Friend of the blog Nir Rosen, who wrote a recent article about the Taliban for Rolling Stone (for which he embedded himself with the a Taliban platoon), is under attack for lack of patriotism. Rosen has been under attack before, since he views the recent US wars as imperialist (that’s what he told Joe Biden) [...]

This is an actual sentence from a CNN report on Sarah Palin attacking Barack Obama over his relationship with eminent Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi:
Khalidi has been a stern critic of United States foreign policy towards Israel and has accused the country of “occupying” Palestinian territories, but he has denied acting as a spokesman for the [...]

Boss Hosni has ordered the release of al-Destour editor Ibrahim Eissa, who was recently jailed for writing this:
The president in Egypt is a god and gods don’t get sick. Thus, President Mubarak, those surrounding him, and the hypocrites hide his illness and leave the country prey to rumors. It is not a serious illness. It’s [...]

Don’t miss this interesting two-part al-Jazeera English report on the ties between the Pentagon and Hollywood, the defense interests of major media companies and the public impact of propaganda movies about war.

Part I
Will update this post with Part II when it becomes available.
Update: Here’s Part II:

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Khaled Hamza is the editor of www.ikhwanweb.com , the Muslim Brothers’ impressive English website. I met Khaled several months ago and he’s a very affable, intelligent man. Last week he was arrested after meeting a human rights activist in the Nasr City neighborhood of Cairo and thus become the latest Egyptian web activist to be [...]

Ahmed Senoussi, the Moroccan comedian better known as Bziz, appeared on al-Jazeera’s “bila hudud” talk show yesterday to talk about the Arab information minister’s recent decree introducing a “code of ethics” for Arab satellite stations. The result is hilarious — just wait through the first eight minutes or so as the host sets up the [...]

Kudos to Jazeera for condemning the recently announced “ethical charter” for Arab satellite stations:

Al Jazeera calls Charter issued by the Arab League’s Minister’s of Information a risk to the freedom of expression in the Arab world
DOHA, Qatar, February 15, 2008: Al Jazeera considers the adoption of the charter “Principles for Regulating Satellite TV in [...]

Last week, during discussion with a fairly senior Egyptian journalist, I was told that the Egyptian Ministry of Information had just finished a preparing a new “code of ethics” in order to puts limits on what satellite TV stations could broadcast, especially when the topic was political in nature. This idea has come about as [...]

Here’s Ulrich Ladurner of Die Zeit (one of Germany’s largest and most influential papers) travelling to a remote Iranian province to find out whether Ahmadinejad’s promises to improve life in the country’s regions were fulfilled.
(Which is a laudable intention, as few bother to look at the country beyond nuclear bomb issue.)
The article simply ends [...]

Reading the New York Times’ editorials on Annapolis, full of praise for “moderates” and worrying about who shook whose hand, I am reminded of why I barely read that newspaper anymore. The reporting is occasionally good, such as the very nice long feature on radicalism in northern Morocco a few days ago, but when it [...]

I just got my satellite dish repaired and was surfing the channels. I came across Rob Satloff interviewing Dennis Ross about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. So basically Satloff, head of the pro-Israel think tank WINEP, interviews Ross, former pro-Israel American diplomat who is spending his exile at… wait for it… WINEP. What channel was this? [...]

I went up the tubes that make up the internets and found these:
Letter from Iraq: Inside the Surge - The New Yorker - The new US strategy in Iraq
Hidden Costs’ Double Price Of Two Wars, Democrats Say - WaPo - Bush lied about that too
Good news from Gaza - Haaretz - Hamas getting more like [...]

I’ve been wanting to put up for a while this audio file of Ibrahim Eissa’s speech at the massive press conference at the Journalists’ Syndicate on September 14th. Here is one (poorly) translated excerpt.
“We succeeded in saving the soul of this umma, which seemed about to die in the hospital of President Mubarak, and which has [...]

Two pieces about Egypt’s current press clampdown are worth reading in light of yesterday’s press strike. Egypt: September of discontent by Amira Howeidy puts the pressure on the press in the current political context:
The problem now is that the authorities seem convinced that the private press, especially al Dostour, has more power than the state [...]