word on promoting democracy in Iraq. In fact, they argue, Mubarak has been one of the strongest opponents of this plan for Arab democratization:
Mr. Mubarak has done the opposite: He has [...]