The Lebanese authorities, like every country, issue out statistics on various economic indicators. Below is the chart that shows the number of employment permits issued for various professions between 2003 and 2005. Click to get a bigger image and look at under “specialized professions,” where there is a category for “knight.” A holdover from the Crusades?
Iranian Internet users face blockage during coming election – IHT | Iran contemplaying turning internet off during elections
Rough justice for Egypt’s Brotherhood | Very nice interview of Khairat al-Shater’s daughter about ongoing arrests
Wal-Mart: Arab-America’s Store | Dearborn, MI Wal-Mart stocks Arab food
Overcoming ‘Fitna’ | Former US democracy promotion chief on Egypt’s role towards Dutch film / Danish cartoons
The Gaza Bombshell: vanityfair.com | How the US funded Dahlan’s coup attempt against Hamas
Rice Waives Withholding Of Aid To Egypt Over Human Rights | US ends only sanction taken against anti-democratic backlash in Egypt
Islamists Today: Suppressing the Muslim Brotherhood is not a solution | Khalil al-Enani argues suppression will encourage Salafism
Vanity’s Fair? – On The Plane | Why is Rice not commenting on Vanity Fair article?
It’s called Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution and seems to be a journalistic account, rather than an academic one, that captures the recent buzz on Egypt. But these books, while compelling to the readers, often miss out on deep trends and tend to exaggerate about things always being on the brink of collapse. But then again, many Egyptians believe that’s case — as the press reminds us daily.
Here’s the review from Kirkus:
The author doesn’t dwell too long on Egypt’s storied past. Instead, he gives a blistering overview of what it’s like to live today in this autocratic, hopelessly corrupt society. The Egypt he depicts is a place where anyone can be jailed or tortured at any time for no reason, where Islamic fundamentalism is slowly gaining a foothold among people formerly proud of their diverse heritage, where in some places the only viable form of employment for young men is prostitution, both gay and straight. Bradley also examines why the United States spends $2 billion per year propping up President Hosni Mubarak (“the third-longest-ruling Egyptian leader in the past four thousand years”), despite his crackdowns on anything approaching democracy and his blatant favoring of anything that will bring in more tourist dollars over the best interests of the Egyptian populace. Mubarak is able to gin up American interest, the author notes, by playing up the threat of the Muslim Brotherhood, a nominally political organization that provides social services far more efficiently than the government does and wants to reinstate the Caliphate. Needless to say, Bradley isn’t hopeful about the future, fearing that an Iranian-style theocracy is in the cards for a once-proud nation whose pedigree dates back more than 5,000 years.
Unlikely to win the author any friends among the Egyptian political elite, but terrifically well told and extremely sobering.
Update: I’m told that the author is a quite well-respected journalist — am looking forward to reading this book.
Cairo-based journalist Jeffrey Black, who is currently in Yemen, has a new blog: Middle East Diaries.
(Speaking of Yemen, a radio journalist friend of mine who left for Sanaa yesterday told me she was going to look into a Yemeni movement that aims to take the US to international arbitration courts because of the probes NASA has landed on Mars (the red planet). Their argument, you see, is that Yemen has prior claim to Mars and therefore NASA should have asked permission. Has anyone heard about this?)
Khaled Hamza is the editor of www.ikhwanweb.com , the Muslim Brothers’ impressive English website. I met Khaled several months ago and he’s a very affable, intelligent man. Last week he was arrested after meeting a human rights activist in the Nasr City neighborhood of Cairo and thus become the latest Egyptian web activist to be imprisoned. Even for those who don’t agree with the MB’s religious, political or social views, Khaled is the type of person you wish you saw more often in Egyptian journalistic life. The way Ikhwanweb has been run, notably the inclusion of many points of views that are critical of the Ikhwan, is a testimony to his own open-mindedness (note to current MB leaders: you could learn something here about not being thin-skinned, as you were when your political program was criticized).
There is an online petition calling for Hamza’s release here.
Update: What he says.
Israeli leaders are warning of an imminent conflagration in Gaza after Palestinian militants aimed rockets at the southern city of Ashkelon.
The deputy defence minister said the stepped-up rocket fire would trigger what he called a “bigger holocaust” in the Hamas-controlled coastal strip.
Israeli air strikes have killed about 30 Palestinians, including six children in the past two days.
. . .
“The more [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves,” Matan Vilnai told Israeli army radio.
Correspondents say the “holocaust” is a term rarely used in Israel outside discussions of the Nazi genocide during World War II.
[From BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israel warns of Gaza ‘holocaust’]
MEMRI has this fantastic Iranian Ministry of Intelligence public information video on the American-Zionist conspiracy to pervert Iranian youth and what YOU (i.e. concerned Iranian patriotic citizen) can do about it. Watch it all now.
From Nir Rosen’s The Myth of the Surge in Rolling Stone, on the co-optation of former insurgents that had caused a decline in violence over the past year in Iraq :
But loyalty that can be purchased is by its very nature fickle. Only months ago, members of the Awakening were planting IEDs and ambushing U.S. soldiers. They were snipers and assassins, singing songs in honor of Fallujah and fighting what they viewed as a war of national liberation against the foreign occupiers. These are men the Americans described as terrorists, Saddam loyalists, dead-enders, evildoers, Baathists, insurgents. There is little doubt what will happen when the massive influx of American money stops: Unless the new Iraqi state continues to operate as a vast bribing machine, the insurgent Sunnis who have joined the new militias will likely revert to fighting the ruling Shiites, who still refuse to share power.
“We are essentially supporting a quasi-feudal devolution of authority to armed enclaves, which exist at the expense of central government authority,” says Chas Freeman, who served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush. “Those we are arming and training are arming and training themselves not to facilitate our objectives but to pursue their own objectives vis-a-vis other Iraqis. It means that the sectarian and ethnic conflicts that are now suppressed are likely to burst out with even greater ferocity in the future.”
Maj. Pat Garrett, who works with the 2-2 Stryker Cavalry Regiment, is already having trouble figuring out what to do with all the new militiamen in his district. There are too few openings in the Iraqi security forces to absorb them all, even if the Shiite-dominated government agreed to integrate them. Garrett is placing his hopes on vocational-training centers that offer instruction in auto repair, carpentry, blacksmithing and English. “At the end of the day, they want a legitimate living,” Garrett says. “That’s why they’re joining the ISVs.”
But men who have taken up arms to defend themselves against both the Shiites and the Americans won’t be easily persuaded to abandon their weapons in return for a socket wrench. After meeting recently in Baghdad, U.S. officials concluded in an internal report, “Most young Concerned Local Citizens would probably not agree to transition from armed defenders of their communities to the local garbage men or rubble cleanup crew working under the gaze of U.S. soldiers and their own families.” The new militias have given members of the Awakening their first official foothold in occupied Iraq. They are not likely to surrender that position without a fight. The Shiite government is doing little to find jobs for them, because it doesn’t want them back, and violence in Iraq is already starting to escalate. By funding the ISVs and rearming the Sunnis who were stripped of their weapons at the start of the occupation, America has created a vast, uncoordinated security establishment. If the Shiite government of Iraq does not allow Sunnis in the new militias to join the country’s security forces, warns one leader of the Awakening, “It will be worse than before.”
An interesting piece with a lot of surprisingly negative commentary by US forces and officials — read it all.
Ahmed Senoussi, the Moroccan comedian better known as Bziz, appeared on al-Jazeera’s “bila hudud” talk show yesterday to talk about the Arab information minister’s recent decree introducing a “code of ethics” for Arab satellite stations. The result is hilarious — just wait through the first eight minutes or so as the host sets up the gag.
[Thanks, Abdurahman]
Links for February 20th through February 21st: