thanks for comments. As I mentioned, the essay was submitted and marked ages ago - I was mostly interested in what people who are either Egyptian, Arab or just living in the ME thought of the evidence, not so much the structural problems, although Nate’s comments were valuable. Because I don’t live in the Middle East, I’m very much going by what people have said in journals, popular magazines and newspapers. I don’t know if this is good (gives me distance and objectivity) or bad (I have no idea what’s happening on the ground).

I’m planning to put up the current version of my Honours thesis soon, so if anyone’s crazy enough to read it, it will afford you the opportunity to vent on the topic of The Bush Administration’s Freedom Agenda 2002-2006 (now tell me you don’t want to start venting already!).

Abu Muqawama, Ms .45 was the title of a movie with the best movie poster ever in the world in all recorded history (look it up on imdb.com). But yeah, vinyl records are good, I’m probably way too small to handle a .45 calibre weapon though. It’d be the size of one of my legs.

Ms .45… I’m guessing that refers to vinyl records and not pistols, but if it refers to the latter, jeez, consider yourself an honorary East Tennessean.

I found the FA article quite interesting, as it included information about the European MB that I didn’t know, and I disagree with Issandr that it exaggerates the links between MBs in different countries - I thought the article made it quite clear that different branches of the MB have quite a strong local character. Keep in mind also that for FA, this is ground-breaking stuff - I’m pretty sure that most FA readers read more Daniel Pipes than they do Marc Lynch. Certainly, the people I meet in the foreign policy community (non-academic people, I mean) seem to regard “the Muslim Brotherhood”, taken out of any national context, as a parent company of al-Qaeda.