It always comes back to oil. The continuing misguided interventions in the Middle East by the United States and the United Kingdom have their roots deep in the Arabian sand. Ever since Winston Churchill led the conversion of Britain’s navy from coal to oil at the start of the last century, the Western powers have …
The NDP just wants you to love them. Really I think people should give the National Democratic Party a break. Really, it’s unfair the way that party’s been treated. Its members can’t help that they belong to the largest and most powerful party in the country. They can’t help it that nothing gets done in …
The deployment of a beefed-up United Nations force in Lebanon to bolster the cease-fire led Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Massimo d’Alema to suggest in late August that a similar deployment be made in the Gaza Strip. Days later, Karen AbuZayd, the commissioner general for the UN Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, said “it would …
The most telling moment in a conversation I had in New York last week with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came when he was asked if America would attack Iran. He quickly answered “no, with a slight cock of his head as if he regarded the very idea of war between the two countries as preposterous. …
CAIRO: It s the same argument all over again, but we never seem to tire of the same vicious circle. The Danish cartoons weren t the first to offend Muslims and the pope s speech won t be the last. Just as Pope Benedict s remarks are currently causing a wave of anger in Muslim …
‘The Pope has slandered Islam by equating it with violence and irrationality. Let’s bomb the Vatican.’ No one to my knowledge has actually said so, though they might as well have, if one is to go by the climate of hysterical frenzy that has swept the Muslim world since Pope Benedict XVI delivered his now …
While the world’s gaze remains focused on Lebanon, less than 200 kilometers south in Gaza, a human time bomb is ticking. Some 1.4 million people in Gaza – more than half of them children – are packed inside one of the world’s most densely populated areas with no freedom of movement and no place to …
Where would you expect conspiracy theories about 9/11 to be disseminated in Cairo? A coffee house in Sayeda Zeinab, Al-Azhar or any of the multitude of so-called “popular quarters of the city – filled with Shisha smoke, and permeated by the smell of molasses-soaked tobacco (otherwise known as me’assel) mixed, perhaps, with the subtle whiff …
While the world’s gaze remains focused on Lebanon, less than 200 km south in Gaza, there is a human time bomb is ticking away. Some 1.4 million people in Gaza – more than half of them children – are packed inside one of the world’s most densely populated areas with no freedom of movement and …
CAIRO: High-priced cement and steel are slowing the growth of the Egyptian construction industry. The Egyptian government is working with cement and steel rebar manufacturers in an attempt to keep prices from soaring any further. HC Brokerage research department figures track the rising price of cement over the past two years from a market average …
The Egyptian Museum came up with a wonderful idea some years ago. They launched a summer art class for children on the museum’s premises. The children would be taken on a tour of a particular wing of the museum, helped to appreciate the ancient Egyptian artifacts on exhibit, given a bit of the history of …
Once upon a time a disgruntled millionaire troglodyte plotted with his ideological cohorts in his Afghan mountain fastness to teach the superpower a lesson. As a result, 19 volunteers, including several trainee pilots, were dispatched to the U.S. to engender a cataclysmic event that would shake America to its core. The rest is history, or …
I have not read the interview that Dr. Hossam Badrawi gave to Al-Wafd newspaper on his proposal to nominate Mr. Gamal Mubarak as President, but I did read the correction published by Al Wafd. I understood from it that it was merely a personal statement; it was made from his personal point of view and …
Who won the 33-day war in Lebanon, Israel or Hezbollah? Both sides have claimed victory, though Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has done so in the kind of understated, eloquent and rationalist discourse that has characterized his satellite TV appearances during and since the fighting. It has been Olmert and his defense minister and coalition partner, …
The Middle East is a place where the dust hardly ever settles. When it occasionally does, even for a short interval, since United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701 calling for a cessation of hostilities in Lebanon seems to be holding, it is time to take stock of events in the hopes that a responsible debate …
Israel is in trouble. Its president Moshe Katsav is being investigated for allegedly raping one of his own staff members. Ehud Olmert, its Prime Minister, is accused of accepting a whopping $500,000 bribe from a building contractor and of making crony political appointments during his former tenure as Minister of Industry and Trade. Its Chief …
Look, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is that if you’re Egyptian, you’re more likely to drop dead of a heart attack than be killed in a transport accident. The bad news is, not much. Figures on those subjects tend to be a little difficult to come by, but it does …
“But they are my grandchildren’s age, were reportedly among the last words uttered by 72-year-old Ahmed Mustagir, geneticist, philosopher and poet, and one of Egypt’s greatest contemporary scientists, as he watched the televised coverage of the Israeli devastation of Lebanon from what was to prove to have been his deathbed. Yet again Arab children were …
The summer of 2006 marked an important milestone for Arab media. Israel and Hezbollah were locked in a bitter conflict that would claim the lives of more than 150 Israelis and an estimated 1,000 Lebanese, a third of them children. Each day brought brutal new images of civilian casualties. On American television, leading journalists, such …
The Bush Administration’s policies in the Middle East were originally sold as a means of encouraging democracy. What they’re actually doing is fostering a growing pan-Islamicism The Bush administration calls it the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), a frighteningly deceptive misnomer for a policy that does little to foster real partnership, substantially more to alienate. …
Hezbollah claims victory, but UN Resolution 1701 is a defeat for Lebanon’s sovereignty CAIRO: The cease-fire that began at 8 a.m. local time last Monday between Hezbollah and Israel was founded on UN Resolution 1701, which provides Israel with an international force to protect its borders and removes Lebanon’s right to defend itself from an …
It is very likely that the world will look back at the summer of 2006 as a seminal moment in Middle East history. We may well be seeing, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice put it, “the birth pangs of a new Middle East. But it is also quite possible a monster will be born. …
The war in Lebanon has produced some surprising outcomes More than a month after Israel started pounding Lebanon for the kidnap of two of its soldiers by Hezbollah, a ceasefire has been brought to the table.It is a miserable fact of this whole miserable episode that while the ceasefire is vital, it could have been …
A perpetual landmine for interventionists, Somalia has witnessed its share of inept approaches. Early in the conflict, the United States precluded any possible mediator role by denigrating the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) with Al-Qaeda and Taliban rhetoric-a U.S. response familiar to Islamic regimes. The United Nations foiled attempts at negotiating the peace process by …
The following question was posed by The Washington Post a few days ago. It was answered, for The Daily Star Egypt by M.J. Akbar: Question: If Lebanon survives as a state, many analysts predict it will be dominated by Hezbollah. How will post-war Lebanon change the political dynamics in the Middle East? Sand doesn t …
What it takes to make patient Egyptians stand up and be counted CAIRO: Egyptians surely rank amongst the most patient and non-confrontational of peoples. But every now and then they get fed up and explode. It happened in 1952 as a result of colonial tensions coupled with the inaction of an opulent monarchy. While King …
CAIRO: Criticism of the electoral process and the consequent results led the latest report released by the legally-oriented United Group regarding the parliamentary elections in 2005. This election evaluated the real political will to push forward. The democratic and political reform Egyptians are aspiring for, reads the report. The reason why this election was the …
After the carnage of this past weekend, they would seem to fade almost into insignificance – and that’s understandable, but they bear noting. The Israeli destruction of TV transmission towers in Lebanon and an attack on a media convoy in south Lebanon are emblematic of a grim fact: the media have become targets – and …
An Egyptian journalist records his travel to Beirut Going to Beirut I was completely unprepared for this. My heart was with my wife and son in Athens. I was hoping to do the Cyprus assignment and go back to them, but life didn’t want things to be this way. It is ironic that, yesterday, I …
