William Safire on the word Kifaya in his On Language column in the NY Times Magazine:
The word means ”enough.” The Arabic verbal root is kafa, ”to be satisfied.” In Hans Wehr’s Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, it has the senses of ‘’sufficient amount” and ”that which suffices for performing a duty.” Munther Younes, coordinator [...]

Despite my best efforts, I didn’t see a single demonstrator yesterday. All the same, what I did see I took as a show of strength for the Muslim Brotherhood. The security measures taken to prevent the demonstration were fairly unprecedented. As has been mentioned here, they closed off Tahrir Square, and all the streets leading [...]

I forgot to mention it yesterday being so busy, but while a really ultimately small protest was quashed heavily in Egypt, there was this huge — especially considering the size of the country — protest for constitutional reform in Bahrain on Friday. Chan’ad Bahraini as always has the goods:
In a massive show of force [...]

The demo I wrote about earlier didn’t take place exactly as planned, as people who posted comments pointed out. No demonstrators ever got to parliament, because, well, parliament was surrounded for blocks by several thousand troops from Central Security, the riot police. Not only that, but this morning the security services arrested about 50 Muslim [...]

Stephen Grey reports from Beirut:
IN an underground car park in the centre of Beirut, a bald man emerged from his Mercedes, surrounded by a phalanx of armed bodyguards.
As deputy leader of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, Musa Abu Marzouk is a potential target for assassination by Israel. Yet there to greet him last week was [...]

Guess who wanted to sell nuclear technology to Iran back in the 1970s?
Lacking direct evidence, Bush administration officials argue that Iran’s nuclear program must be a cover for bomb-making. Vice President Cheney recently said, “They’re already sitting on an awful lot of oil and gas. Nobody can figure why they need nuclear as well [...]

Maybe I’m a cynic, but this just looks cheesy and opportunistic.

Abu Aardvark explains why Jim Hoagland is going after Jordan’s King Abdullah. Disgraceful. There are so many better reasons to go after Abdullah.

Ahmed Zaki, the veteran Egyptian actor who played roles such as former presidents Nasser and Sadat, passed away today after a long battle with cancer. The Egyptian press had been on death watch for the past few weeks, including some rather tasteless coverage of his agony.
Zaki’s last film, Maali Al Wazir (His Excellency the Minister), [...]

There will be a Muslim Brotherhood demonstration outside parliament in about an hour (at 1pm.) It should be one of the first one in ages, but the question will be whether the Brothers come out in strength or just send a token representation. There have been a number of demos outside parliament in the past [...]

Tipped off by friend and Egyptian journalist Magdy Samaan, who writes for Masr Al Youm, I went to Bab Sharqeya–the Cairo neighborhood that elected Ayman Nour to parliament and where he holds weekly rallies–to see how it is festooned in pro-Mubarak, anti-Nour posters. Member of the NDP and of various local councils (and the other [...]

Read Syria Exposed. Another very funny, very weird Syrian blog. (Another one I mentioned recently is Amarji.)

Abu Aardvark mentioned in a recent post that a “popular Islamic party” might see the light in Egypt, and noted that he hadn’t seen much on it so far. I was hoping to post about this earlier, but things being as busy as they are, I am doing so only now.
The basic story, as Al [...]

… never fails to entertain:
“The Israelis are idiots and the Palestinians as well,” Kadhafi said Wednesday in the speech at the closing session of the two-day summit in Algiers which is usually reserved for a reading of the final resolutions.
“The Jews are dying by the dozen because they are in the West Bank and the [...]

Juan Cole links to an update on the AIPAC investigation. He says:
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee spy case is heating up again. The FBI clearly believes that AIPAC is at the center of an important political conspiracy, but may not be able to make the whole case in the legal system.
Whatever the outcome [...]

Rather embarrassing mistake:
Professor Juan Cole thinks:”An outspoken but generally anti-Shiite Bahrain blog by a Sunni is Mahmood’s Den”
So I’m anti-shi’ite, and I’m a Sunni!
Apart from both statement being completely wrong (I’m not just a Shi’ite, but am a Sayyed and an Alawi (both parents are Sayyeds and can trace their lineage as descendants [...]

The third and final thing that stood our for me in the Rice interview (transcript) was about the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Here the gap between official discourse and the real policy is widening:
Rice denied reports from Israeli officials — and some U.S. officials — that the Bush administration had struck [...]

The second item of note in the WaPo Rice interview (transcript) is on Syria’s future, which is being debated in Washington with exiled opposition figures that are giving me a bizarre sense of deja vu. More on this below, but first the Rice quote:
Q: One last question and that is on Syria. I gather President [...]

I just read the very interesting interview (transcript) the Washington Post did with Condoleeza Rice. There are three issues I want to highlight in it, but I’ll post each separately. The first is about Egypt. For about a quarter century, the primary objective of the Mubarak regime and its most important claim to both international [...]

A couple of social scientists at Harvard have put the received wisdom to the test and found that only a small proportion of Pakistani children receive a full-time education in religious schools

That caught your attention, didn’t it?
Actually, this will happen if Wolfowitz does becomes president of the World Bank, which is financing the construction of a new passenger lounge at Sharm Al Sheikh airport. The company that won the contract for the project is none other than the Saudi Binladen Group, owned by Osama’s family (which [...]

There was a new twist to the anti-Mubarak demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square today. Taking a play from the Lebanon playbook, Mubarak supporters staged a pro-Mubarak demonstration right next to the opposition’s demonstration. They waved “Long Live Mubarak” signs and chanted “Down with the traitors.” They also included a sprinkling of anti-occupation in Iraq and [...]

My old friend Ashraf Khalil has a fantastic story in the LA Times on the Mujaheddin El Khalq’s bizarre HQ in Iraq, Camp Ashraf:
Last week, MEK officials allowed a pair of journalists to visit Camp Ashraf, the first such visit by Western reporters since shortly after the Iraq war. The visit left the impression that [...]

One of the interesting things about the current anti-regime movement in Egypt is that its Pr is much more sophisticated than those of most of its predecessors. Consider for instance Kefaya’s use to stickers over demonstrators’ mouths — a great picture that sums a lot of things up — or the use of websites and [...]

Cairo — the magazine, that is — has put up some new stories on its site pending its next issue. They include:
A report on Ayman Nour’s release.
A fascinating story on feudal land wars in a small village.
The traffic controllers’ strike that had President Mubarak personally intervene.
The recent visit to Cairo by the Speaker of the [...]

I am posting the aforementioned Robert Fisk article on who might be behind Hariri
s assassination here. The highlights:
The UN’s Irish, Egyptian and Moroccan investigation team has now been joined by three Swiss bomb experts following the discovery that many of the smashed vehicles in Hariri’s convoy were moved from the scene of the massacre only [...]

The LA Times has a well-researched story on an American arms dealer who was killed in Iraq after he warned US officials of corruption involving a contract to rapidly supply the Iraqi army with tanks ahead of January 2005’s Iraqi elections. The story adds another dimension to reports in January this year that Hazem Shaalan, [...]

Reuters is reporting that:
An explosion has hit the offices of an English-language newspaper in central Baghdad and casualties are feared, witnesses say.
Ambulances rushed to the scene, not far from Baghdad’s national theatre and hotels housing foreign contractors.
It was not clear whether it was a mortar or car bomb that caused Wednesday’s explosion. The house was [...]

The brillant Amira Hass has a story in Haaretz that says it all:
The Defense Ministry is blaming an army dog for the death of an innocent Palestinian, who was shot by Israel Defense Forces troops 10 months ago.
According to Deputy Defense Minister Ze’ev Boim (Likud), the dog had mistaken the Palestinian’s identity.
Boim wrote this in [...]

The second MERIP article I want to link to (here is my post about the first) is by Gary Sussman, a professor at Tel Aviv University. In this important article, Sussman articulates what I’ve always thought about Sharon’s withdrawal plan from Gaza: that it’s a sham designed, as Dov Weiglass famously said, to put the [...]

I had meant to post about these earlier, but the always excellent MERIP published two fine articles on its site recently. I’ll post about them separately.
The first, by Stanford Professor Joel Beinin, is about the growing number of strikes by government (and private sector) workers who are opposing the neo-liberal policies of Gamal Mubarak and [...]

I just came across one conspiracy theory about Hariri’s murder I’d never heard about before: it was done by the US (and possibly Israel) to remove Hariri and his opposition to building a massive airbase in Northern Lebanon:
Hariri, a pan-Arabist and Lebanese nationalist, was known to adamantly oppose the construction of a major U.S. air [...]

Fascinating story in the New York Times today about the Jordanian man allegedly responsible for last week’s huge suicide bombing in Hilla in Iraq and the consequences that it is having on Iraqi-Jordanian relations. Raad Mansur al-Banna’s family thought he was looking for work abroad until they received a phone call from Iraq last [...]

Here are more details on the Fisk article I mentioned yesterday:
In his article, Fisk said the report of the United Nations inquiry team “will be so devastating that it will force a full international investigation of the murder of ‘Mr. Lebanon’ and his entourage, perhaps reaching to the higher echelons of the Syrian and Lebanese [...]

For the past few days I have been emailing a friend in Lebanon about the current situation there and in Syria. Rather than repeat tidbits here and there, I’ve asked him to write up his impression of what led to the present state of affairs, particularly from the Syrian angle. What follows are his impressions [...]

Things just keep getting more and more interesting, don’t they?
I agree with the Head Heeb:
The size of the Hizbullah and opposition demos should also put paid to the theory that either side was manufactured ex nihilo by foreign interests. It simply isn’t possible to mobilize crowds that size in a nation of four million without [...]

This is the essence of my disgust: our leaders can’t tell the difference between mediocrity and strength.
Still, even a mediocre inquisitor has sufficient power to detain and torture. This is the essence of my fear. And my terror. My would-be torturer will be a mediocre figure, working for a mediocre President, in a mediocre country, [...]

Via Josh Marshall (who I hadn’t read in a long time, which is my loss), it seems that Congress has successfully sabotaged a request by President Bush to give supplemental aid to the Palestinian Authority. Of all places the Israel Policy Forum is angry about this, suggesting Israel is:
The Bush administration believes that bucking [...]

Most of the articles I posted a few days ago were relatively optimistic about what was happening in Lebanon and the rest of the region. Now, after the huge Hizbullah demonstration, here are some more realistic analyses:
Charles Harb — Lebanon is not Ukraine (The Guardian)
Syrian mismanagement of the Lebanese portfolio had been building up [...]

A bail of LE10,000 (about $1700) has been set but despite news reports (BBC, Reuters) it’s not clear whether he has physically been released yet. It may just be the routine bureaucracy of being released from prison.
Update: According to Al Had supporters there was huge crowd waiting for him at the prison. He’s now out [...]