Archive for August 19, 2007
Kuwaiti secret police kidnapped two Kuwaiti journalists from outside their office building. (I did not see any reference to that in the Western or Eastern press).
Posted on August 19, 2007 by As'ad
“Iraqi scholars seek asylum”
Posted on August 19, 2007 by As'ad
“One of Iran’s most powerful politicians has provoked controversy by suggesting that the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the country’s Islamic revolution, wanted to drop its signature chant, Death to America.”
Posted on August 19, 2007 by As'ad
“The Israel Lands Administration (ILA) is working together with the Ateret Cohanim association to wrest from Palestinian landowners control of 30 dunams (7.5 acres) of land in East Jerusalem and to transfer it to the association without a tender. Such is the claim outlined in a petition submitted two weeks ago to the High Court [...]
Posted on August 19, 2007 by As'ad
For coverage of the Elie Nahhas’ scandal, go here. (Did you notice that An-Nahar which brags about every Lebanese in the news has been silent?) And will the French investigation lead to a similar investigation of the branches of the Style “modeling agency” in Dubai and Beirut? Of course, not.
Posted on August 19, 2007 by As'ad
“Another major change in the period from April through June of 2007 was that press coverage of the war in Iraq declined markedly. Together the three major storylines of the war—the policy debate, events on the ground, and the impact on the U.S. homefront—filled 15% of the total newshole in the quarter, a drop of [...]
Posted on August 19, 2007 by As'ad
Colonialism; pure and simple. “In a conference room at State Department headquarters, Rice and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley sat down with aides that winter to consider a pressing question: Should Palestinian parliamentary elections scheduled for January 2006 be canceled? Israeli leaders, including Tzipi Livni, now the foreign minister, had implored Bush advisers to [...]
Posted on August 19, 2007 by As'ad
“Two and a half years after Bush pledged in his second inaugural address to spread democracy around the world, the grand project has bogged down in a bureaucratic and geopolitical morass, in the view of many activists, officials and even White House aides. Many in his administration never bought into the idea, and some undermined [...]
Posted on August 19, 2007 by As'ad
“Israel yesterday said it planned to turn back refugees arriving from Sudan’s war-torn Darfur area”
Posted on August 19, 2007 by As'ad
I read the book Poems of Guantanamo, edited by Marc Falkoff. I am afraid I was not impressed with the poems, although you can better judge if you read them in the original Arabic. This reviewer suspect a Pentagon’s PR job in the book.
Posted on August 19, 2007 by As'ad
Grand (not at all) Ayatullah Sistani, the pillar of US occupation in Iraq, expressed his thoughts on the Maliki government. He said: “They have filled my heart with puss.”
Posted on August 19, 2007 by As'ad
The town of Ghazir put a statue of Ernest Renan in its square. An-Nahar (the right-wing, sectarian Christian, anti-Palestinian (people), anti-Syrian (people) newspaper) put it on the front page. The Lebanese never misses an opportunity to please and appease the White Man, even when the White Man in this case, Renan, believed in the inferiority [...]
Posted on August 19, 2007 by As'ad
You know me. I don’t like flags but for the Palestinians, I make exceptions. This was taken during a demonstration in Khalil. (Reuters).
Posted on August 19, 2007 by As'ad
Al-Akhbar newspaper is bragging that the Lebanese Army is now bombing the Nahr Al-Barid camp from the air.
Posted on August 19, 2007 by As'ad
52% of Lebanese oppose the intervention of clerics in political affairs.
Posted on August 19, 2007 by As'ad
In the introduction to Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized, Jean-Paul Sartre said: “Thus oppression justifies itself through oppression: the oppressors produce and maintain by force the evils that render the oppressed, in their eyes, more and more like what they would have to be like to deserve their fate.”
Posted on August 19, 2007 by As'ad
Please dry your tears: “MEMRI in Finanznot” (thanks Norbert)
Posted on August 19, 2007 by As'ad
Eastern Orientalism. It is most dangerous to think of Orientalism as a mere Western phenomenon. To understand Orientalism and its impact, it has to be studied as an Eastern phenomenon too (as when the colonized mimic the colonizers). Here, some Lebanese pay tribute to Ernest Renan. “Ghazir dresse un monument en hommage à Ernest Renan.” [...]
Posted on August 19, 2007 by As'ad
“Sewall can say what the generals who devised the manual cannot. She addresses the concern that the manual is nothing more than a “marketing campaign for an inherently inhumane concept of war,†arguing that if politicians continue to put young American men and women in harm’s way, military leaders have an obligation to enhance effectiveness, [...]
Posted on August 19, 2007 by As'ad
“However, in her review of four books on terrorism, especially Talal Asad’s “On Suicide Bombing†(July 29), she claims a moral distinction between “inadvertent†killing of civilians in bombings and “deliberate†targeting of civilians in suicide attacks. Her position is not only illogical, but (against her intention, I believe) makes it easier to justify such [...]
Posted on August 19, 2007 by As'ad