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The features of the media and propaganda war on Syria are so clear now: each side asserts confidently that its calculations, assumptions, and predictions have been accurate all along. No side shows – or wants to show – the slightest signs of doubt or insecurity when both are now deeply dependent on regional and international backers for survival.

There is no question about it: the Muslim Brotherhood’s organizations all over the Arab world have stumbled on a foreign policy governing formula that ruling Arab families have stuck to for decades. It’s simple: an alliance between a governing party or a ruling family in the Arab world and the Western Zionists can bring about Western governmental support.

During a period when European colonialism was met with armed resistance, Algerian-born French writer Albert Camus’ suggestion that an Arab colonialism replace the French one was controversial. From a different angle, the idea of replacing one system with another is now legitimate after the Arab Spring. The differences in the comparison are considerable, but the point is the same: revolting nations are not interested in exchanging their dictators for Gulf-funded governments the way colonialism was replaced with authoritarian states.

Cairo – Following the results of the first round of the constitutional referendum, activist Alaa Abdel-Fattah was busy dispelling false historical allegations aimed at selling Egypt’s low turnout and approval rates as internationally acceptable.

John Kerry has been trying to become president all his life. He failed miserably. His personality does not translate into a mass appeal movement. This is a man who was a politician from his school days: opposing the war in Vietnam while distancing himself from the radical progressives of the anti-war movement. He, like Bill Clinton in that famous letter from Georgetown University while an undergraduate, was protecting his political viability. John Kerry ran for president all his life while serving in the shadow of the senior senator from Massachusetts, Edward Kennedy.

Cairo – Lines of plain-clothed conscripts and officers blocked the curved hallways leading to the prosecutor general’s office. In front of the bevy of close-shaved heads in sweaters and jumpers, young prosecutors stood in ties, neat suits and coats in an uneasy, hours-long standoff on Monday, 17 December 2012.

They were steadfast in their siege of the office and negotiating with the prosecutor general but unwilling to turn it into a confrontation, which they saw as beneath them as members of the judiciary.

In the measured (mildly critical) response to Edward Said’s Orientalism, Maxime Rodinson commented in La Fascination de l’Islam that Said was effective in shaking the arrogant self-confidence of some classical Orientalism. Rodinson did not mention Lewis, but he may have been talking about him. There is no classical Orientalist who exhibited the arrogance (and sometimes the arrogant ignorance) of Bernard Lewis.

Cairo - Islam and revolution are used interchangeably.

Islamists in Egypt justify President Mohamed Mursi’s controversial decrees as vital to protecting the revolution, while demonstrations organized in his support are labeled as defense of both “legitimacy” and “Islamic sharia”. In the meantime, the words gradually become synonymous.

Sometimes, it feels as if Qatar is the Arab North Korea; all mysterious and closed-in on itself. The Qatari model is yet to be studied closely as a new ‘successful’ experiment in governance and public policy. This country that came to the front suddenly in the past few years raises many questions.

Sometimes, it feels as if Qatar is the Arab North Korea; all mysterious and closed-in on itself. The Qatari model is yet to be studied closely as a new ‘successful’ experiment in governance and public policy. This country that came to the front suddenly in the past few years raises many questions.