Links February 17th to February 18th

Links from my del.icio.us account for February 17th through February 18th:

• Arts diary, Charlotte Higgins: Churchill's Gaza play accused of antisemitism | Culture | The Guardian - Anti-semitism, anti-Shmemitism: play accused of 'blood libel' because it refers to 'dead babies' in Gaza.


• Assad urges US to restore Damascus envoy | World news | guardian.co.uk - Guardian talks to Bashar al-Assad about Obama, engagement, etc.


• POMED Notes: Rashid Khalidi - Rashid Khalidi lecture on Israel-Palestine, regional powers, international law.


• Memo From Cairo - Egypt’s Critics Have a Voice, but Never the Last Word - NYTimes.com - Good article in the NYT looking at bloggers' emprisonment but getting to the more general bottom line: Egypt is a police state, and one where there is no other vision than continuing being a police state.


• Watch That Welcome - washingtonpost.com - WaPo tells Obama not to visit Cairo or receive Mubarak in Washington unless progress is shown on democratic reforms.


• A child of Cairo's streets, with a child of her own - Los Angeles Times - Just read it.


• The Empty Quarter: news and analysis of southern arabia - Another interesting Arabian Peninsula blog, focusing on security issues.


• The Daily Star - Opinion Articles - In Morocco, anger at Arab collusion against Gaza - "In the face of this organized hypocrisy, the average Moroccan, Algerian, Libyan or Egyptian citizen was stuck with two unpalatable choices: to support or join forces with radical liberation or transnational revolutionary movements whose lack of a coherent strategic vision has brought chaos and destabilization to large swaths of Arab land; or to continue to bow down to a power structure dominated by corrupt and dependent authoritarian regimes. The causes of these dangerously conflicting and, at times, polarizing sentiments of the masses about their predicament have existed for generations, though the hardening of the rift between the two extremes has never been revealed with such stark acuity as it was during the Gaza confrontation."


• Islam and Insurgency in Yemen - New blog on Yemen, focusing on insurgency and Islamist movements.


• A new enemy for Gaza smugglers - Los Angeles Times - "The Egyptian people are our brothers," Abu Baraa says. "The government is a collaborator."


• Always on the side of the egg - Haaretz - Israel News - Acceptance speech of Haruki Murakami, Japanese novelist who was awarded Israel's Jerusalem award, in which he comments (ambiguously?) on the Gaza war and thoughts of boycotting: "Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."


• Sudan’s top novelist dies in London at 80 - Al-Tayyib Salih, author of 'Season of Migration to the North', passes away. There was a campaign to get him nominated for the Nobel before he passed away, as his work is thought to be among the most important in modern Arabic literature.


• BBC NEWS | Programmes | File on 4 | What was Egypt's real Gaza role? - Good radio program on Egypt's role during the Gaza crisis.


• Bourdain and the Public Face of Egypt - Mango Girl links to a food show by celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, shot in Egypt, in which he gets yelled at for showing an interest in street food rather than "respectable" tourist restaurants.