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 [...]