Manal and Alaa's bit bucket

I have officially joined the movement and placed my order for a few of the ‘We will not be silent‘ t-shirts made famous by Raed’s ordeal. You can order your very own, by emailing: wewillnotbesilent[AT]gmail.com.Basically, Raed was stopped at the airport and asked to change his t-shirt because it read “We will not be silent” [...]

Live, from New York, it’s CNN’s anchorwoman having a little chat in the bathroom while President Bush is on air. Too, too good. It could have been so much better. Video here. New York Post story (their masters came up with the headline ‘Flush and Bush’) is here.Technorati Tags: Bush, CNN, Kyra Phillips

“About 200 Kiss fans protested Saturday in front of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum to demand that the band be inducted into the hall.”—AP

The United States and France have finally agreed on the text of a draft Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon. But wait, there’s more:Mr Bolton said the text did not include a requirement for an immediate cessation of hostilities.But it does call for “the immediate cessation by Hezbollah of all attacks [...]

So asks The Forward in its Aug. 4 editorial, albeit obliquely and while wrapping itself in white and blue. This is an overtly Zionist paper with a Yiddish edition and roots in the turn-of-the-century New York immigrant Jewish socialist movement. So this editorial—written in response to misgivings about the war and the fatal shooting in [...]

Lest there was any doubt that the savagery inflicted upon Lebanon does not have US neo-conservative hands behind it, this article should do the trick.The US intelligence agency, the National Security Agency (NSA), is providing intelligence to Israel about the possibility of Syria and Iran assisting Hezbullah with weapons. The article does not reveal whether [...]

Better late than never, but try telling that to the dead:Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice expressed support Thursday for an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon as the first phase in ending the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. It was the most concrete signal yet that the U.S. may be willing to compromise on the stalemate over [...]

I want one…Windows users with time on their hands, download the software and have fun. Bloggers, don’t feed the trolls.Technorati Tags: Israel, israel lobby

Reviving this from two years ago because it recently came up in conversation and because it’s still funny. Originally from The New York Observer.Write your own Thomas Friedman column!1. Choose your title to intrigue the reader through its internal conflicta. War and Peasb. Osama, Boulevardierc. Big Problems, Little Women2. Include a dateline from a remote [...]

Reviving this from two years ago because it recently came up in conversation and because it’s still funny. Originally from The New York Observer.Write your own Thomas Friedman column!1. Choose your title to intrigue the reader through its internal conflicta. War and Peasb. Osama, Boulevardierc. Big Problems, Little Women2. Include a dateline from a remote [...]

Today’s hero: He’s stark, raving, and like all psychotics, boring. Can you guess who today’s Strangelovian psychopath is?Send links for the next installment.

Today’s hero: He’s stark, raving, and like all psychotics, boring. Can you guess who today’s Strangelovian psychopath is?Send links for the next installment.

The news is hazardous this week. While the bombing continued in Lebanon and Israel, one hundred Iraqi civilians were killed over the past 24 hours.Here in Cairo, everyone I talk to seems to be sinking into depression. All conversations eventually turn to the war. “Have you heard anything since this afternoon?” For a few minutes [...]

The news is hazardous this week. While the bombing continued in Lebanon and Israel, one hundred Iraqi civilians were killed over the past 24 hours.Here in Cairo, everyone I talk to seems to be sinking into depression. All conversations eventually turn to the war. “Have you heard anything since this afternoon?” For a few minutes [...]

St. George’s BayThe news from Lebanon looks worse and worse. Friends in Beirut are busy trying to get out. Problem is, there’s no way out. The airport’s bombed, there’s a naval blockade, and all roads out of the country are bombed out. So they’re trying to get to the mountains in the Christian North. I [...]

Look, Ma, no Photoshop! Thanks to Lawrence for going out of the way to take this picture.Technorati Tags: Egypt, Pyramid, Pizza Hut

Astounding.Technorati Tags: Egypt, aid, United States

I’m late to this party, but finally found time to read Michael Massing’s “The Storm over the Israel Lobby” in the New York Review of Books today. If you haven’t already, read it.Technorati Tags: Israel, AIPAC, lobby

Thanks to Nutgraph for noticing this quote from Egypt’s Foreign Ministry, penned in response to a statement from the U.S. State Department on Ayman Nour’s latest date in court.Egypt’s foreign ministry said on Friday it was “astonished at the manner taken by the official spokesman of the American foreign ministry,” which “implied an affront to [...]

At this risk of burying the lede, let me start with the event at the center of today’s violence. Today in Cairo, two outspoken, senior judges refused to appear before an extraordinary disciplinary board convened to punish them for speaking out against vote-rigging and voter intimidation in last year’s elections because they could not bring [...]

Just landed in Amrika, got this in my email, and was reminded of why this country, for all its problems, is still a pretty amazing place: Because you can do this. Can you imagine Ibrahim Eissa doing something similar to Mubarak’s face on Nile TV?Technorati Tags: bush, colbert, united states

Currently buried under mountains of work, but just wanted to flag two items of interest: 1) The government says it has arrested 22 men it said were planning bomb attacks in Egypt (see Reuters’ story). 2) VOA’s entry for Best Headline, 2006, “U.S. Push for Democracy in the Middle East Going Through a Slow Phase.” [...]

The wolves are circling around U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Great. Hope they eat him. But the swing in sentiment against him makes me tired. Back when most Americans polled thought the war Iraq was a swell idea and sat around the dinner table cursing the French, Rumsfeld was a hero and was even [...]

Dubai’d (d-bd):v.The act of judging, demonizing and attacking a person or company based on their relation to the Arab world for political gain (or just because). They can be of Arab origin, related to anything Arab or associated with an Arab country. If all three are true, then they become Dubai’screwed.Example:1. Find a target associated [...]

First a confession: I’m a few steps behind. Here in Cairo, a blissful step removed from the U.S. news cycle (but, I like to think, a few steps closer to the events that shape it), I missed this. Only today’s BBC online story alerted me.The Pentagon’s new 20-year plan seems sensible enough from the Post’s [...]

I am still torn over the immigration bill being tossed around in Congress, and about the issue of illegal immigrants and their status in general.But as I came home this afternoon, I was overwhelmed by what seemed like thousands of people of hispanic origin lined up at Metro stations leading into Washington DC. They were [...]

Harry Taylor, a 61 year old real estate broker confronted George Bush recently with these words:“In my lifetime, I have never felt more ashamed of my leadership in Washington,” Taylor told the president. “And I would hope from time to time that you have the humility and grace to be ashamed of yourself.”The fact that [...]

File this under “Join the Queue to See Hamas Fall.”And as a new stage in the game of brinksmanship that will probably end in Hamas’ climbing down from its old rhetoric. This will probably happen faster if they’re allowed to do so without losing face.Hamas had some success on a fundraising tour of the Gulf. [...]

Dictators of the region take note: You don’t need an official press to get propaganda on the front page. You can do it without the expense of serving a city-block full of journalists tea six times a day.Technorati Tags: Bush, Libby, United States, Iraq

Just ran across this blog from Tekla Szymanski, a polyglot journalist and editor who’s worked as a journalist in Germany, Jerusalem, and, most recently, New York. Her recent comments on the Israeli elections and her recollections of coming to Amrika are worth checking out.Tekla and I used to get into daily debates about Middle Eastern [...]