A few days ago, Kifaya announced that George Ishaq, its general coordinator for the last two year, will be stepping down. His replacement is Abdel Wahab al-Messiri, a renowned philosopher best-known for his Encyclopedia of Jews, Judaism and Zionism — the most comprehensive and serious study of these issues in Arabic. When I first read [...]

I noted a while back that my friend/former boss Hisham Kassem had left his position as executive publisher of al-Masri al-Youm, the independent daily newspaper he launched in 2004 and that went on to become the premier source of reporting in Egypt. Many people have asked me if it has had any impact on al-Masri [...]

More signs that Arafat was murdered by Israel with US collusion. I wonder if the UN will ask for an international investigation like it did over Rafiq Hariri’s assassination in Lebanon.
If Arafat were still alive
Israel should take no comfort from inter-Arab conflicts. Peace depends on Palestinian unity
Uri Avnery
Wednesday January 31, 2007
The Guardian
‘If Arafat [...]

Naguib Sawiris, Egypt’s top billionaire and around the 64th richest man in the world, has carried out something he has long been talking about and launched a satellite TV company. From a business briefing I receive:
Mr. Naguib Sawiris announced the launch of a new satellite TV channel with a paid-in capital of USD17 million. The [...]

I haven’t had time to read it yet, but the ICG has just published a very interesting-looking report on Egypt’s Sinai question in light of the three bombings that have taken place there in the past three years and the subsequent indiscriminate crackdown on the Bedouin population:
Thus, beneath the terrorism problem is a more serious [...]

A question to any lawyer types out there: does the decision below set a precedent for any victim of terrorism to sue financial institutions whose clients were involved in those acts of terrorism? Would it apply to other types of violence, including state violence?
A Federal Court Judge in Brooklyn on Tuesday approved a lawsuit filed [...]

What a scumbag:
WASHINGTON (AFP) – A former American official with the US-led occupation authority in Iraq was sentenced Monday to nine years in prison and forced to forfeit 3.6 million dollars for his role in defrauding the authority.
Robert Stein, 52, pleaded guilty in February 2006 to charges of bribery, money laundering and conspiracy in relation [...]

If you’re interested in the Sunni-Shia debate, you should be reading Abu Aardvark. He has a whole series of very interesting posts lately.

From TomDispatch:
Just over 3,000 Americans have died in Iraq. If the U.S. population is 300 million, then that’s just 0.001% of it. Add into this the fact that the American dead come disproportionately from the most forgotten, least attended to parts of our country, from places that often have lost their job bases; consider that [...]

When the New York Times covers an incident where three Palestinian students get beat up by footballers at a Quaker college, it uses a lot of quotation marks because it can’t take the event too seriously (e.g. “hate crime.” “ugly incident”) and makes the whole story about “hippies vs. athletes.”
While some students praise Ms. Hamlin [...]

Click “more” for a nice breakdown of Sunni and Shia populations across the region, by Reuters. I do think they made a mistake in saying the worldwide population of Muslims will “double by 2010.” Surely we don’t breed that fast.

I heard last night that the Cairo Opera House had dismissed (or tried to) all of its female veiled musicians. Does anyone know more about this? Is this some kind of revenge by Farouq Hosni?

Great news from a country whose majority suffered greatly from Israeli support for apartheid:
JOHANNESBURG, Jan 26 (IPS) – A call from a South African trade unionist for national supermarket chains to stop importing avocado from Israel could ultimately lead to the banning of all imports from the Jewish state, if unions and human rights activists [...]

How does this:
Israel May Have Violated Arms Pact, U.S. Says
By DAVID S. CLOUD and GREG MYRE
Published: January 28, 2007
WASHINGTON, Jan 27 — The Bush administration will inform Congress on Monday that Israel may have violated agreements with the United States when it fired American-supplied cluster munitions into southern Lebanon during its fight with Hezbollah last [...]

Ours, I tell you! Dirka dirka Muhammad Jihad! Muahahahahahahaha!!!!
Islam could soon be the dominant force in a Europe which, in the name of political correctness, has abdicated the battle for cultural and religious control, Prof. Bernard Lewis, the world-renowned Middle Eastern and Islamic scholar, said on Sunday.
The Muslims “seem to be about to take over [...]

Don’t miss Baheyya’s reviews of new books at this year’s Cairo International Book Fair: Sonallah Ibrahim’s “Sneaking,” Khaled al-Khamissi’s “Taxi” (which I got a chance to take a look at the other day) and of course Alaa al-Aswani’s “Chicago,” which we mentioned earlier here. I haven’t gone to the fair yet this year, but I [...]

Max Rodenbeck reviews Michael Oren’s “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present,” finding it full of interesting anecdotes and well-researched but subtly biased in favor of both Israel and “America’s self-image as an innocent among Middle Eastern sharks.”
Some readers may remember that Oren, who holds Israeli citizenship and has [...]

The CIA station chief in Baghdad is a man who championed the rendition of Islamists to Egypt and other countries for torture, says Harpers:
Given the desperate situation in Iraq, whoever runs the CIA’s Baghdad station will need to be an extraordinary manager who can marshal the agency’s forces and work closely with the U.S. armed [...]

“Isolationist” is a term used derisively in American foreign policy circles, but one with which I increasingly identify. Non-Americans increasingly feel that way too: leave us the hell alone, America, they say. William Pfaff explores this argument in this NYRB piece:
It seems scarcely imaginable that the present administration could shift course away from the [...]

Those of you who live in Egypt will know that over the past week there has been much brouhaha over a series of stabbings in the well-heeled neighborhood of Maadi, land of expats, embassy housing and fine pork products. The press has been having a field day with this, as it has over past “serial [...]

Book-banning, Bahai-hating, regime bigot-in-chief Sheikh Ali Gomaa, the Mufti of Egypt, has decreed that women are barred from the presidency in Egypt.
“Under Islamic sharia (religious law), a woman cannot be head of state because it is one of the duties of the position to lead Muslims in prayer and that role can only be carried [...]

Our friend Kamel Labidi had an op-ed a few days ago in the Daily Star about the clashes last took place in December between Tunisian security forces and Islamists probably associated with the Groupe Salafiste pour le Combat et la Predication of Algeria. If you’ve followed this story you will remember that there was a [...]

The American Foreign Policy Council launches an ad campaign to help the Bush administration make its case against Iran.
The geriatric king of Saudi Arabia warns against the spread of Shi’ism — even though there are probably more Christian evangelists in the Arab world than Shia ones. Pure, irresponsible, bigoted fear-mongering of the kind we’ve come [...]

I have an op-ed about US strategy in the Middle East and the growing Sunni-Shia divide over at TomPaine.com. Let me know what you think.
Later today I will post a hyperlinked version here.
Update: The New Saddam
Making a renewed appearance in the State of the Union address this year was Iran. Bush set out an agenda [...]

HRW has sent an open letter to King Abdullah of “mainstream moderate” Saudi Arabia urging to put an end to a campaign of persecution against Ahmadis:
Your Majesty,
We write to urge you to put an immediate end to Saudi Arabias nationwide campaign to round up followers of the Ahmadi faith who have committed no [...]

He rarely covered the Arab world, but I nevertheless want to express my regret here that Ryszard Kapuscinski has died two days ago, aged 74.
This is a heavy loss to a world whose parts seem to understand each other less and less. He was a ‘translator of the world’, as Polish TV called him yesterday.
Do [...]

Inspired by sandmonkey’s remark on gifts to Egypt from foreign revolutionaries, I went to see the 1973 War Panorama the other day – also to learn more about the war’s first half. (For some reason, the show stopped before the IDF built four pontoon bridges crossing the canal into the other direction and before Egypt’s [...]

I watched President Bush’s State of the Union address last night. After calling for a balanced budget (I’m not sure if it was such a priority for the Republican Congress to balance the budget, but anyway..), health care tax credits, and immigration reform, he got to the main thrust of his speech: a defense of [...]

Is another civil war about to start in Lebanon? The general strike called by Hezbullah and its allies yesterday turned into a day in which 3 people were killed, dozens injured, and gangs of Sunni and Shia youth threatened and insulted each other.
Novelist Elias Khoury and historian Fawwaz Traboulsi–two major Lebanese intellectuals–are in New York [...]

Bloggers and human rights activists have called for an anti-torture protest tomorrow Thursday 25 January, 4pm, in front of the Press Syndicate, to celebrate “Egyptian Police Day.”

Participants are urged to bring along banners, posters, and photos of Mubarak’s police torture victims.

As a favor to a friend of a friend, I have been asked to let interested readers know about a a questionnaire on file-sharing put together by someone carrying out research into the ways people use the internet. It takes about 15 minutes to get through, so if you are so inclined go here.

Imagine if Hillary Clinton wins the 2008 US presidential elections. Statistically speaking, she is likely to be re-elected in 2012 (most presidents have been) and therefore remain president until 2016. This will mean that between 1988 and 2016 two families will have shared the presidency — 28 years of Bushes and Clintons. You could even [...]

From the Shebab Kifaya mailing list. Haven’t verified the information or obtained the victim’s full and informed consent to publish the details here, so names and details redacted for the moment:
Citizen [...], known by [...] was subject to severe beating and use of electricity on sensitive parts of his body at the state security intelligence [...]

From a WaPo piece on Rice’s recent Middle East tour:
At one point, Rice said that the difficult circumstances in the Middle East could represent opportunity. “I don’t read Chinese but I am told that the Chinese character for crisis is wei-ji, which means both danger and opportunity,” she said in Riyadh. “And I think that [...]

So it appears from this Haaretz interview of King Abdullah “PS2″ (like most people he can’t find a PS3) that Jordan is joining the fast-growing gang of Arab countries with civilian nuclear programs and an ambiguous attitude as where there is going to be anything more than just civilian. The boy-king says Jordan has to [...]

My friend Sandmonkey and I disagree on most things (because he’s wrong!), but a few days ago he spotted reports of an Egyptian blogger attending a conference in Israel who said things that have raised the Egyptian blogosphere’s collective eyebrows. Among other things, he alleged that we are all opposition journalists, there are only 100 [...]

Ok ok. My apologies to the fine boys who come out to make sure that law and order are maintained during these demos. Sometimes you just can’t resist though.
Today’s Kefaya demo at Sayeda Zeinab mosque, marking the thirty-year anniversary of the Bread Riots, was more energetic than usual, and the crowd seemed more diverse. At [...]

The Washington Post takes the time to point the obvious and gets in some good old fashioned Hozz-bashing:
The new strategy explains a series of reversals of U.S. policy that otherwise would be baffling. In addition to embracing the Middle East peacemaker role that it has shunned for six years, the administration has decided to seek [...]

Intriguing story:
An Egyptian ruling party politician started to undress in parliament on Tuesday in protest at proposed constitutional amendments which perpetuate many of the Egyptian president’s vast powers.
In a debate on the amendments, details of which have not been released, member of parliament Mohamed Hussein objected to the article which gives the president the right [...]

I’ve been looking at Israeli reactions to yesterday’s revelation that a secret negotiations between Tel Aviv and Damascus had been going on since 2004 — negotiations that yesterday Ehud Olmert rushed to dismiss, even insulting the mediators involved. This from Uzi Benzimann in Haaretz:
It is enough to observe the panicked responses in Jerusalem to the [...]