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Issandr El Amrani Contact him here
Egypt follows EU line on GM Egypt has unexpectedly rescinded its support for a lawsuit filed by the US against the European Union... 'Baghdad' -- music to Arabs' earsFor Mamdouh, the music that comes out of his creaky radio is one of the few respites from the dense, noisy Cairo traffic... All hell breaks loose in CairoDemonstrators riot and try to close the U.S. Embassy in a country where protest has been mostly banned for 20 years... Mirror of a movementThe word "ebullient" seems barely adequate to describe the atmosphere in the austere Cairo courtroom... Arab League faces uncertain futureOfficials at the Arab League's Cairo HQ - an unassuming building in the city's central square that blends modernist and Islamic architecture - wear long faces these days.
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Wed, 18 Jun 2003 Iran’s students and the American debate This morning I came across this Andrew Sullivan column on Salon. Although he might be right to say that the Iranian students deserve more international support, as he has been arguing on his blog his argument here is disingenuous. He tries to portray the American left as so obsessed with the human rights abuses at home (those carried out by Bush & Co.) as to be blind to human rights elsewhere in world. Who comes to the rescue? The rabidly right-wing National Review, Sullivan argues. Of course the only thing they have in mind is helping out the poor Iranian students. No domestic agenda. It’s increasingly frequent that right-wing bloggers and columnist will use what they call a “silence” among leftists on a human rights issue to argue that the left has lost its “moral compass.” But their own lack of a moral compass becomes all too clear when they use other people’s suffering to justify their domestic ideological wars. It got me angry enough to write this letter to the editor: For what it’s worth, I think the Iranian students are heroes. I wish there were those kinds of balls in the Arab world. Their protests certainly deserve more attention, although I suspect that the reason they aren’t is that it doesn’t look like they will amount to much in the near future — no strong leadership. I just hope this time around, if there is a revolution, the students and other Iranians fed up with their retrograde theocracy don’t lose the political battle to some secular version of Khomeini, as they did in 1980. Tue, 17 Jun 2003 More US soldiers have died since the official end of the war in Iraq than during the war itself. Meanwhile, the low-intensity/guerrilla warfare that people had been afraid of before the war is starting to take place. Some people talking to journalists there are even afraid to give their names just in case Saddam comes back. Speaking of the devil, a veteran Middle East reporter just back from northern Iraq said that he was convinced Saddam was still in Iraq, moving along the Sunni tribes near the Kurdish region. It’s a story that is getting growing attention these days, although I have yet to see anything that convincingly puts Saddam behind the Falluja-style guerrilla groups.After a couple of months of learning HTML and tinkering with Perl and other forms of geekiness, I am finally going online. This is still very much a beta site, so please be patient. I’m even still looking for a title… any suggestions? Mon, 16 Jun 2003 The Democrats are trying to outdo the Republicans in being pro-Israel. If the presidential election is going to be fought on these kinds of issues — on trying to be tougher than the Republicans — then we’re stuck with W. until 2008. Great. And after that, Hillary? Tom Tomorrow has a hilarious cartoon in today’s edition of Salon. On a similar theme, very nice-straightforward story on a Hamas supporter who lost 16 relatives to the Israeli army in today’s Times. The article may require a subscription to read, but here’s the end quote that sets the story straight: “The hatred and enmity between us and the Jews is not because they are Jewish. It is because they took our land and threw us off it. That is the only reason.” Sun, 08 Jun 2003 At least they don’t hurt Christians I’m torn whether this New York Times Op-Editorialist is a Bashar Assad apologist or a bizarre type of Christian fundamentalist:
Perhaps the reason Syrian Christians feel so “equal” in Syria is that the regime there represses everyone equally. I believe the situation was the same in Iraq under Saddam Hussein — in fact, many say that Christians were even favored through prominent representatives at the heart of the regime such as Tariq Aziz. Perhaps the author should look at the notion that regimes such as Assad’s (and probably Hussein’s too) use “identity politics” to divide and rule. It certainly comes in handy to justify the dominance of the Alawi sect in Syria or the Tikriti tribe in Iraq — at least, they can say, it’s not the orthodox Sunnis running the place. Indeed Hafez Assad did murder between 10,000 and 25,000 — depending on who you believe — people in Hama in 1982 when that town was taken over by Muslim Brothers. I’m sure many of those who died weren’t even Muslim. When the Assad regime does go, we will be likely to see the same type of resentment from the divisive politics played by the Hussein regime in Iraq. Although more broad-based — consisting of Alawis, provincial (i.e. non-Damascene, especially from the East) Sunnis and a few Christians — the Assad regime shows the kind of provincialism that makes any kind of internal regime reform seem unlikely. Of course, there are also other problems with this piece, such as the notion that Syria and Lebanon are the only countries in the Arab world where Christians are treated well. I think including Lebanon is a bit odd since there the Christians unfairly dominate politics in the constitution, at the expense of Shi’as especially. Furthermore, I seem to recall there was a rather long civil war there in which Muslims were set against Christians… hardly the model for a healthy, equal society. Also, for both of these countries, one may also want to look at how colonial politics under the French (and through missionaries of various religions) helped create the feeling (and reality) that Christians were different from the Muslim population. I also think that Egypt, with its substantial Christian population, should be on the list of countries were Christians are generally treated equally by the government — or as equally badly as everyone else. It’s worrying that this kind of garbage, with its faint scent of evangelicalism, makes it to the Op-Ed page of the NYT. Especially when the editor of those pages is in the running to replace Howell Raines as editor-in-chief.Tue, 03 Jun 2003 Salon is a running a good piece on the Hepatitis C epidemic in Egypt, caused by an effort to wipe out Bilhazia in the 1970s. The article is right is avoiding laying too much blame on the government for this — after all Hep C had not been diagnosed at the time of the anti-Bilharzia campaign — but it the way in which no one here wants to discuss the problem is depressingly familiar. It’s astounding to what extent an unaccountable government will always prefer burying its head in the sand rather than face up to a problem. And in Egypt, it’s also the same with AIDS. |
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