Links from my del.icio.us account for March 30th through March 31st:

????????: The changing face of Luxor - How Luxor's old houses are being torn down
The Obama Doctrine | The American Prospect - Obama doesn'st just want to change policies, he wants to change the principles policies are based on
Study Shows Life Was Tough For Ancient [...]

Adam Shatz reviews a new biography of Abu Musab al-Suri, one of al-Qaeda’s most important theoreticians - Laptop Jihadi:

Al-Suri’s world-view isn’t original, although it is no less chilling for that: a Qutbian brew of political grievances (Israeli atrocities in Palestine, the US sanctions against Iraq), toxic prejudice (non-Muslims, but especially Jews and crusaders) and sexual [...]

(I had temporarily deactivated the script that takes the delicious links onto the blog, here is a month’s worth — but no recent links) 
Links from my del.icio.us account for February 27th through March 19th:

Israel’s Shin Bet launches blog - The Israeli secret service - go troll now
Egyptian Universities Strike - Blog of professors for academic [...]

How things are getting worse:

NEW YORK, Mar 27 (IPS) - One of the Arab world’s most widely respected non-governmental organisations is charging that at least 14 Middle East and North African governments are systematically violating the civil liberties of their citizens — and most of them are close U.S. allies in the war on terror.
In [...]

Cheney issues strong defense of Israel.

US struggles to explain AFRICOM vision:

Gen Ward argued that AFRICOM ‘recognises the essential relationship between security, stability, economic development, political advances, things that address the basic needs of the peoples of a region and, importantly, the requirement to do those efforts in as collaborative a way as possible - not to take over the [...]

A very good appearance by Sinan Antoon on Charlie Rose, where he dismisses the “what-went-wrong-in-Iraq” line of argument as forgetting that the US should have never gone in there in 2003 after a decade of sanctions.

Egyptian novelist Bahaa Taher has won the “Arabic Booker” . Here’s a 2002 profile of Taher, from the late lamented Cairo Times, after the jump.

Hannah has a great post about a very coquette (and courageous) Shia Tikriti woman:

How on earth, I asked her, does a Shiite Tikriti living under control of the Mahdi Army get away with dressing as she does when these days even Christian women have begun to cover their hair to deflect attention?
K replied that she [...]

Arab Media & Society has translated the Arab League Satellite Broadcaster Charter revealed a few weeks ago and offers some analysis, with various experts weighing in on whether the charter may be a good thing in some respects (regulating hate speech, religious extremism, etc.) but judging from its contradictions and the track record of who’ll [...]

Iraqi Voices in Cairo is a collection of accounts of Iraq refugees’ lives in Egypt, where over 150,000 reside with few opportunities to remake their lives:

Approximately 150,000 refugees from Iraq are trapped in Cairo, Egypt, with little hope of integration and no home to return to. We are an association of reporters and researchers working [...]

The Moroccan who was jailed for putting up a fake profile of Prince Moulay Rashid has been freed. This is great news, and while it should have never gotten to this, better late than never. I suppose the king wanted to make sure the message got across that the royal family is a no-go area [...]

Too busy to blog right now, but you should definitely watch this and follow the coverage of the growing crisis over bread shortages in Egypt:

Also read:
FT.com / In depth - Egypt weighs cost of daily bread
Al-Ahram Weekly | Economy | Fuelling rumours and discontent
BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Egyptians hit by rising [...]

A lot of goof stuff here, but I found this particularly funny:

I must still be groggy from the all-night travel. At my first attempt to use the phone, a Tokyo Rose voice intones in American English, “In the name of God, the number you have dialled does not exist. Please hang up and check the [...]

On the recruitment of collaborators in pre-1948 Palestine:

In his groundbreaking book Army of Shadows, Hillel Cohen, a research fellow at Hebrew University’s Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace, exposes this particularly nefarious side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Cohen has spent years in numerous Israeli and British archives gathering information that many would [...]

This post is not about Ron Paul, since I am not a libertarian and do not agree with most of his views outside of foreign policy (specifically his argument for the end of American empire in the Middle East and major cuts in defense spending). But there is something deeply wrong with Congress when this [...]

I love Legos. I would play for hours with them as a kid, building spaceships, forts, guard towers, supercars (that’s right, they were super) and tons of other stuff. So I’m delighted that BrickArms, a company that provides accessories that Lego does not make, is updating the arsenal and look of Lego characters for today’s [...]

Rami Khouri has written a series of thoughtful articles about the restructuration of state power in the Arab world — both the power shift away from the military towards the security services as well as wider issues of the failure of public institutions. His his latest piece he explores the subject further:

What is significant is [...]

I haven’t had time to read the explosive Vanity Fair article on the US-Fatah coup attempt against Hamas yet, but from what I hear about it, it would confirm many of the allegations made around the time of Gaza takeover and that has been published in the Arabic press and elsewhere, not to mention some [...]

The Lebanese authorities, like every country, issue out statistics on various economic indicators. Below is the chart that shows the number of employment permits issued for various professions between 2003 and 2005. Click to get a bigger image and look at under “specialized professions,” where there is a category for “knight.” A holdover from the [...]