OAKLAND: I was very fortunate to attend a talk by Doctor Izzeldin Abuelaish, a man nominated for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. The talk was held at a Kehilla Community Synagogue in Oakland, California, which organised this talk along with Americans for Peace Now and Brit Tzedek V’Shalom. I learned of the event from my …
I was recently in the United States to participate in a conference convened by the Aspen Institute in Colorado on “Literature and Democracy . Before I traveled all my friends warned me of the swine flu whose first cases came to us from the US and then spread quickly in about a month to reach …
YANGON – All politics are local, goes the old aphorism. Yet today, we can say that all problems are global. As world leaders meet at the G-8 Summit in Italy, they will have to update their politics to grapple with problems that none of them can solve alone. The last two years have witnessed a …
MADRID: President Barack Obama’s much discussed Cairo speech represented not only the demise of George W. Bush’s ideological drive to reconstruct the Muslim world through a democratic revolution; it marked the end of American liberalism’s quest to remake the world in its own image. Instead, Obama’s administration is guided by a relativist political realism that …
CAIRO: A coupe of days ago, Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif announced a new strategy to clean out 29 slums deemed “unsafe , as part of a national project that will involve civil society in coordination with the local councils and the ministries of housing, finance and local development. The project includes plans to contain the …
The situation in Egypt today is at its best. According to scientific, objective indicators, both international and local, Egypt is still backward, surpassed by many Asian, African and Latin American countries that were, until recently, less developed. Despite sincere national action efforts, the outcome is still modest. For example, the deterioration in education, especially in …
WASHINGTON DC: On July 1, 2009, media relations between the Arab world and the United States took a fascinating turn. For the first time, the Doha-based TV station Al Jazeera brought its English-language news service to a large cable television audience in America, beginning in Washington, DC and then moving to other US cities. As …
When African leaders discuss economic growth in Africa at this week’s African Union Summit, their options will be constrained by the growing AIDS epidemic and slow progress on reaching the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). For example, over the years we have seen agriculture output being impacted by people unable to till their fields or having …
Runaway food prices gave the world a wake-up call last year. Two weeks ago, another alarm went off: UN food agencies reported that the world’s hungry have surpassed one billion in number. Two hundred sixty-five million of these people are in sub-Saharan Africa – an increase of almost 12 percent over last year. These alarms …
Thousands of Iraqis are celebrating the redeployment of US troops out of their cities and into military bases throughout the country. But the fireworks fired into the air and the pomp and circumstance of so-called Sovereignty Day, the sobriquet the Baghdad government has chosen to earmark the US redeployment, cannot mask the grief felt by …
There is much talk within Cairo s cultural circles of an existing, or imminent, cultural renaissance in Egypt. The increase in the number of new bookstores and new publishers over the past few years gave the impression that Egypt is about to revive its long dead cultural life. A number of factors, however, suggest just …
NEW YORK: While discussions about economic “green shoots continue unabated in the United States, in many countries, and especially in the developing world, matters are getting worse. The downturn in the US began with a failure in the financial system, which quickly was translated into a slowdown in the real economy. But, in the developing …
SAN FRANCISCO: The day before November s US presidential election, I was checking my bags in at the San Francisco airport. I handed my driver s license to the woman behind the counter and told her my name. When she looked at me, I could tell there was confusion and apprehension behind her mask of …
VIENNA: These days, a dollar won’t get you very far in a rich economy. But in a poor country like the one I come from, Sierra-Leone, even half a dollar can save a life or feed an entire family. Every penny invested in Africa counts today and to secure Africa’s future. Experts are unanimous: the …
SOUTHAMPTON, ENGLAND: Once the crowds were in the streets in Tehran, one could, if one knew the script, begin the countdown: if today there are mass protests, tomorrow there will be threats of retaliation in the name of “national security. By day three, we will see journalists imprisoned and media shut down; day four, bloody …
CAMBRIDGE: The rate of inflation is now close to zero in the United States and several other major countries. The Economist recently reported that economists it had surveyed predict that consumer prices in the US and Japan will actually fall for 2009 as a whole, while inflation in the euro zone will be only 0.6 …
BUDAPEST: It’s a well-worn contrast: the United States is religious, Europe is secular. Yet, in some respects, this clichéd opposition has actually been reversed recently: religion played virtually no role during the last American presidential elections, while in a range of different European countries major controversies about religion have flared up, suggesting that questions of …
CAIRO: The Supreme Press Council issues a periodic report on the performance of the Egyptian press, whether national, partisan or independent. When I read the last report I felt a strange nostalgia for Her Majesty the Press, in whose court I worked my whole life. So I decided to call, but she didn’t answer. After …
SEOUL: Once again, the Korean peninsula is experiencing one of its periodic bouts of extremism, this time marked by the suicide on May 22 of former president, Roh Moo-hyun, and North Korea’s second test of a nuclear device. Roh’s suicide is a disaster for his family and a national shame, while North Korean leader Kim …
CAMBRIDGE: Care-giving is understood by economists as a “burden, by clinical psychologists as a “coping process, by health-services researchers in terms of health-care costs, and by physicians as a matter of clinical competency. But, for many people, care-giving is a foundational component of moral experience. It is a practice of acknowledgement, empathic imagination, witnessing, responsibility, …
SULAIMANI, Iraq: Can religion comprise a country s all-encompassing identity? How does connecting religion to a particular place affect our perception of that place? Outsiders views about a religion can be shaped by the way it is linked to a certain nation or geographical area, and in a world where religion is at the centre …
LONDON: In the last two months, I have been in eight American cities – Boston, New York, Washington, Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. Phew! I am left with several sentiments. First, if you have to travel from city to city in the United States, you would do yourself a favor if you …
CAIRO: Surely, Ahmedinejad is a nutcase. Just look at him; he’s been wearing the same jacket for years, ever since we laid eyes on him. He’s unshaven, and unkempt. He exudes an informal, almost clumsy air and doesn’t seem like much of an orator. He’s soft-spoken enough to make a cynic disbelieve anything he says, …
CAIRO: As I watched Fox News’s online video promotions preceding coverage of Michael Jackson’s sudden death, the irony of it all hit me: “We report without spin, without an agenda, without bias, goes the voice over, “we report all sides on all the issues; and the topics that mainstream media’s afraid to tackle . Balanced …
The significance of the current gridlock in Iran goes beyond what happened in the June 12 elections. It strikes at the heart of a political theory, which is the source of religious and political legitimacy of the State of Iran, namely “Wilayat Al-Faqih or Guardianship of the Islamic Jurists, which has served as a barrier …
The need to develop a voluntary code of conduct for the press in Egypt has never been so pressing as it is today. This code must highlight the media’s commitment to the public interest and establish a means of avoiding the interference of the state in press-related disputes. In Egypt, there are no widely-adhered to …
The current political crisis in Iran and the ban on foreign media has proved that modern technology is challenging the monopoly of information management by the state. Today, modern technology is acting as an alternative instrument to expose what the regime prefers to hide from the outside world. Personal cameras and mobile phones have enabled …
HAIFA: Ever since the Six Day War of June 1967, a small number of Israelis, not all on the left, supported the idea of two states as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Most of their compatriots rejected it, as did the Palestinians. Israelis justified their stance with this question: Just when did the Palestinians …
WASHINGTON, DC: As President Obama shifts into a round of White House meetings with leaders from Israel, the Palestinian Authority and the Arab world, and looks for footholds that let him try new approaches, he has a quiet ally in his corner: the American public. As is usually assumed, a third of Americans (33 percent) …
PARIS: France currently has the largest Muslim community in Europe with approximately five million people (i.e., about eight percent of the total population), most of whom hold French nationality. This sociological and demographic fact has raised many questions regarding the level of integration or exclusion of this community, even though most polls underline the support …
