Here we go again. Another attempt at local English-language news reporting, this time in Palestine, according to AP.
The Palestine Times, available on the internet in crude but workable PDF format, is on issue no. 4 as of today.
If, as the editor claims, the Palestine Times isn’t going to be beholden to any particular political or [...]

Abou Bakr Jamai, editor of Morocco’s only truly independent publication, Le Journal Hebdo, has an interesting post on his WaPo blog about the biggest political controversy of the moment in Morocco: polls that indicate the Islamist PJD party is set to come about 30% ahead of the next party in next year’s parliamentary election.
When first [...]

Trust Patrick Cockburn to see the big pictures that papers like the Post and the Times don’t seem to want to admit.
Civil war is raging across central Iraq, home to a third of the country’s 27 million people. As Shia and Sunni flee each other’s neighbourhoods, Iraq is turning into a country of refugees.
The UN [...]

The craziest and most dangerous article I have seen in a long time. If the Saudis really started massively arming and financing Sunni insurgent groups in Iraq, we’d probably have a 20-year Persian Gulf war.
Over the past year, a chorus of voices has called for Saudi Arabia to protect the Sunni community in Iraq and [...]

I’m going to regret putting this up, but Oprah is doing a show in Cairo right now on MBC4. It’s full of Mama Suzanne cronies, naturally.

Always good to be reminded that there are many anti-free speech idiots writing libelous stuff out there:
If Al-Jazeera English had wanted to impress people with its first week or so of programming, including a David Frost interview with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, it failed. The channel was very quick out of the chute [...]

Very disturbing:
Cairo – Egyptian police have uncovered a gang of beggars that raped and killed several homeless children, the official al- Akhbar newspaper reported on Tuesday.
The suspects have admitted to murders in several governorates.
So far the police have found two bodies and are looking for more.
The investigation began when a group of homeless children filed [...]

The Economist Intelligence Unit has released an index of democracies [PDF] in which it ranks full democracies, flawed democracies, “hybrid systems” and authoritarian regimes. Egypt and Morocco are both at the same rank (115) in the last category — here’s Moroccan blogger Larbi’s take on it — while the US, UK, France or Japan don’t [...]

Yesterday Hossam quoted al-Destour for some interesting figures about how much the interior ministry is spending. It’s worth highlighting that, in fact, a lot more than that is available. For several years now the Egyptian government has been improving its statistics gathering and dissemination, and a lot of these figures come from what is probably [...]

Ahmadinejad writes another letter. This time, he writes directly to the American people. I’m sure this will make the rounds of late-night comedy shows, but however much you may mistrust the Iranian regime, the letter’s interesting to read and hardly insane (the only quirky touch is calling us “Noble Americans”).
(P.S. I posted this and then [...]

Bloomberg is reporting that the Carlyle Group — the biggest buyout firm in the US, famous for having allegedly held a meeting on 11 September 2001 that included both a representative of the Bin Laden clan and George H.W. Bush — will shortly be opening offices in Cairo and seeking to buy out Egyptian companies, [...]

Kefaya is calling up on civil society and environmental activists to join the movement’s anti-corruption demo, Sunday 3 December, 1pm, in Matarriya Square to protest the unfair garbage collection fees.
دعوة عامة الى كل القوى الوطنية الشريفة واحزاب المعارضة ومؤسسات المجتمع المدنى والجمعيات الاهلية وجمعيات حماية البيئةتدعوكم الحركة المصرية من اجل التغيير كفاية وبمشاركة لجنة الاحياء [...]

I received news that leftist academics are holding a protest tomorrow Wednesday, from 11am to 12 noon, at Ain Shams University to protest the state-sponsored thuggery against activist students over the past couple of weeks. The professors will assemble in front of Qasr el-Za’afarana, the university’s administration building.

In recent weeks, Ain Shams University campus has [...]

Must-read Anthony Shadid story on a new ad campaign satirizing sectarianism in Lebanon.

The ECES has an interesting paper by Robert Mabro on a question that’s been bugging me for a long time: why is Egypt sticking (and hiding the facts and figures) about its bad LNG export deal with the Spanish firm Union Fenosa, which is causing it to lose money on the gas it exports?
There are [...]

And on the same (well, kind of the same) note, Banksy does Disney does Gitmo. Check out the video of how he got the job done.

Politics through Beirut’s street art. Or make your own online.

It’s about two weeks old, but Baheyya has written a beautiful portrait of the recently deceased Marxist intellectual and public servant (in the best sense of the term) Ismail Sabri Abdullah.
I wish Baheyya would write more these days, but then again things are so much more depressing than they were last year. I can’t blame [...]

November 24, 2006
It was just such a classic Baghdad return. The sky was hazy and overcast as we drove back from the airport. The traffic was bad, a convoy of SUVs featuring guys with assault rifles hanging out of the window came blaring past. And then back at the office a bombing that killed 25 [...]

The Economist thinks that if things don’t go smoothly, a Shia uprising could take place.

Conversations at Thanksgiving dinner last night (mostly Egyptians of various religions) generally went like this: “I would have never thought I’d say this, but we need to help out Farouk Hosni.” One suggestion was to circulate a petition along the lines of “Farouk Hosni is a scumbag, but…” Among this extremely liberal crowd, the attack [...]

Check out Elijah’s post from Damascus. I love Damascus, having lived there in the mid-1990s, and he gets a lot of the things about it right. Even if Syria is largely depressing, it’s a fantastic country and people. And even better than Damascus is Aleppo. Both cities have a “den of spies” 1950s feel to [...]

An arabist.net reader was at Judge Hisham Bastawissi’s AUC lecture last night and shared impressions with me. I regret not attending.
The man was brilliant, first-class public speaker. Eloquent and utterly scathing in a gentlemanly-legalistic sort of way. He was supposed to speak on Articles 76 and 77 but really focused more on issues of basic [...]

Inside Higher Ed has an update on the struggle between Campus Watch and Middle East academia.

Top Kazakh Rabbi: In My Country There’s No Problem
In the fictional version of Kazakhstan in the hit movie “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” the only Jews in the country are larger-than-life caricatures that get trotted out for a ceremonial “Running of the Jew.”
In the real Kazakhstan, the top [...]

I’ve been getting these PINR reports for over a year but could never figure out who they (PINR) were exactly – they never replied to my emails. Still, they often have interesting stuff, as in their take on the Gemayel assassination.
Intelligence Brief: Pierre Gemayel Assassinated in Lebanon
Drafted By:
http://www.pinr.com
On November 21, Pierre Gemayel, a [...]

There are few articles in the Western mainstream press on single Middle Eastern economies, and this one by Damascus-based freelancer Gabriella Keller on the Syrian economy for the online edition of Der Spiegel is quite well researched and sharp. She argues that while the political leadership has realized the need to open up the economy, [...]

Some 40% of the land on which Israeli settlements are built is the private property of Palestinians (who have the papers to prove it).
This info comes from data leaked by Israel’s Civil Administration to the advocacy group Peace Now, and reported in, among other places, the New York Times yesterday.
Some settlements are built on up [...]

The oddest controversy has been taking place in Cairo over the last few days. Last Friday, al-Masri al-Youm published an interview with Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni in which he regretted that the veil had become so popular in the country. By Friday afternoon, the Muslim Brotherhood had already issued a scathing statement condemning Hosni [...]

My friend Paul Schemm, a journalist in Baghdad, sends regular personal dispatches from there. His latest is about something we both like a lot — Battlestar Galactica. This season (the third) is replete with references to tawhid, the Islamic concept of monotheism or “oneness of God” that is unfortunately more famous as a jihadi terms. [...]

I’ve been getting emails asking why I haven’t written about Pierre Gemayel. The reason is simply that I’m extremely busy until the end of the week.
Still, a few points:
- Obviously I am worried about what’s next in Lebanon and horrified at the continued string of political assassinations. This is the last thing the country needs [...]

Daniel Pipes at his looniest — if there’s one thing that’s been great for Israel, it’s the peace treaty with Egypt, but he wants it canceled. Rather amusing that it’s the same conclusion, albeit for different reasons, as the far left and far right in Egypt.

Alif, a new French-language online magazine on Egypt, has launched its first issue. Behind Alif is part the team that created the short-livedPetit Journal du Caire, as well as some of the people behind La Revue d’Egypte. Check out their content – including a weekly press review and articles on hash smoking among the Cairene [...]

After Moorishgirl mentioned this show in New York by Colombian artist Fernando Botero, I went there this afternoon.
Although I gather that Botero’s art is viewed as rather overr-rated and unsophisticated by many art critics, this show was well-reviewed in the Nation and The New York Times. In fact, the show has received a lot of [...]

Today’s pro-judges demo called by Kefaya was noisy and vociferously defiant of the security forces who lounged on the opposite side of the street, but it wasn’t very big. Are the arrests, beatings and sexual assaults taking their toll?
I’ll post at least one other pic from the afternoon on my flickr site.

To North American academics out there: are you by any chance attending MESA? Would you be interested in telling us what happened there, particularly in the Egypt, Lebanon, academic freedom and blogging panels? Drop us a line at issandr AT arabist.net.

Today’s protest outside the Arab League was not particularly well attended, except by the police. The beltagui were lined up and large men in cheap suits were brought in to push the women around.
Look for a more substantial posting from Hossam soon on 3arabawy.

Dan Murphy goes to the Badawi moulid in Tanta after a run-in with the US Ambassador in Egypt.
Al Azhar and the Brotherhood don’t like it, though:
They lean their foreheads against the metal cage that surrounds the tomb, and murmur prayers for health, better financial fortune, or a child’s success in school. The practice – similar [...]

I really don’t want to promote Tarek Heggy’s delusions of grandeur (see his bio, which describes him as “being amongst the members of the first echelon of the contemporary Arab liberal thinkers”), but I find his constant references to “security services mentality” in this piece on Copts interesting.
This security-service mentality is one of the [...]

A collection of interesting stories and sites collected in the last week or so.
- Words Without Borders has a special issue on Palestine this month.
- NYT: For Evangelicals, Supporting Israel Is ‘God’s Foreign Policy’
How evangelicals and Elliott Abrams heart each other. The article also says that the right-wing Jerusalem Post recently started an edition for [...]