Not having internet at home, being very busy and feeling a little bit under the weather means blogging is light, but I could not pass up the great news that the pride of the Egyptian blogosphere, Wael Abbas, won a Knight International Journalism Award for his website MisrDigital. I am especially happy as I wrote [...]

Too busy to write in more length about this today, but for over a week now the Egyptian (non-state) media has gone into another one of its Mubarak deathwatch modes. Last time was during the last big al-Ahly game, when Mubarak’s absence at the match caused a panic among journos who believed the old man [...]

Iran: mostly nasty, but sometimes they may be on to something. (No, not really.) Meanwhile, the Lebanese are the last people to discover Facebook, apparently.

Normal Finkelstein is barred from teaching, despite from having one year left on his teaching contract at DePaul University:

The required reading was at the bookstore, the students had the course syllabus, and space in Political Science 235, “Equality in Social Justice,” was standing-room only when DePaul University pulled the plug Friday on what was to [...]

China Regulates Buddhist Reincarnation – Newsweek:
In one of history’s more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is [...]

As the controversy over a dodgy arms procurement contract involving someone close to General David “Jesus Christ The Savior” Petraeus evolves, becoming both a corruption and a security scandal, do read the fantastic and expletive-filled Rolling Stone article on the contracting in Iraq. Choice excerpts below.
The Great Iraq Swindle – Rolling Stone:
A few months later, [...]

Philip Atkinson, a writer for the conservative think tank Family Security Matters has penned a call for US President George W. Bush to commit genocide in Iraq, settle the country with Americans and then take power for life, modeling himself on Julius Caesar after the Gaul campaign.
Before anyone answers that any cooky idiot can write [...]

I am off to Tangier for the next week. No more posts till I get back – and for those who’ve written, there will be more blogging on Morocco when I get back.

West Bank poverty spawns child beggars:
NAZARETH, Israel – For 15-year-old Issa, days of summer start when the sun rises over a northern Israeli hill, shining on a garbage dump, a thorny field and then the dirty mattress that is his bed.
Issa is among hundreds of Palestinian child laborers who sneak into Israel from the West [...]

I have read about the Alms for Jihad affairs in Britain — and I would fully support the Association of Librarians of America in keeping the book available in the US, regardless of the quality of the book (which I have no idea about).
OIF is hearing from librarians who are wondering if they must comply [...]

I have just received the following email from a friend in the Muslim Brotherhood:
I just received the news of the arrest (or re-arrest) of Essam El Erian, Chief of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political bureau, who was banned from travelling to Turkey this morning. A number of leaders were also arrested, including Mahmoud Hussien, a member [...]

Kamel Labidi calls for Western states to walk the walk and urge Ben Ali not to run again in 2009:
Tunisian democracy: To hope or despair?
The policy of repression, compounded by confiscation of public property and murky privatization deals by Ben Ali’s relatives and cronies, has prompted many Tunisians to take steps publicly to help stop [...]

The Economist article below gets something plain right: some of the killing in Iraq, such as the recent attacks against the Yazidi community (Angry Arab had a great post about them here), all too often gets ignored among the avalanche of death statistics. And there is an unfortunate and self-defeating confusion between supporting an armed [...]

The video below, updated to Google Video by Ikhwanweb.com, a Muslim Brotherhood website, shows an interview with a child and his mother, who say he was tortured in a police station in Mansoura, northern Egypt. The video is graphic and shows the child’s burn wounds and other injuries. As horrible as these scenes are, it [...]

Hamas and Fatah in the dock in Gaza drama – Yahoo! News:
GAZA CITY (AFP) – Crowds throng the hall to hear the court’s decision. In the dock are Gaza’s Hamas rulers and their secular rivals Fatah. The verdict, with no right of appeal, comes late and after passionate and stormy debate: “All are guilty of [...]

Diplomat Charged With Arab Threats Retires:
(AP) A career U.S. diplomat indicted this week for sending threatening messages to an Arab political organization has retired from the foreign service, the State Department said Thursday.
Patrick Syring retired last month, about a year after he allegedly left racist and intimidating phone and e-mail messages with the Arab American [...]

Update: Sign the counter-petition, which has already been endorsed by a number of A-list academics.
Alumni Group Seeks to Deny Tenure to Middle Eastern Scholar at Barnard College:
Controversial research on Israel and the Palestinian territories has become the basis of yet another campaign to prevent a professor from winning tenure. A group of Barnard College alumni [...]

Israel, U.S. formally sign new defense agreement – Haaretz
Israel and the United States signed Thursday the Memorandum of Understanding on the new American defense package for Israel. Under the new aid agreement, the U.S. will transfer $30 billion to Israel over 10 years, compared with $24 billion over the past decade.
Israel is slated [...]

Hamas’ Mousa Abu Marzouk has an op-ed responding to a British parliamentary committee’s support for engaging with Hamas:
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Hamas is ready to talk:
While Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert is busily courting Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas as a “partner for peace”, successive voices continue to speak out against efforts to sideline [...]

This may be rather naive, and considering the vitriol being thrown around on the issue of Lebanon these days I want to tread carefully: but how come analysts have such detailed knowledge of the voting patterns according to sectarian affiliation in the recent Metn by-election? Are these published in official records? Are they based on [...]

Daniel Pipes’ fascist-style campaign against an Arabic-language school in Brooklyn and its principal is succeeding:
The Evening Bulletin – Stop The NYC Madrassa:
When Dhabah (”Debbie”) Almontaser resigned on Aug. 10 as principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy, her action culminated a remarkable grass-roots campaign in which concerned citizens successfully criticized the New York City establishment. [...]

U.S. Weighing Terrorist Label for Iran Guards – New York Times:
WASHINGTON, Aug. 14 — The Bush administration is preparing to declare that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is a foreign terrorist organization, senior administration officials said Tuesday.
If imposed, the declaration would signal a more confrontational turn in the administration’s approach to Iran and would be the [...]

Charles Levinson unearths this disturbing-but-funny-but-disturbing MEMRI clip from Hamas TV about getting children to behave better with animals. It is truly bizarre, but I wouldn’t draw any wider conclusions from it aside from wondering whether there can be a worse place for animals than Gaza zoo (look at how small the lion’s cage is), which [...]

LRB | Henry Siegman : The Middle East Peace Process Scam:
Both Bush and Olmert have spoken endlessly of their commitment to a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but it is their determination to bring down Hamas rather than to build up a Palestinian state that animates their new-found enthusiasm for making Abbas look good. [...]

Hamas optimism vs. Fatah despair: the CSM’s Dan Murphy has a nice story on the difference in mood between Gaza and the West Bank.

More lobby efforts to prevent people from saying the lobby exists.

Two questions about the story below: 1) While remembering that many governments, even in democratic countries, require demonstrations to be registered for public safety reasons, is this merely an attempt to control the situation in a chaotic area (and where certain clans may be still be bitter about Fatah’s defeat) or is Hamas taking the [...]

This is a (very long overdue) announcement that the Arabist family has added another member. Please check out the blog Hatshepsut, which has been up and running for some time now, waiting to be officially unveiled. It contains some gems.
Hatshepsut is dedicated to covering women’s rights and issues, the history of feminism in Egypt, and [...]

Also read Baheyya on Egyptian novelist Ibrahim Aslan. She knows what she is talking about.

A summer of discontents | Economist.com: For the last year or so it’s been social unrest after social unrest, and this story covers the situation well. What’s surprising (or perhaps not) is that despite the high prices, poor services, widespread discontent, not only is there little sign of any meaningful political change (aside from those [...]

Is it just me or do banks, hedge funds and other financial companies always cry out against government intervention, except when they need a bail-out or central banks to intervene in the markets to restore stability after their irresponsible unfettered speculation blows up in their face? Just asking.

A parable on freedom and social constraints – part 1 in Arabic, part 2 in Arabic, and both parts in English. Found through Bint Battuta in Bahrain.

There’s been an interesting scandal brewing in the last few days about Lebanon Examiner, a section of the Beirut Daily Star sponsored by USAID to carry out investigative journalism. A piece that recently came out about Solidere — surely the first and foremost investigative business journalism story to do in Lebanon — apparently pissed off [...]

Our friends Samer Shehata and Joshua Stacher have a new piece on the Muslim Brotherhood’s relationship with the Egyptian regime at MERIP. It’s a thorough overview of the last two years of mounting repression against the MB, tracking down the post-parliamentary election crackdown, the Fall 2006 labor and student election crackdown, the “Ikhwan Militia” scandal, [...]

Bizarre little story in today’s Le Monde: last Friday 12 swimmers drowned on a beach in northern Algeria after a giant wave suddenly appeared on a beach near Mostaganem, in Western Algeria. No one knows what caused the wave, which only appeared at that particular beach and was not part of a larger tsunami or [...]

See SyriaComment. It’s becoming clearly obvious in every country whose news I follow that blogs and other websites are playing a crucial role as forum for debates and news-reporting where traditional publications face censorship. With the web, however, while governments can make things more difficult for users there are always ways to get around barriers.

Reformist paper closed by Iran for second time:
Authorities in Iran closed down the country’s leading reformist newspaper yesterday in the latest stage of an offensive against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s opponents in the media.
Shargh, which has been critical of Mr Ahmadinejad, was ordered to shut after running an interview with an anti-regime poet last Saturday. The [...]