Month: August 2006

Crap

crap.jpg

Fisk’s latest bit has an interesting fifth paragraph—he claims that Hizbullah is encouraging erstwhile residents of the now flattened southern suburbs of Beirut to rent, not buy. Seems that someone’s thinking tactically here, and has decided that there’s no point in rebuilding quite yet.

Lebanon and Iraq are beginning to look like a giant fire sale, with Iran buying everything in sight, including the matches.

Saad Ibrahim’s op-ed in the Washington Post is worthwhile complimentary reading. Ibrahim points out quite rightly that the White House and its clients are simply being outplayed by the Islamists, and declines to say that this is a bad thing. Not only does he manage to write about the Middle East without getting democracy and electoral politics hopelessly tangled up (check out Fred Kaplan’s “What a moronic presidential press conference� in Slate), but he even uses the word “inimical.�

Kaplan meanwhile treats us to a classic bit of Bush fumble-mouthed idiocy, but is unfortunately disingenuous in his presentation. He claims that Bush is too stupid to understand that terrorism and “democracy” (which Kaplan unhappily conflates with electoral politics) can, and do, mix. Face it: Bush knows the difference between democracy and electoral politics (he’s made a career out of undermining the former with latter), and anybody who works with Karl Rove at home and “shock and awe” bombing campaigns in the great outdoors knows damn well how terrorism and electoral politicking go steel hand in velvet glove.

Unfortunately, Kaplan owns up to this in his last para, where he switches from his thesis (that Bush is a moron who can’t grasp the basic flaw in his own spin) to admitting that it is in fact Bush’s refusal to discuss, rather than his failure to understand, that is getting his goat. In the end it looks like Kaplan who doesn’t see the tree for the forest.

Seems apropos here, if late in the news cycle, to congratulate beleaguered Brit Deputy PM, Stetson wearing Big John Prescott, for his characterization of Bush’s handling of the Middle East: “crap.â€�

Iraq’s “Daily Show”

Another nice AP report by Rawya from Baghdad…

Iraqi reality TV show defies odds in this violence plagued country
By RAWYA RAGEH
BAGHDAD, Iraq– Clad in a beige suit, the TV news anchor fiddles with his glasses as he announces there’s been an explosion: “The microwave blew up in Soha’s face as she was preparing her trademark pizza,” he says.
Jon Stewart, step aside. Welcome Ali Fadhel, rising star of Iraqi spoof news _ or so he hopes. For now, the 24-year-old is a popular contestant on Iraq’s new hit reality television show “Saya Wa Surmaya,” or “Fame and Fortune.”

Continue reading Iraq’s “Daily Show”

11 killed in another bus crash, as govt seeks revamping railways

From Reuters…

Egypt seeks $1.5 bln to revamp railways after crash
By Abdel Sattar Hatita
CAIRO, Aug 23 (Reuters) – Egypt, reeling from its worst train disaster in four years, scrambled on Wednesday to find $1.5 billion to overhaul its antiquated rail network.
Fifty eight people were killed and scores injured on Monday when two commuter trains collided in the Nile Delta town of Qalyoub. Egypt’s state news agency said the accident happened after one of the drivers apparently failed to heed a signal.
Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif had ordered Transport Minister Mohamed Lutfi Mansour to report preliminary findings on the crash by Wednesday. But Mansour gave no hint of the cause in an address to a parliamentary committee convened for the accident.
A cabinet spokesman said the preliminary results were now expected to be released later in the evening or on Thursday.
Mansour told the committee he would dip into proceeds from the $2.9 billion sale of Egypt’s third mobile phone license to help pay for the rail revamp.
He said 5 billion Egyptian pounds ($871 million) would be drawn from the mobile proceeds, and the government would borrow the remainder of the total $1.5 billion that the overhaul is expected to cost.
The money will pay to upgrade equipment, improve maintenance and revamp old engines or buy new ones, Mansour said. It would also go toward installing automated crossings and linking the rail networks by computer.
Mansour said he had initially submitted to parliament in June a plan for upgrading the railways, but it had not been carried out.
In a statement, the transport ministry said Mansour had previously warned of potential danger on the railways.
The train crash in the town of Qalyoub, which prompted Mansour to fire the head of the state railway authority, was Egypt’s worst rail accident since 2002, when a fire ripped through a crowded passenger train, killing about 360 people.
Since Monday’s crash, a string of accidents have hit Egypt’s transport industry. Eleven Israeli Arab tourists were killed on Tuesday when their tour bus flipped on a dangerous curve in the Sinai Peninsula. Earlier that day, a sleeper train collided with a tractor south of Cairo, injuring two people.
Security sources said on Wednesday a further 11 Egyptians were killed overnight and nine injured when a bus in a wedding convoy flipped into a waterway near the southern city of Aswan.

Only a few hours to go before Armageddon

Since today is 22 August, and we all know what that means, am kind of surprised the end of the world hasn’t come yet… What’s up Ahmedinejad? Get on with it already.

Then I started thinking about it, trying to emulate the great mind of Bernard Lewis. The threat might not be literal, but something more insidious, more perverse. Imagine an Iranian sleeper agent with a mission to bring down Western society. Imagine someone who, perhaps more than anyone at the moment, represents the kind of Western decadence Sayyid Qutb and the Ayatollah Khomeini were warning against.

Wait… could this be a sign?

Paris Hilton is releasing her album Paris on Tuesday, though for the 25-year-old hotel heiress, socialite and star of The Simple Life, making music is nothing new, she reveals.

“When I was little,” she tells Blender magazine for its September issue, she was forced to practice piano, violin and guitar “every day … since I was 11. My mom made me.”

All the practice seems to have paid off: Of her new album, she tells the magazine: “I, like, cry, when I listen to it, it’s so good.”

It gets worse:

Paris Hilton is leaving her promiscuous past behind her and is trying to encourage women to join her on her “no sex for a year” pledge.

Paris said recently: “It’s sexier when a girl is flirty but she doesn’t do anything.”

“I think women should be confident and strong, and they often underestimate themselves and give in to men.”

Paris Hilton is on a jihad against Western men, clearly. Against all their senses. For didn’t Nostradamus write:

Quatrain 1.39

By night in bed the supreme one strangled,
The elevated blonde, for too great an involvement:
By three the empire is surrogated and enslaved,
To death, neither letter nor packet read.

Ah, Bernard… you’re so lucky to be over 80.

Paris Satanism
Paris Hilton makes the sign of the Beast. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Another black day for the transportation ministry

I’m receiving news there is some nasty bus accident that happened in Sinai today, with casualties.

UPDATE: Here is a Reuters report on the bus crash…

Up to nine Israeli Arabs die in Egypt tour bus crash
By Cynthia Johnston
CAIRO, Aug 22 (Reuters) – Up to nine Israeli Arabs were killed on Tuesday and 39 injured when their tour bus overturned in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Egyptian officials said, the latest in a string of Egyptian transport accidents.
Egypt’s Interior Ministry said five people had died in the crash on a road near the holiday resort town of Nuweiba. Medical and security officials put the death toll at nine.
Medical sources said seven of the injured were in a critical condition.
The crash was the third in two days to hit Egypt’s transport network. Also on Tuesday, a sleeper train collided with a tractor south of Cairo, injuring two people.
On Monday, 58 people were killed in a collision between two commuter trains in Egypt’s worst rail disaster in four years.

AND ANOTHER TRAIN ACCIDENT!!!!! MESH MOMKEN!

Egyptian train collides with tractor: two injured
By Summer Said
CAIRO, Aug 22 (Reuters) – An Egyptian sleeper train collided with a tractor south of Cairo on Tuesday, injuring two people, a day after 58 people were killed in Egypt’s worst rail disaster for four years, security sources said.
Police arrested the train driver after the collision, one of the sources said.
The collision, in the town of Beni Suef 100 km (60 miles) south of Cairo, derailed two carriages and caused panic among passengers.
In Monday’s crash in the Nile Delta town of Qalyoub, a driver apparently ignored a signal and a commuter train ploughed into the rear of another.
Relatives have claimed the bodies of 55 of the dead but three remained unidentified, health officials said.
Tuesday’s collision occurred shortly after Egypt appointed a new head of the state railway authority. The previous head, Hanafi Abdel-Qawi, was fired on Monday and his deputy suspended pending an investigation into the accident.
Transport Minister Mohamed Mansour is due to report the preliminary results of the investigation on Wedesday.
Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif has pledged that anyone found to have been negligent will be held to account.
The crash on Monday was the worst rail accident in Egypt since 360 people were killed in 2002 when fire ripped through seven carriages of a crowded passenger train.

The only good “transportation” news I heard today, was that one of my friends made it from his bedroom to the bathroom safely, without any accidents. He decided to walk.

SMS culture in Iraq

My friend Rawya wrote a very interesting piece form Baghdad on Cellular phones culture in Iraq…

Texting, ring tones all the rage in Iraq
By RAWYA RAGEH, Associated Press Writer
Sun Aug 20, 2:45 PM ET
Beep, beep, beep. Then the text comes: “President Bush calls for a timetable for the withdrawal of the Iraqi people from Iraq.”
It’s not a news update. It’s Omar Abdul Kareem’s relentlessly beeping cell phone — and one of the 20 or so humorous text messages he gets every day from his friends.
In a city bereft of entertainment, text messaging and swapping ringtones are all the rage for young Iraqis trying to lighten their lives. Most restaurants, cafes and movies have closed due to the country’s security situation.
The content of the text messages and ringtones speak volumes about the state of affairs here: jokes and songs about suicide bombings, sectarianism, power outages, gas prices, Saddam Hussein and George Bush.
Cell phone shops, the only crowded stores these days, sell special CDs with ringtones at about $2 apiece. Collections of short jokes especially written for texters are best-sellers.
Iraqis fiddling with their cell phones on the streets look like New Yorkers hooked on iPods.
“It’s not like there’s much to do around here,” Abdul Kareem said. “It’s perhaps the only venue to express ourselves.”
The suave 22-year-old security guard carries a cutting-edge Nokia 3250 with a camera and twisting base. He used to buy $60 worth of prepaid phone cards a month to text with his girlfriend — until they broke up.
After sending her a lot of “I miss you” texts, he’s moved on. Now he sends his aunt dozens of jokes, most of them at the expense of ethnic Kurds.
The daily reality of violence and explosions has influenced every aspect of Iraqi life — including love notes. “I send you the tanks of my love, bullets of my admiration and a rocket of my yearning,” one popular message reads.
A popular ringtone features the music from Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise.” But the local version includes a voice similar to Saddam’s rapping in English: “I’m Saddam, I don’t have a bomb/Bush wants to kick me/I don’t know why/smoking weed and getting high/I know the devil’s by my side.”
The song concludes with: “My days are over and I’m gonna die/all I need is chili fries” as a crowd yells “Goodbye forever, may God curse you.”
Competing with Saddam for the most popular song in Iraq today is Iraqi pop star Hossam al-Rassam — “Ma, I’ve been stung by a scorpion.” Its sensual lyrics challenge widespread conservatism in Iraq by talking about a girl’s lips and perfume “that make you live longer.”
Rasha Tareq, 23, has al-Rassam’s ringtone, as well as dozens of others by Lebanese singers. The most expensive ringtones include songs by Egyptian pop star Amr Diab.
“Ah, well, Dad pays for all that,” she said.
Dad also paid for her Nokia 7660 as well as the eight other models she has bought since cell phones first hit the market after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
Rasha says her only source of entertainment used to be trips to Baghdad’s Mutanabi Street on Fridays to buy downloads and joke books for her cell phone. But since a Friday morning curfew was imposed a few months ago, she has had to limit herself to nearby stores.
“Though not as good as the stuff on Mutanabi Street, there’s at least three stores in every block,” she said. “Texting my girlfriends is my only hobby.”
But cell phones in Iraq aren’t just about being cool.
Some Iraqis use their cell phones to make political statements, with ringtones like “Mawtini,” or “My Land,” — Iraq’s pre-Saddam national anthem. Others favor jingles believed to be sung by members of the Shiite Mahdi Army militia.
Because of the popularity of text messages, political parties used them as a way to campaign during parliamentary elections last year. Currently, an Iraqi non-governmental organization texts Iraqis, urging them to “confront violence with peace.”
The tech-savvy insurgents have also gotten in on the act, making threats through text messages sent from Web sites, which makes it hard to track down the source.
Abdul Kareem, the security guard, says he texts his mother around the clock — “especially if I’m out late, you know, with all the bombs going off everywhere.”

Nice one ya Rubi…

Hamzawy: Democracy lost

That Amr Hamzawy — he’s so hot right now (you have watched Zoolander, haven’t you?):

This widening ideological divide between ruling elites and oppositions will make it more difficult to adopt political reform measures, which require at least some consensus and flexibility on both sides. More troubling is that the positions of putatively democratic Arab opposition movements on the war in Lebanon have exposed their totalitarian and populist tendencies. There is a great difference between adopting a rational discourse that rightly condemns the Israeli military for its crimes against civilians and criticizes unconditional American acceptance of the war, and cheering the death of Israeli civilians as a step toward the destruction of the “Zionist entity.” This goes beyond the tendency of Islamist and pan-Arab opposition movements to opportunistically capitalize on popular feelings to rally support. It shows that these movements lack a key characteristic of reformist political forces: a willingness to combat ideologies of hatred and extremism rather than using them for political advantage.

Furthermore, although they call for democratic reform in Arab countries, Islamist and pan-Arab movements have failed to acknowledge the fundamentally non-democratic nature of the actions of Lebanon’s Hizbullah. By unilaterally making a decision of war and peace on July 12, Hizbullah confiscated the right of Lebanon’s government, of which it is part, to determine the country’s fate. Israel’s response , by targeting infrastructure and the civilian population, was surely extreme, legitimizing resistance; however, Hizbullah acted like a state within a state, taking advantage of the weakness of Lebanon’s formal institutions and transgressing the principle of consensual decision-making.

The regional shadows of the war in Lebanon will persist for many years. They may well be a long and painful reminder that the hope for any near-term democratic transformation of the Arab world was perhaps the greatest loser in a war that produced tremendous damage on all sides.

Harsh words indeed. While I agree with him that Hizbullah acted irresponsibly on 12 July, it’s quite a stretch to say that it took a decision of war and peace. It was Israel that took the decision to escalate the conflict into a full-scale war. As for the opposition being opportunistic in capitalizing on the Hizbullah-Lebanon war for local advantage, I don’t really see that as a problem (they’re politicians, after all) as much as some of the delusions about this war. But there is a real concern in that the opposition does not realize that cheering for Hizbullah is a dead-end street: there is no real support in Egypt (and I suspect in all other Arab countries) for going to war against Israel. The need for a rational discourse about the region is indeed great, and it would have been nice to see less grandstanding from certain parts of the Nasserist left (which does indeed have totalitarian impulses). But it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg argument: can you have a quality democratic debate in the absence of democracy and when the only avenue open to dissidents is populism? Rational debate lost out on all sides here: in both the Arab world and in Israel (actually, particularly in Israel), jingoism triumphed.