Blogs

Cairo - Rejection of Egypt’s draft constitution is getting stronger. A protest initially planned against the fledgling constitution, among other objectives, turned into clashes with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which controls the presidency and the Constituent Assembly writing the charter. Political rejections of the circulating drafts are pinpointing the disasters in the fine print.

Another car bomb in Lebanon and another assassination in the long series of assassinations that preceded the assassination of Rafik Hariri. This is a continuation of the previous series but with a new twist. Wissam al-Hassan was far more influential than all the previous victims of March 14 figures who were targeted, and his assassination takes place in a very different context.

To take Zionist statements at face value is to ignore the long history of Zionist duplicity, deception, and double talk. This is a movement (from the first Basel declaration in 1897 to the Balfour Declaration and their aftermath) that consistently masked its aim and camouflaged its objectives.

Cairo - A man harasses a woman. Offended, she wants to take him to the police station. Passersby interfere. She tells them about the obscenity she has been subjected to. They tell her to move on. One man makes a comment about the way she’s dressed and her hair. The intervention is against her, not the man who harassed her.

It’s a common scene in Cairo’s streets. The woman, the victim of verbal and physical sexual harassment, is the one to be blamed. Rarely is the man, the culprit, held accountable.

To draw the political map of the Gulf, one is always asked to use the terms set by a shared Arab reality; Ikhwan (Muslim Brotherhood), Salafis, conservatives, liberals, leftists, and so on. As someone from the Gulf, I always wonder: How can the Ikhwan of Kuwait brag about the power of their counterparts regionally when they do not hold the same position on certain issues as their brethren do? How can you be a Kuwaiti Ikhwan and support Saudi Arabia, Hamas, and fight Iran that supports Hamas and is the enemy of Saudi Arabia?

Ayoub is a new name in the Arab political lexicon. It is the name of Hezbollah’s spy plane, which was named after one of its own “martyrs.” The speech by Nasrallah intended to take responsibility for the plane that was downed by Israeli fighter jets. Israel, typical of its propaganda, did not tell the truth. It was embarrassed to admit its failure to detect the plane, and Israeli media are very cautious in probing the failures and shortcomings of the Israeli military-intelligence apparatus.

It was amusing to see Giselle Khoury (a pro-Hariri TV presenter who works for the news station of King Fahd’s brother-in-law, al-Arabiya) on MTV (a right-wing station with a history of racism, sectarianism, and misogyny) the other day. She was defending the authenticity of the Syria-related “documents” that were being released by al-Arabiya over the last few weeks.

Cairo - The acquittal of former state officials from charges of inciting the attack on protesters on 2 February 2011, known as the Battle of the Camel, follows the trend of absolving the state from its responsibility for killing protesters revolting against its brutal practices.

Cairo - It’s been 100 days. Much has been said about reviewing President Mohamed Mursi’s commitment to his 100-day plan. There are the level-headed analyses, the spiteful critics and the fanatic supporters.

“We just want to be like Kuwait” is a sentence that one might often hear from people of the Gulf – specifically Saudis and Bahrainis. The sentence reflects either their desire for greater individual freedoms or to be able to express themselves freely in politics. In the 1960s and '70s, Kuwait was one of the centers of the Arab world in hosting politicians, intellectuals, and a dominant, powerful progressive opposition – a place where movements of all kinds were active in demanding change and greater freedoms.