I am currently in Rome attending a conference, so I will not be able to post much this week. I apologize to all those who left comments in the past few days — I’ll add some of my own thoughts soon. I’ll also have a few comments on the conference, although I probably won’t be able to say much as it was confidential and not generally open to the press, as there are both Arabs and Israelis who may not want to be identified. More on that soon.
Just out of curiosity, do the Arabs who don’t want to be identified include a preponderance of Egyptians and Syrians?
to get rid of this “internet-casino”-spam-shit you can use
http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/
But use the 1.x-version as log this
http://www.jayallen.org/comment_spam/2004/11/critical_bug_dont_delete_weblogs
is not solved.
Thanks Shual for the tip. I think I’ve already been using this but these latest ones did not get caught. There’s a bunch of site maintenance I need to do but I have been too busy lately.
Hopefully by next week I will have time for a little makeover of the site engine and some cosmetic changes I’ve been wanting to do too.
The link list also needs to be updated…
Jonathan,
There were no Syrians and the Egyptians were either serving or retired ambassadors so it’s not that kind of reluctance to be identified. I think it’s more that the kind of people who attended do not want the conference to be official so that what they say is not linked to the institutions they represent, as they may have personal doubts about policies that they have to enforce. This goes for the Israelis and Arabs as well as the Europeans.
As I said, I promise to write a bit more on this soon, including some thoughts on the Israeli left — there were a bunch of Peace Now types there — and about Israeli Arabs. One thing though, that may be of interest, was that there was an almost universal agreement by these people — activists, policy wonks, and policymakers — that the war on Iraq is a disaster with no end in sight.