This NYT piece on the relationship between Courageous Reformist Arab Personalities (CRAP) Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji seizes the non-relevance of these people to the problems of the Islamic world yet, admitting that, continues to find them enthralling.
First there is this paragraph:
Yet though they are allies on one level, their approaches to Islam [...]

Syrian Blogger and opposition activist Ammar Abdulhamid has a very different take on prospects for change in Syria, which he says will be driven by economic factors. I would not be so optimistic (I see the same kind of thinking over Egypt’s current economic crisis) because just like you can’t control a country entirely through [...]

Links from my del.icio.us account for April 23rd through April 26th:

Al Kamen – The Baghdad Embassy, a W Hotel – washingtonpost.com – Scroll down to read about Doug Feith's Georgetown teaching job not being renewed
U.S. arms sales to OPEC at risk over oil: senators
U.S. arms sales to OPEC at risk over [...]

It’s not exactly Sudan’s biggest problem, but the government there should think of getting new copy editors. On the occasion of the fifth Sudan Population and Housing Census:

Yet in some ways it works, doesn’t it?
[Thanks, Diana]

Yesterday several of the opposition-minded papers in Egypt ran with front-page stories about Bilal Diab, a Cairo University student who heckled Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif as the latter was delivering a speech to students about how great things were going in Egypt. I love this story, as does the Egyptian media, because it is reminiscent [...]

Links from my del.icio.us account for April 22nd:

TelQuel : L?incroyable évasion – Detailed story on Islamist jailbreak in Morocco
Al Hayat – Three Arab Oil Phenomena in 2008 – Walid Khadduri on developments in Arab petroleum market
Jackson Diehl – Hunger Pains for Mubarak – washingtonpost.com – Diehl as back at Mubarak-bashing
The Daily Star – Arts [...]

Links from my del.icio.us account for April 21st through April 22nd:

Maghreb : qui sont les hommes d'influence ? : Portraits des vrais maîtres du sérail – Algérie – Egypte – Libye – Maroc – Tunisie – Afrique – The strongmen of North Africa: who's who in the corridors of power
FT.com /Egypt grapples with pressures on [...]

From Electronic Intifada:
A pro-Israel pressure group is orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged.

A series of emails by members and associates of the pro-Israel group [...]

Search around Project Guttenberg, the excellent repository of free ebooks, and you’re bound to find dozens of books that in some way have to do with Egypt. One thing most of these have in common — particularly those from the 19th and early 20th century, when the Victorian fad was to write travel diaries — [...]

Links from my del.icio.us account for April 18th through April 20th:

Strikes in Egypt: Female Workers on the Frontline | Mediterranean | Culture et politique en Méditerranée: information et identité Méditerranéennes avec Babelmed – Our Eman on the role of women in Egypt's strikes
The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict – [...]

Links from my del.icio.us account for April 16th through April 17th:

The Bwog: Lisa Anderson, former SIPA Dean, named Provost of American University in Cairo – Top Middle East Studies academic moves to AUC
Egypt grapples with Palestinian dilemma – Guardian look at Omar Suleiman and Egypt's Palestine problem
J Street – New US Israel lobby says it's [...]

Doug Feith trots out a line about Saddam Hussein being part of an “international terrorist network” just as dangerous as al-Qaeda. This guy is truly shameless.

The Guardian writes on the occasion of the London Palestine Film Festival:
Perhaps Palestinian cinema cannot help but be ironic, when the most widely known cinematic images of Palestine are those that close Otto Preminger’s 1960 film Exodus and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. In Exodus, youthful Israeli forces win a decisive battle against the old-world savagery [...]

Former Arabist contributor to the blog and all-around smart guy Josh Stacher has penned a report on Egypt’s Muslim Brothers for the UK’s Institute for Public Policy Research:
Within and between western governments, a heated policy debate is raging over the question of whether or not to engage with the world’s oldest and most influential political [...]

Links from my del.icio.us account for April 15th through April 16th:

Strategic Insights — The Arab Minority in Israel: Motivations for Collective Action – Interesting academic article on 48 Palestinians and their potential for action
Arab world sees U.S. in poor light: poll – Yahoo! News – No kidding
"Bilal Hussein to Be Released Wednesday" by Scott Horton [...]

The London Book Fair, which this year shines a spotlight on Arab literature, ends tomorrow. Here are selected links to related stories:
✯ PUBLISH AND BE DAMNED – On religion and censorship for Egypt’s independent publishing houses.
✯ Pigs raid Sharqawi’s publishing house; confiscate books خنازير الداخلية تداهم دار ملامح للنشر وتصادر كتب at 3arabawy – Hossam [...]

From Hillary Clinton’s website, her position on the two-state solution:
Hillary Clinton believes that Israel’s right to exist in safety as a Jewish state, with defensible borders and an undivided Jerusalem as its capital, secure from violence and terrorism, must never be questioned.
The fact that the Clintons, after George W. Bush, are the worse thing that [...]

Just in from Reuters: EGYPTIAN MILITARY COURT HANDS JAIL TERMS TO 25 FROM MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD, ACQUITS 15 – BROTHERHOOD LAWYER
Ikhwanonline has special front page for occasion. Some background in English from Ikhwanweb at “Final Session of MB Military Tribunal today” and “Journalists and MB Supporters Harrassed Prior to Military Verdict”
Pending detail of who got [...]

Links from my del.icio.us account for April 13th through April 14th:

Ministers under pressure to reopen BAE corruption probe | The Guardian – Get Bandar!
Bread Crisis Escalates; Shots Fired At Bakery – "Governor Nabil el- Ezaby asked the women of the governorate to make bread at home"
Zaqzouq To Imams Of Mosques: "Denounce Vandalism And Rebellion." – [...]

Links from my del.icio.us account for April 11th through April 13th:

Egypt bread price up nearly 50 percent in 12 months – Yahoo! News – Official stats say
al-Jazeera English report on bread crisis – Good coverage
The Mac Guru of Damascus in the Case of the Missing Laptops – Of Mukhabarat and Macs
To Veil or Not to [...]

Links from my del.icio.us account for April 10th:

Mubarak hangs on | Middle East Strategy at Harvard – Steven Cook on the current crisis
Egypt calls in more troops in case of Gaza border breach – So I wonder what the new limit of troop numbers the Israelis have accepted is
Egypt police arrest democracy activist – Yahoo! [...]

Below is a letter sent by the Committee to Protect Journalists to the chairman of Nilesat regarding the ban of al-Hiwar, a London-based satellite channel, which is apparently the first victim of the new Arab Information Ministers’ Charter on Satellite TV:
April 8, 2008
Mr. Amin Bassiouni
Chairman
Nilesat
P.O. Box 72
6th of October City, Egypt
Via Facsimile: +202 384 [...]

Links from my del.icio.us account for April 7th through April 9th:

Gay Men Face Jail in Egypt, Kuwait in Bid to Appease Islamists
Bloomberg.com:
Exclusive – Bloomberg story on discrimination on gays, although I doubt it has to [...]

No clear end to occupation:
A confidential draft agreement covering the future of US forces in Iraq, passed to the Guardian, shows that provision is being made for an open-ended military presence in the country.
The draft strategic framework agreement between the US and Iraqi governments, dated March 7 and marked “secret” and “sensitive”, is intended to [...]

Keep clicking on that refresh button at Hossam’s for updates on Mahalla, where tensions are extremely high as we might head into a third day of riots. In the meantime, a repeat of the general strike is being called for May 4, the date of Hosni Mubarak’s 80th birthday. I’m heading there this afternoon. In [...]

From The Battle of Tavregh Zeina « The Moor Next Door:
More news from Mauritania. Word on the street is that two people have died and fifteen people have been hospitalized in a massive fire-fight in the chic Tavregh Zeina neighborhood of the Mauritanian capital of Nouakchott today. The fighting is linked to the massive manhunt [...]

Links from my del.icio.us account for April 7th:

TelQuel : La nouvelle chasse à l?homo – More homosexual witchhunts in Morocco
Nine terrorists escape from Moroccan prison – Smells very fishy…
Israel's Tehran connection | Comment is free – Silverstein argues that Israel is buying oil from Iran
Abu Dhabi not looking to start newspaper war – ArabianBusiness.com – [...]

The other fallout from yesterday’s events, and the crackdown on the MB of the last two months:

Egypt Islamists to boycott election
CAIRO (AFP) – Egypt’s main opposition movement the Muslim Brotherhood said on Monday it will boycott Tuesday’s municipal elections after it was allowed to field only 20 candidates for thousands of seats.
“We call on the [...]

As the khamseen winds blew into town today, a strange thing happened. A general strike that has been called for weeks went missing. People went out on the streets, asking, “have you seen the general strike?” “Are people striking over there?” “Do you know where the general strike went?”
It was all rather odd, because opposition [...]

Links from my del.icio.us account for April 5th through April 7th:

Annals of Law: Camp Justice: The New Yorker – "he Bush Administration, instead of closing Guantánamo, is trying to rebrand it?as a successor to Nuremberg rather than as a twin of Abu Ghraib."
Beirut's largest synagogue in danger of being demolished – Haaretz – Latest historic [...]

Dave Marash, al-Jazeera English’s Washington anchor until last week, gives an interesting interview to the Columbia Journalism Review about the reasons behind his departure. Chiefly it seems that he was unhappy with the US coverage of the station and his dwindling influence, but he also gives an intriguing explanation of recent editorial changes at both [...]

I like Sameh Fawzy, a smart Coptic activist and researcher who has written at length about Islamist groups, the concept of citizenship, and many other issues. In his latest article for the Daily News Egypt he talks about Coptic attitudes towards the municipal elections, the problem with the clergy intervening on behalf of the regime [...]

Links from my del.icio.us account for April 2nd through April 4th:

Muslim Brotherhood Statement on April 6 Strike – Ikhwan backs general strike on 6 April

Egypt police detain 51 Brotherhood members – More Ikhwan arrests during elections
Egypt police detain 51 Brotherhood members
Protest in Muslim Province in China – After the Tibetans, the Uighurs
Steve Walt's Sacrifice – [...]

How creepy.

The latest Times Literary Supplement has a review piece on several books about al-Qaeda, notably its ideology. Here’s a passage worth highlighting from Jihadi studies:

“Although his discourse has evolved, there are some constants, one of which is Palestine. For some curious reason, there has emerged a perception – particularly in the US – [...]

In light of the recent news that Israel is yet again expanding West Bank settlements (by the way take a look at the wording of the headline and lead on that Post story), it’s worth highlighting an excellent article on the issue in the London Review of Books.
LRB · Henry Siegman: Grab more hills, expand [...]

After the jump is a press release (in French) by Tunisian rights activist Sihem Bensedrine on the release of comic Hedi Ouled Baballah, who recently spent two months in prison for cannabis possession. It’s widely believed by Tunisian NGOs that the real reason for his imprisonment (and the beatings he received at the hands of [...]

Links from my del.icio.us account for March 31st through April 2nd:

Mirror of the Arab World – Sandra Mackey – Book Review – New York Times – This is the NYT: uses Pajamas Media blogger to review Arab world books
Arab Reform Bulletin: April 2008 – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace – The new issue is out [...]

For those who might be interested, I just did a story on the (continuing) bread crisis for the radio program The World.
In my visits to Cairo bakeries last week, I was amused and a bit disconcerted to see to what extent the bread shortage has already become a “sensitive” issue–one that gets enfolded, as [...]

From The Washington Note, where American conservatives are angry at the idea of more forays into the “Koran Zone.”