Algerian President Abdel Aziz Bouteflika has ordered 42 private French-language schools to be closed for “linguistic deviation,” Le Figaro reports. Algerian police have been told to enforce a presidential decree that stated that “any private institution which does not give absolute priority to the Arabic language is bound to disappear.” The policy is revival of [...]

Very, very evasive answers from Ismail Haniyeh in this WaPo interview. Every question led him to state Israel’s position rather than Hamas’… The lack of clarity may be strategic, but it hardly encourages trust or even comprehension of Hamas’ standards for peace. Maybe it’s just too early in the game.

Another fine editorial calling attention to the shutting down of Voice of America’s English-language service and its replacement with pop music channels like Radio Sawa.
Thus, it is with growing dismay that I read news of the latest spending plans being discussed by members of the Bush administration and their advisers for how best to influence [...]

A group of theology students from Qom in Iran has launched a blog about the attack on the holy shrine of Al Askariyeen in Samarra. They seem to think — and imply — that the US was behind the attack (but produce no evidence for this).

February 27, 2006
And then I suddenly realized, there was no way weren’t going to hit that car. It’s that moment in every traffic accident, that you know there is no avoiding the collision, and you brace yourself.
Mind you, I wasn’t actually all that worried, we were in a heavily armored humvee and the rickety white [...]

Check out Baheyya for all you wanted to know about judges but were afraid to ask.

I was looking to see what had been done in the infamous Holocaust cartoon contest launched by an Iranian contest and ran across this site, which has a wonderful collection of cartoons, including pretty tame ones on Holocaust (the one above seems to be a reference to Finkelstein’s Holocaust Industry)– and many others about other [...]

So it seems that the Gamal and Khadiga story was true after all:
CAIRO (Reuters) – The son of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, ruling party politician Gamal Mubarak, will get engaged on Friday to the daughter of a prominent building contractor, the state-owned newspaper al-Ahram said on Sunday.
Gamal, 42, is the assistant secretary general of Mubarak’s [...]

I won’t go into the events in Iraq themselves, but this latest escalation of conflict between Sunni and Shia in Iraq is deeply worrying. I can’t say I have had much hope for Iraq anyway over recent months (receiving news several times a day of riots and deaths on my mobile phone has that effect), [...]

Very good of Knight Ridder’s Hannah Allam to have picked up on one of the most talked about aspects of Egypt’s new political landscape: the presence of Al Masri Al Youm, an independent liberal daily newspaper. She writes:
Even as the traditional, state-backed papers try to liven up coverage to compete, the upstart dailies still stand [...]

I’ve noted it before, but isn’t it odd that in a year that has seen Hamas come to power in the Palestinian occupied territories, AIPAC is focusing its annual meeting on Iran? And whatever happened to the fallout there was supposed to be from those convicted spies anyway?
(The above ad was posted on the Haaretz [...]

Yesterday, a senior Israeli military official, Major General Yair Navah, predicted that King Abdullah might be the last Hashemite monarch, causing a stir in Amman:
Naveh noted that at least 80 percent of Jordan’s citizens are Palestinian and said that, due to regional threats including Hamas’ rise to power, King Abdullah is liable to be [...]

There is something surreal and weirdly compelling about this interview with Condoleeza Rice that appeared on Egyptian state TV:
QUESTION: Just before you came, you said no FTA, you pushed for more reform and called for turning down Hamas. What’s in it for us?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, in fact, on the FTA, we will continue to [...]

The Egyptian edition of the Daily Star (originally a Lebanese paper now attempting to go regional) is now online.

It must be that time of the month again. The WaPo has a new attack on the Egyptian regime, and US policy towards it, in Mr. Mubarak’s Rollback. This time, their beef is the “tepid” response to the cancellation of municipal elections. They think it’s because Egypt is helping out with Hamas and all that.
So [...]

Nur Al Cubicle writes of a new Turkish movie, Valley of the Wolves, that is highly critical of the US in Iraq and seems to be a form of revenge for the curt treatment given Turkish troops in northern Iraq in 2003:
So this is what happens after 40 years of NATO membership. The US partnership [...]

Megan Stack of the LA Times has a very nice story on the Shia of Bahrain, or Ajam, and their struggle for political recognition. It focuses on one family that has returned from exile in Canada and tries to find its footing in the midst of promises of reform. As always with Megan, it is [...]

I’d like to highlight some of arguments made by Sir Derek Plumbly, the British ambassador in Cairo, in the letter to former ambassador to Cairo John Sawers that was revealed by the New Statesman as we reported yesterday. The letter is dated 23 June, 2005, or just after Condoleeza Rice delivered a lecture that was [...]

This baited breath tone of this article by Martin Bright in the New Statesman is pretty stupid:
The British government has a terrible dilemma. Should it refuse to deal with radical Islamic movements altogether, and so risk alienating large parts of the Muslim world, or should it make overtures towards the leaders of these movements and [...]

Newsweek has an interview with Mohammed al-Asaadi, the editor of the Yemen Observer who was recently jailed for reprinting the Danish cartoons of Prophet Muhammad. His situation seems just ridiculously unfair:
When we ran our article on the Danish cartoons, it was all about how the Prophet should be honored, with quotations from famous people about [...]

Condoleeza Rice gave a roundtable interview to Arab journalists before leavng on her tour of the region. Most of it was about Hamas and Iran, but I thought her response on Egypt’s cancellation of municipal elections and the critique of the Bush administration’s “Arab democratization” policy were interesting:
On Egypt, well, of course, we were disappointed [...]

I want to flag this NYT article on a new recording of Sayyed Darwish compositions. Darwish is the founder of modern Egyptian music and an important artistic commentator on social issues in Egypt for the first half of the 20th century, as the article explains. His music can be hard to find, particularly in the [...]

I have just received a message saying that four Egyptian judges, including the noted judges Hesham Bastawissi and Ahmed Mekky, were taken in for police questioning this evening, apparently because they had accused other judges of taking part in election fraud during the parliamentary elections.
As many readers will remember, it became apparent during the parliamentary [...]

This is pretty funny:
Amitai Sandy (29), graphic artist and publisher of Dimona Comix Publishing, from Tel-Aviv, Israel, has followed the unfolding of the “Muhammad cartoon-gate” events in amazement, until finally he came up with the right answer to all this insanity – and so he announced today the launch of a new anti-Semitic cartoons contest [...]

These two stories popped up next to each other on an Egypt news search:
EGYPT: Poverty rampant in rural areas, says new report
CAIRO, 13 February (IRIN) – The rich-poor divide in Egypt remains significant, especially in rural areas, according to the UN and government ministries.
“Improvements in the gap between rich and poor are marginal,” noted Khaled [...]

Hey, Israel and America are coming up with a way to make Palestinians luv Hamas 4ever!
JERUSALEM, Feb. 13 — The United States and Israel are discussing ways to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again, according to Israeli officials and Western diplomats.
The intention is [...]

That momentum for reform, that is:
CAIRO: Egypt’s consultative council yesterday approved the two-year postponement of municipal polls that had been due within two months, in a move slammed by the opposition Muslim Brotherhood.
The Shura council, the country’s upper chamber of parliament, approved a proposal by President Hosni Mubarak that the elections be delayed by two [...]

An excerpt from an interview with legendary Egyptian director Youssef Chahine in a German magazine, translated on copts-united.com:
SZ: Is it difficult to find actors?
Chahine: No. I find them in Parliament. When they meet there is great applause. If I need a crowd for an opera scene, I will wait until Parliament is off so that [...]

It’s only been out a few days, but the American intelligentsia is ripping apart Bernard Henry Levy’s book on modern America. A well-deserved put-down, which colleagues back in France should take note of. This review by Garrison Keillor is a fantastic send-up.
If you’re not familiar with him, BHL is France’s most media-savvy public intellectual and [...]

It turns out Al Fagr printed the cartoons back in October… go to take a look.

I don’t know where this cartoon originally sprang up, but it’s making the rounds on emails here…
Update: Actually it came from here, and their latest cartoon isn’t bad either.

This just in: a friend just got off the phone with Amr Khaled, the superstar Muslim televangelist, who said that he will be making a live announcement on the Islamic channel Iqraa on Saturday evening with a proposal to resolve the the current fracas over the Danish cartoons. It will involve a interfaith youth conference [...]

Famed French specialist on Islamist movements Olivier Roy has a caustic op-ed in Le Monde today titled “The Geopolitics of Outrage.” Here’s the link (subscriber-only, I believe) and the text is after the jump. I can translate the intro for now, but have no time for more:
The conflict over the Danish cartoons is often [...]

Algeria’s national TV channel has decided to take Star Academy, the Lebanese remake of France’s show of the same name and the equivalent to American Idol, off the air. According the newspaper El Watan, this effort at banning the show was led by the president of the Islamist party MSP, Bouguerra Soltani, but ultimately was [...]

There a bunch of stories out there today highlighting US budget increases on defense spending and cutbacks on other initiatives, particularly ones that have to do with spreading democratization or simply information. We’ve written of the demise of VOA at the expense of Al Hurra and Radio Sawa before, but now it seems they put [...]

News from the Hashemite Kingdom of Boredom:
AMMAN, Jordan (AP) – A new Islamist weekly was launched in Jordan on Wednesday aimed at promoting moderation and countering militant “takfiri” ideology, which brands other Muslims as infidels, the chief editor said.
The weekly Fact International emerges at a time when Jordan’s King Abdullah II has called for a [...]

In the last few years we’ve seen massive terrorist attacks, wars, uprisings, assassinations, worldwide torture programs, ethnic cleansing and even genocide, but of course the most-important-event-of-all-time-to-get-indignant-about are those Danish cartoons. For some reason, there is something very compelling about the argument surrounding their publication — the freedom of expression vs. respect for religion debate — [...]

The French weekly Charlie-Hebdo, with a long tradition of iconoclastic and satirical reporting, has republished the infamous Danish cartoons today, Le Monde reports.
Its cover, showed above, features Prophet Mohammed weeping under the headline “Mohammed overwhelmed by fanatics” as the prophet himself mutters “It’s hard to be loved by assholes.” It’s drawn by legendary French [...]

From last night’s Egypt-Senegal game, which Egypt won (yea!):

There was also an ad on the side of the pitch saying, “Be Fair Play – No To Racism,” but I’m not sure whether it was about the Danish thing.
Do you really want to give up these things?

[...]

Last week at the Al Jazeera conference in Doha I had the opportunity to have a chat with Alain Gresh, the French Arab world specialist and editor of the respected left-wing monthly Le Monde Diplomatique. I was asking him how the paper was doing after its financial difficulties in recent years, and he said things [...]