Hannah Allam has a cool inventory of signs spotted in Baghdad’s Green Zone.
Update: Now Hannah has a list of military acronyms used in Iraq.
Canetti and the Iraq War
Harpers’ Scott Horton has a really good post linking the great writer Elias Canetti, notably his Crowd and Power, and the Bush administration’s emotional management of its war dead. Do read the old Harpers’ review article on Canetti from 1980 too if you can.
Avraham Burg profile
The New Yorker has a profile of Avrahum Burg, the former Knesset speaker turned anti-Zionist, that’s well worth reading even if it contains obvious faults and biases, notably in the first two paragraphs. It also contains some excellent examples of how the Zionist meta-narrative brooks no dissent and savages its opponents by qualifying critiques as “unutterable”:
Soon after the interview was published, Otniel Schneller, a Knesset member from Ehud Olmert’s centrist Kadima Party, said that when Burg dies he should be denied burial in the special section of Mt. Herzl National Cemetery, in Jerusalem, reserved for national leaders. “He had better search for a grave in another country,” Schneller said. One letter to the Jerusalem Post compared Burg to young people who, after military service, go off to India to find their spiritual selves in an ashram. “Yesteryear, Burg would have been disowned as at least a lunatic,” the columnist Sarah Honig wrote in the same paper. “The grave danger is that today he gives voice and lends insidious quasi-respectability to what was heretofore unutterable. By tomorrow, the uncontrollable infestation he spreads might confer outright legitimacy on Israel’s delegitimatization.” If and when Israel’s borders changed, Honig continued, “Burg probably won’t stick around to risk the ensuing slaughter. The new Wandering Jew will pack his sinister seeds and propagate his wicked wandering weeds from afar.”
In some ways I think this article — notably the themes of Holocaust exploitation and the power of the US Lobby — would not have been possible before Norman Finkelstein’s books and the “lobby” essay by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer.
Munif special in new issue of MIT-EJMES
That stands for Massachusetts Institute of Technology Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies and the current issue contains tons of articles on the great novelist Abdel Rahman Munif.
Al-Masri al-Youm’s English edition
While I can only applaud the efforts made by al-Masri al-Youm to provide an English translation for its leading articles, I think I’ll stick to the Arabic edition. The quality of the translation is at times comical, such as when the name of the current American ambassador to Cairo, Francis Ricciardone, is translated as “Francis Richard Dooney” as in here.
Nouveaux philosophes, neo-conservateurs
This fine piece on that moment in French intellectual history, in 1977, that saw the birth of the “nouveaux philosophes” should have pointed out that many of these philosophers (a title undeserved by BHL at least) are now the French equivalent of neo-conservatives: BHL as “liberal interventionist” or Glucksmann as Sarkoziste.
Napoleon’s Egypt
Uber-blogger and Middle East historian Juan Cole has a new blog on Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt, the first modern invasion of the Middle East by a Western power. It’s called Napoleon’s Egypt and goes along with Cole’s new book, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East. Cole is appears to be going through the invasion chronologically, quoting from memoirs and and biographies written at the time — in the excerpt below, from an eye-witness account of how Napoleon came decide on invasion:
‘In the month of August 1797 he [Bonaparte] wrote “that the time was not far distant when we should see that, to destroy the power of England effectually, it would be necessary to attack Egypt.”
In the same month he wrote to Talleyrand, who had just succeeded Charles de Lacroix as Minister of Foreign Affairs, “that it would be necessary to attack Egypt, which did not belong to the Grand Signior [Ottoman Emperor].” Talleyrand replied, “that his ideas respecting Egypt were certainly grand, and that their utility could not fail to be fully appreciated.”
More from that except here.
Lebanese brain drain
LEBANON: One in three Lebanese wants to leave:
BEIRUT, 10 June 2007 (IRIN) – Researchers warn that economic instability and persistent security threats are driving ever more young, educated Lebanese abroad, creating a brain drain that threatens the country’s economic and social future.
“We’re suffering a huge brain drain,” Kamal Hamdan, head of the Lebanese Centre of Research and Studies, told IRIN.
“Those who have the brains take their diplomas and leave. They are the young people who would go on to be middle executives and entrepreneurs. In the long term, their absence means we may face a serious shortage of policy developers and managers.”
Perhaps one of the worst consequences of last summer’s war — it repeated the brain drain caused by the civil war.
Giulani as the neo-con candidate
Rudy Giuliani apparently wants to be known as the neo-con candidate in the US presidential race. I was aghast enough that he chose pro-Israel agitator Martin Kramer as his Middle East advisor, but now he’s gone one step further and taken on grand-daddy of all neo-cons Norman Podhoretz as his foreign policy advisor:
WASHINGTON, July 23 (UPI) — Republican candidate for the presidency Rudy Giuliani, the leading hawk among presidential hopefuls, has appointed Norman Podhoretz senior adviser for foreign policy.
A founding member of the neo-con movement, Podhoretz, in the June issue of Commentary magazine, called for an immediate attack on Iran. Either we bomb Iran now, or “we could wake up one morning to find that Iran is holding Berlin, Paris or London hostage to whatever its demands are then.” The geopolitical label for the process is the “Islamization” of Europe, which neo-cons say is a rerun of Hitler’s conquest of Europe in the 1930s and 40s.
Giuliani’s eight-member foreign policy team also includes Martin Kramer, an Israeli-American expert on Shia Islam at Harvard and a fellow with both the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the Jerusalem-based Shalem Center (“for the development of Zionist thought”). Kramer once said the tendency by American Middle Eastern academics to neglect radical Islam as an issue was partly to blame for the failure to anticipate the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Well, at least we’ll know clearly where he stands. It’s rather alarming, though, considering that Giulani (despite being a well-known nutter) has the potential to appeal beyond the Republican mainstream and cross-over to some Democrats and swing voters because of his more liberal social views, has taken foreign policy advisors that only care about Israel. If he’s elected, we’re not likely to see the same drift on US foreign policy outside the Middle East that we saw during the Bush administration. With these people (and with neo-conservatives more generally) it’s Israel, Israel, Israel.
And here’s Podhoretz foaming-at-the-mouth piece in favor of bombing Iran, which is an interesting example of the paranoid delusional mindframe.
Moustache vendetta
Am in calm, clean Morocco for the summer, but this story made me miss Egypt:
When an elder was kidnapped in a clan dispute in conservative southern Egypt, the al-Arab family’s worst fears were soon realised — they received a package containing his moustache, local media reported on Sunday.
The man himself was returned uninjured, but the use of the new shaving tactic sent shockwaves through the town of Mahrusa, near Luxor, 650km south of Cairo, where a man’s honour is measured by the size of his moustache, the al-Gomhuria daily said.
Return to semi-regular blogging schedule soon.