Month: January 2009

Links for January 18th

Links from my del.icio.us account for January 18th:

Links January 14th to January 17th

Links from my del.icio.us account for January 14th through January 17th:

Links January 13th to January 14th

Links from my del.icio.us account for January 13th through January 14th:

Olmert’s diktat

Thanks to Ehud Olmert for making the point that Israel calls the shots in the US when it comes to Middle East policy:

Israel’s Olmert says Rice was embarrassed by an order to abstain from UN vote
By JASON KEYSER
Associated Press Writer

JERUSALEM (AP) _ Israel’s prime minister said Monday that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was embarrassed after being ordered to abstain from voting for a U.N. cease-fire resolution that she helped arrange.
Israel had described the resolution calling for a halt to the Gaza fighting as unworkable because it did not guarantee Israel’s security, and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he was key in persuading the United States, a close ally, to abstain.
The resolution, passed Thursday in a 14-0 vote, “calls for an immediate, durable and fully respected cease-fire, leading to the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.”
“I said: ‘Get me President Bush on the phone,'” Olmert said Monday in a speech in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon. “They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care: ‘I need to talk to him now.’ He got off the podium and spoke to me.”
Olmert said he told Bush that the United States should not vote in favor, and the U.S. president then called Rice and told her not to do so.
“She was left pretty embarrassed,” Olmert said, referring to Rice.
A senior U.S. official disputed the account.
“The government of Israel does not make policy for the United States,” the official said on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the diplomacy.
A day after the vote, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki said he was surprised by the U.S. abstention.
“We were told that the Americans were going to vote in favor,” he said.
But when Rice came in to the Security Council chamber, she informed the Saudi foreign minister with an apology that she would abstain and would clarify later that the U.S. supported the resolution nonetheless, according to Malki.
“What happened in the last 10 or 15 minutes, what kind of pressure she received, from whom, this is really something that maybe we will know about later,” he said on Friday. The vote was delayed for about 45 minutes, apparently waiting
for Rice to return to the council chamber.
Rice said after the vote that the United States “fully supports” the resolution but abstained because it “thought it important to see the outcomes of the Egyptian mediation,” referring to an Egyptian-French initiative aimed at achieving a cease-fire.

So even though the Americans were behind this UN resolution initiative, their entire efforts were rendered pointless by one order from Olmert to Bush. Sometimes it’s nice to have such clarity on how this “special relationship” between Israel and the US works.

Link to another version of this story here and here.

حمدي ابو جليل/Hamdi Abu Gulail

I read on the Literary Saloon a while back that Hamdi Abu Gulail’s new book الفاعل won the Naguib Mahfouz Award from AUC. The good people at the Saloon also did some complaining over the lack of information about the award and the various and unpredictable spellings of Abu Gulail’s name. Their “plea for uniform transliteration,” which I completely support, is however unlikely to be answered anytime soon. 

I’d be curious if there is a consistent transliteration system from other non-European languages that have their own different script, like Chinese. When it comes to Arabic, even within academia there seems to be no single consistent system. And everyone else pretty much wings it, like I did in the title for this post. 

But back to Abu Gulail. I just finished the previous book by this young Bedouin author, لصوص متقاعدون (“Retired Thieves”, available from University of Syracuse), and was very pleasantly surprised. It’s sort of unstructured (mostly it’s the observations of a tenant in a building in the slum of Manshiat Nasr about his neighbors, and in particular his landlord’s semi-criminal family) but there are some very funny, well-observed vignettes and a real originality to the voice and the plot. Abu Gulail makes his protagonist a young Bedouin new to the city, and I’d say one of the book’s strengths is how well he captures the latent menace and manipulation in many Egyptian social relations, and the importance of the boundaries between “insiders” and “outsiders.”

I don’t know anything about Abu Gulail’s latest and award-winning novel (I don’t even know how to translate the title: The Doer? The Agent? The Subject?) except that it is currently being translated for AUC Press by our old friend and Arabist extraordinaire Robin Moger. Keep an eye out for it.

Links for January 12th

Links from my del.icio.us account for January 12th:

Links January 9th to January 12th

Links from my del.icio.us account for January 9th through January 12th:

Links for January 8th

Links from my del.icio.us account for January 8th:

Jon Stewart on America, the media, and Gaza

Perhaps the most balanced, incisive, and interesting commentary on how the Gaza crisis has been handled in the US:

Links January 7th to January 8th

Links from my del.icio.us account for January 7th through January 8th: