It kind of snuck up on us, but today PM Nazif asked parliament to extend the emergency law for another two years, using the Dahab bombings as a justification. I received a SMS on my phone around 3:30pm saying it has already been passed. That’s a fast turnaround for a parliament that usually leaves things [...]

So I’d heard about this new publication called the New York Sun as (in a Jewish New Yorker’s own words) a paper founded, funded and aimed at New York neo-con Jews. (What, there aren’t enough of those kind of rags?) I’ve been following their foreign coverage lately, which seems very Middle East heavy, and it [...]

Strong words from the judges in this NYT story:
“It is enough that for the past 52 years, we have been carrying the liability of rigging the elections in this country,” Zakariya Ahmed Abdel Aziz, chairman of the Judges Club, said at a meeting in August.
And this WaPo one:
“We’re insisting that the elections were flawed. The [...]

Gameela Ismail, Ayman Nour’s wife, writes:
Unfortunately this regime is going madly nervous. Amid the judges reform movement crisis and the support given to it by civil society movements and parties, and amid the demonstrations for the last couple of weeks, Yesterday, the two main lawyers for Nour, Mr Amir Salem and Mr Ehab el Kholy, [...]

Hugh Roberts, the International Crisis Group’s North Africa director, has an interesting op-ed on the questions raised by the Dahab bombings:
The authorities’ reluctance to accept that Al-Qa‘eda may have been behind these events is understandable given the effect this admission could have on the tourist trade and may even be valid, but only underlines the [...]

I have a new piece on the recent Coptic clashes at MERIP:
For years, the Egyptian government and state-run media have brushed off acts of hostility toward minority Coptic Christians, or periodic Coptic-Muslim clashes, as exceptions to a rule of “national unity” and inter-communal brotherhood. But the sectarian street battles in Alexandria in mid-April, set off [...]

Maria Golia says what I want to say, but more nicely put than I could:
Egypt’s political lassitude and social anomie suggests that rather than ensuring public peace, the Emergency Law has undermined it by discouraging people’s natural impulse to help themselves and one another. The suspension of due process has eroded the fabric of society [...]

Take a noble idea, a tragic event, a grave issue and pervert it with bad analogies and facile rhetoric. You’ll get something like this. Putting Algeria, Sudan and Iraq in the same basket is insane. It’s the sign of a mind without historical context, or indeed much knowlede of what it talks about. But he [...]

Hussein Abdel Ghani, Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Cairo, has been charged with “spreading false news” two days after he was arrested. I had heard that he had been arrested because Al Jazeera helped spread the rumor that Interior Minister Habib Al Adly would soon be sacked. Instead there was this lame excuse:
The interior ministry [...]

A Briton was a member of the A.Q. Khan network. Where will the trail end?

The Guardian on United 93, the first feature film about 9/11:
The film is a documentary-style re-creation of what Mr Greengrass calls a “believable truth” about what might have happened on the plane and in air-traffic control centres – from the moment a controller hears the first indications of the hijacks to when the Flight 93 [...]

Stupid Haaretz:
Without a dialogue with Hamas, Israel needs a responsible Arab adult, like Hosni Mubarak, who holds some valuable bargaining chips, the most important of which is to grant or deny Arab legitimacy to Hamas.
Yeah, right. Hamas needs Mubarak for legitimacy just like Fatah needed him, I suppose. Really served him well during those [...]

Below is a statement about the clashes that took place today, including more arrests and beatings. Names of activists who were arrested are cited.

I’ve mentioned before the shameful verdict against Le Journal Hebdo, a French-language Moroccan weekly, which forced it to pay the highest-ever damages for a libel suit in Morocco. Abu Aardvark had a post about it too, and The Lounsbury over at Aqoul had a response to it. Ustaz Lounsbury is, methinks, too tough on [...]

It’s in French only for now, but there’s a new ICG report out on Mauritania:
Mauritanians wish to break with the way power has been concentrated in the hands of a few tribal groupings, a syndrome that reached unprecedented levels under Ould Taya. However, the country’s new strongman and some of his colleagues are pillars of [...]

Matthew Carrington was at the judges’ demo that was squashed last night — he sent in this account of what he saw:

I stumbled on this demo. It’s the first one I’ve been to in a while now. And what struck me immediately about it was the immense disparity—the farcical dis-proportionality—between the numbers of protestors and [...]

I just got back from a trip to the Western Desert and have missed out on the tragic events of the last few days — a judge being hospitalized, dozens of demonstrators being beaten up, at least 25 dead and many more wounded in two series of bombings in the Sinai. Now, just as I [...]

About an hour ago and two days after the terrorist attack in Dahab, news broke that the multinational force on Sinai has come under attack, probably by a suicide bomber. There seem to be few casualties, but this has already happened before, once in August 2005.
The force has recently increased protective measures. Here is some [...]

Courtesy Manalaa, photos of Judge Mahmoud Mohammed Abdel Latif Hamza, after he was hit by police yesterday. He doesn’t seem to be too badly injured. The issue is that state security thugs should raise their hands to a judge at all.

At least three explosions have been reported in the tourist beach town of Dahab, in  Sinai. Egyptian TV says a supermarket and bridge were targeted.

Fifteen activists were arrested and one judge was beaten so badly he had to be hospitalized early this morning. The group was holding a sit-in in front of the Judges’ Club in solidarity with the judges currently being threatened with expulsion for their demands for greater independence. This–physically attacking a judge–is dangerous esclation indeed. I [...]

Would appreciate it if somebody could send me a copy of today’s op-ed on Sudan by Nicholas Kristof in the NYT:
OP-ED COLUMNIST
China and Sudan, Blood and Oil
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Chinese oil purchases have financed Sudan’s pillage of
Darfur.
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/opinion/23kristof.html?th&emc=th
(Available only to TimesSelect subscribers)
Thanks.
Update: Thanks to the people who emailed it. You know who you are.

All you ever wanted to know about the Egyptian judiciary and the current attack on reformist judges, but were afraid to ask:
The pattern governing all of the actions this week is clear: the regime is leaning on certain judges to activate seemingly unobjectionable procedural mechanisms to punish prominent reformist judges, who are portrayed as errant [...]

Big Pharaoh has great coverage of the national unity demo held yesterday in Shubra by Kifaya & Friends. Nice work.

I stole this picture from BP’s post — he says:
One of the most refreshing things about today was the support we got from passersby and those who were not part of the demonstration. These ladies from [...]

My friend Yasmine Rashidi writes in the WSJ about the impact of tighter visa regulations and perceptions of discrimination on Arab tourism to the United States:
But America’s allure appears to be waning, and travel to the U.S. from the Mideast has dropped. U.S. visits by Saudi Arabians, for example, fell to 18,573 in 2004, the [...]

It is the Near East foundation telling us that everything is fine at Egypt’s Social Fund for Development. The fund is the government’s agency for implementing development projects and financing SME’s.
How are they doing? Near East Foundation’s Center for Development Services was selected–after competitive bidding–to find out.
NEF zeroed in on 39 projects in 18 [...]

Le Journal Hebdo, arguably Morocco’s most irreverent and political critical liberal publication, has lot its appeal to avoid paying the highest-ever libel fees imposed by a Moroccan court. It’s all here.
I met with Abou Bakr Jamai, Le Journal Hebdo’s publisher, about a month ago in Casablanca and found him extremely interesting. In Morocco itself he [...]

Timothy Garton Ash engages in some speculative history:
May 7 2009 will surely go down in history alongside September 11 2001. “5/7″, as it inevitably became known, saw massive suicide bombings in Tel Aviv, London and New York, as well as simultaneous attacks on the remaining western troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Total casualties were estimated [...]

Surely after the clear demonstration of Israeli tactical and strategic superiority on the battlefield in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 and the vastly superior intelligence gathering services of the Israeli secret services (not to mention the advanced military technology and various forms of US aid), one would think Israelis don’t think Egypt is much of [...]

IkhwanWeb has a look at the latest development with Ahmed Mekki and Hisham Bastawissi, the two dissident judges who led accusations of vote-rigging during the parliamentary elections and are now being punished for it. About 10 days ago Heba Saleh had a piece about them in the FT (reg), too, in which she interviewed Mekki:
The [...]

A lot of food for thought in this MERIP article on Fatah’s strategy for regaining control of Palestine’s government:
It was not long before Abbas was conferencing with other Palestinian Authority officials, and key leaders of his losing Fatah faction, to determine how the presidency should traverse the uncharted territory of a Hamas-led government. Fatah’s top [...]

Nazi analogies are always fun:
This former senior officer said there “seems to be a quiet conspiracy by rational people” at the agency to avoid involvement in some of the particularly nasty tactics being employed by the administration, especially “renditions”—the practice whereby the CIA sends terrorist suspects abroad to be questioned in Egypt, Syria, Uzbekistan, and [...]

From Le Monde (reg) today:
Quant à l’évolution interne de l’Egypte, la France n’endosse pas, ici comme ailleurs dans le monde arabe, le discours plus offensif des Etats-Unis sur le thème de la démocratisation, mais préfère mettre l’accent sur le fait que des “réformes doivent être conduites par chacun à son rythme”. M. Chirac, a indiqué [...]

How convenient:
CAIRO – The Egyptian government said on Wednesday it had broken up a group of at least 22 militant Muslims planning bomb attacks on tourist targets, a gas pipeline near Cairo and Muslim and Christian religious leaders.
The Interior Ministry said in a statement the underground organization called itself the Victorious Group and had members [...]

Interesting story on anti-Muslim violence in Spain:
Authorities in the city said yesterday that they were considering putting security cameras around mosques, shrines and buildings belonging to other religions in order to dissuade potential attackers.
Although it was unclear yesterday whether those who burned the sanctuary were non-Muslims or fundamentalists opposed to the form of worship practised [...]

The government report on the Safaga ferry disaster is out. It’s not pretty:
“The responsibility of the ship’s owner and his sons has been determined in this crime because the ferry was operating with major deficiencies that should have prevented it from sailing,” the investigating committee reported.
The report said Al-Salam Maritime Transport Company failed to respond [...]

I just got a text message from MobiNil, my phone company, offering a new translation service by SMS. Basically you send in a word by SMS to the number “1001″ and you’ll get it back translated in English or Arabic (i.e. the opposite of whatever you sent in). Quite nifty. Makes me wish I still [...]

Very cool maps for every major religious group here. I wonder who the lonely Muslims deep inside Alaska and in the northern island of the Hawaiian archipelago are. I don’t know if the information exists, but it’d be great to have a similar map for Arab-Americans, perhaps also further broken-down by religious affiliation.

Note to AP: do you really need to refer to thoroughly discredited former Wafdist leader No’man Gomaa as a “key opposition figure“? Perhaps when you mentioned that Gomaa was released by prosecutors “because he was in poor health” (ignoring many Egyptian press reports that he was moved to a hospital simply to be spared from [...]

Chan’ad Bahraini has the details.
Incidentally, about two weeks ago I got an email at my blog address from the Bahraini Office of Foreign Media Affairs asking if they could subscribe me to their press releases about Bahrain. I said yes and since then got emails about recent reforms in Bahrain (for instance the royal budget [...]