Israel's Iran Deal Enthusiasts→

Daniel Levy, in Foreign Affairs, points out that most experts and security apparatchiks in Israel like the Iran deal, but very few politicians. There are some real zingers in this piece, such as:

In main, the Israeli leadership has focused on castigating the deal for what it was never designed to address, namely Iran’s role in the region. That must be particularly irksome to the P5+1 powers. It was, after all, Israel’s leaders who insisted that the nuclear file be addressed first and on its own, and who pushed back hard against any attempt to forge a more comprehensive understanding or grand bargain with Iran (an idea explored over a decade ago in back-channel talks during the term of President Mohammad Khatami). Last summer for instance, when Iran and the West found themselves on the same side against Islamic State (also called ISIS) in Iraq, senior Israeli Minister Yuval Steinitz, who was head of the Iran file at the time, noted that Israel had pushed for and received commitments from “the Americans and the British and the French and the Germans—that a total separation will be enforced,” that is, the West would not negotiate with Iran on regional issues until the nuclear question was dealt with. Israel, in other words, demanded that the nuclear file be treated as a standalone issue—the very thing that it now criticizes about the deal.

So basically it seems that Israeli politicians feel about the Iranian nuclear deal the same way they feel about Israeli-Palestinian peace: a nice idea to pay lip service to, but something they'll do everything to oppose in practice. Levy's analysis of what stands for Netanyahu's opposition in Israeli politics, and their repositioning as not only against the deal but also against the way Netanyahu has opposed the deal, is enlightening to read inasmuch as what it tells you about the chronic short-termism of Israel's political leaders.

The conclusion on Israel-US relations is fascinating, too:

More than the Iran deal itself, it is this Netanyahu-led campaign against the White House that is so controversial, both in Israel and in the United States. The Israeli center–left, the country’s President Reuven Rivlin, and the security establishment have all condemned Netanyahu on that score. Stateside, Bibi has the competing pro-Israel lobbies—AIPAC and J Street—duking it out, and Jewish community centers, federations, and synagogues are all being pulled into the fray. American Jews are being asked to ditch the Democrat president they have overwhelmingly voted for (twice) in favor of a Republican-aligned Israeli prime minister, who previously pushed for the Iraq war and is now engaged in a deeply partisan struggle, in which he wants the Israeli interest (as he interprets it) to be placed above the American interest. Many American Jews are uncomfortable with being put in this predicament. Polls suggest that a clear majority back Obama and his Iran deal. To be sure, at this point, it is unclear who is using whom more—Israel the Republicans or the Republicans Israel.

Links 27 June - 10 July 2015

• Number of Syrian Refugees Climbs to More Than 4 Million
• Quick Thoughts: Nathan Thrall on the Gaza Strip One Year After Israel’s Operation Protective Edge
• Facts and footballers | Inanities
  Nice vignette of Egyptian media vulgarity
• Egypt Wants To Jail Journalists For Not Falling In Line. It's Been Trained By A US Nonprofit.
• Exclusif. Forces armées/ Plusieurs changements au DRS et mécontentement du général Toufik
  Exclusif. Plusieurs changements au sein du DRS/Et le général Toufik boycotte la remise de la médaille de Bravoure
• A Detailed Look at Hacking Team's Emails About Its Repressive Clients - The Intercept
• Small Arms Survey - 2015 YB released
  "Business as usual for small arms exports to ‘Arab Spring’ states"
• Egypt anti-terror bill speeds trials, tightens hand on media
  This ought to end terrorism in Sinai
• Egypt Warns Journalists Over Coverage of Militant Attacks
  Sisi compares report to a “fourth generation of warfare, and even fifth.”
• Egypt’s Coming Chaos Steve Cook
• Egypt's Brotherhood calls for uprising after killings
  It has been calling for an uprising for a while, mind.
• Assault in Sheikh Zuweid: A turning point in Egypt's fight against terrorism
• Widespread Graft Benefited Tunisian Leader’s Family, Study Says - NYT
• BREAKING: Egypt's top prosecutor killed in bomb attack
• In Morocco, It’s Jennifer Lopez Versus Jihad
  Worst article I've read on Morocco in a long time. Full of errors and clichés. Reporter was flown to Morocco by PR firm. 
• Alexandria's iftar event breaks world record despite the mayhem
  "Scuffles broke out among attendees of the event, who smashed chairs and tables and threw them at each other."
• Senussi “claims” US offered pardon and job in new government
  Claims that in 2011 US offered to drop ICC charges (improbable...)
• ‘He’s Jesus Christ’
  Kristof on the Nuba Mountains conflict.
• The Massacre of Druze Villagers in Qalb Lawza, Idlib Province
  By "moderate jihadi" Jubha an-Nusra

Links 20-26 June 2015

• A terrible blow, but Tunisia will not buckle
• Tunisia attack: multiple deaths at Sousse beach resort
• Scott Ritter · ‘We ain’t found shit’ · LRB 2 July 2015
  On why Iran shouldn’t accept ‘no notice’ inspections of its nuclear sites
• Patrick Cockburn · Why join Islamic State? · LRB 2 July 2015
  On Kurdish advances on Tal Abyad, IS and Turkey
• Political TV talk shows a victim of Egypt’s crackdown on dissent — FT
• Stop Scaremongering About ISIL in Libya | Al Jazeera America
  Alison Pargeter.
• Why We Need al-Qaeda by Ahmed Rashid | NYRblog
• A Partnership with China to Avoid World War by George Soros | The New York Review of Books
• The west opens up to Egypt’s President Sisi - FT
  This gets the politics right and the economics wrong - Egypt has not "graduated from handouts" and not that many foreign companies are keen to invest.
• How leaked Saudi documents might really matter
  By Marc Lynch
• Germany frees al-Jazeera reporter Ahmed Mansour
  Instead of extraditing him to Egypt as it had hoped
• Leaks allege assassination plot hatched by Egypt and Sudan | Middle East Eye
• How security forces keep critics quiet in 'progressive' UAE

Media, the regime, and censorship in Egypt

Our own Nour Youssef has a piece in the Guardian about the Egyptian media, the role it has played in the events of recent years, and the complicated system by which it stays in alignment with regime interests. It has interviews with a who's-who of prominent TV hosts and is chock-full of incredible quotes. 

“I would say anything the military tells me to say out of duty and respect for the institution,” says Ahmed Moussa, one of the most popular TV presenters inEgypt.

Moussa has no qualms admitting on air his relationship with the authorities – and his vocation to serve them. He claims he would also extend the same courtesy to the police, he said but he “might stop and think a little first”.

Sharing Moussa’s sense of duty towards the military is the veteran talk show host Mahmoud Saad, from Al-Nahar TV. “The military should never, ever, ever be covered,” he says, shaking his head. “You have to let them decide what to say and when to say it. You don’t know what will hurt national security.”

But it’s also the power to influence people that appeals to him, he says. “It’s a beautiful feeling knowing that when you swing right,” he says as he swivels his upper body right, “the people will swing right. “And when you swing left,” he goes on, swivelling in the opposite direction “the people will swing left.”

The Farce Behind Morsi’s Death Sentence - The New Yorker→

Jon Lee Anderson:

As its leaders present and former grapple with their legacies, Egypt, no longer a regional leader of any sort, is mired in a miasma of self-made miseries, a nation best known for its corruption, poverty, and the absence of the rule of law. The 2011 “revolution” that seemed to have pulled it briefly from its steadfast implosion seems not only to have come and gone but to have been a mirage.

Tragically, Cairo’s Tahrir Square is likely to be remembered as a place where hopes were raised for democratic change, only to have those hopes dashed by the country’s perennial powers-that-be. The decision by Egypt’s judiciary to kill Morsi is not only a crudely cartoonish attempt at the implementation of justice; it defies even the kind of canny political logic that one might expect from a military élite like Egypt’s. If Egypt’s generals thought that brutality would buy them control, they didn’t get it. In the Sinai, ISIS now runs amok, seizing police posts and massacring captives. As for the heroes of the country’s Arab Spring, so vaunted by the West during that fateful spring of 2011, most have left the country, been killed, or are themselves in prison. The farcical show trials, in which Morsi and other former senior officials are exhibited in courtrooms in cages, covered with soundproofed glass so that they cannot be heard shouting, must be seen for what they are, alongside a myriad of arbitrary arrests and detentions, including of journalists.

Links 8 - 19 June 2015

Ramadan Kareem. Get your Moroccan Harira recipe here (the secret is lots of celery btw). Photo by Shutterstock.

• How security forces keep critics quiet in 'progressive' UAE
  One tactic: kidnappings
• The Moral Conflict of Living and Working in Qatar
  Interesting discussion of the personal pros and the ethical cons
• Water In Crisis - Spotlight Middle East
  Apparently desalination is not the answer
• The Rhetoric of Egyptian Reaction
  A new post by Baheyya
• Smuggling books across the border: PalFest 2015
  Leila Abdelrazaq puts the experience into drawings
• 'One Thousand and One Nights won’t be any less impressive than Hollywood movies': Nicole Saba
  Ahram Online on what may be the Ramadan serial of the year
• Why Obama’s Plan to Send Advisers to Iraq Will Fail - The New York Times
  Compare to what Iran's "advisers" do in Iraq...
• Clans du pouvoir : les masques sont tombés
  Algerian Kremlinology - the comments are out there.
• U.S. Embracing a New Approach on Battling ISIS in Iraq - NYT
• Israeli exonerates itself over killing of Gaza boys on beach
• A Room Of Their Own: Makeshift Schools Help Syrian Students
• Egyptian Muslim Brothers launch “fierce” attack on Tunisia’s Ennadha, Ghannouchi
• The Guardian view on the flogging of Raif Badawi: Saudi Arabia is in the dock | The Guardian
• Egypt says terror attack foiled at temple in tourist city of Luxor | The Guardian
• Five takeaways from the Turkish election
• One Egyptian novelist takes another to task for accepting $60,000 Qatari literary prize
• Mysterious Disappearances of Egyptian Youth Continues
  Egypt more and more resembles Pinochet's Chile
• On being transgender in Egypt
• How Teaching in English Divides the Arab World - Ursula on a growing trend at universities in the middle east

Much Loved, Much Hated: a Moroccan film about prostitution is banned

The number one topic of conversation in Morocco in the last few weeks has been the film Much Loved, by director Nabil Ayouch. The film tells the story of prostitutes in Marrakesh; it premiered at Cannes and some scenes were leaked -- and widely viewed -- online. These include a scene featuring a gay prostitute, rich Gulf clients who mock the Palestinians as a bunch of parasites, some explicit dancing, and some more explicit dialogue (I believe the words the women speak are the most shocking element in fact). 

Judging from the snippets I've seen, the movie's style is naturalistic, almost documentary; the  dialogue is reportedly based on research the director and lead actress carried out with sex workers. 

Before the director even presented his official request to screen the movie in Morocco, it was banned here, for being "une atteinte a l'image du Maroc," ("an insult to Morocco's image"). The lead actress has received death threats. 

The director's protestations of shock sound hollow to me; you don't screen a movie with this style and subject at Cannes and expect no blowback back home. But of course the ban is ridiculous. Those who support the director -- like the editorialists of the liberal magazine Tel Quel -- have pointed out that as usual decision-makers and public opinion are much more concerned with the representation of social problems than with the problems themselves (an attitude that is frequently found in the Arab world). There is a significant amount of prostitution in Morocco, and Moroccan women have a reputation of being both terribly attractive and immoral in other more conservative Arab countries (whose men come here to take advantage of these qualities). But as Omar Saghi writes in Tel Quel, Moroccan women are considered "loose" only by the standards of Gulf Arabs, and why should they interiorize these views? He writes that "Egypt, close to the Gulf, has long paid dearly for this comparison: after having veiled its women, decreased salaried female employment, and lowered a lead cloak on its beaches, Egypt remains, for the Gulf, a pagan country with shameless women who speak too loud and have the regrettable tendency to go out in public. To fix the problem of prostitution in Morocco, we should abandon an apocalyptic vision and come back to our senses: end the prostitution of minors, punish pimps and trafficking networks, spread information about health hazards...As far as defending the image of Moroccan women, let's stick to two things: keep demagogues out of this, and stop comparing ourselves to Yemenis." 

How teaching in English divides the Arab world

I have a new piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the spread of English at universities in the middle east. This is a world-wide phenomenon, and the main reason for it is that working in English helps academics access the latest research and to publish (because most journals are in English). It also often helps students land better jobs after graduation. And there are other more ambiguous gains to English: access to Western culture generally, a different and often more open teaching style (since more professors might be foreign), and a general aura of "modernization." 

“New private colleges that teach in English are popping up, while public universities have made English the language of instruction for certain fields — particularly scientific ones — or sometimes on the whole campus.

But the enthusiasm for English isn’t universal. Skeptics note that switching to English does not solve all the underlying problems of troubled educational systems. Some see the turn away from their native language as a threat to Arab identity. Others worry that English-language education exacerbates the divide between the haves and have-nots. For a small minority of graduates, like Mr. Hamdy, English is the gateway to the global economy. But millions more are left behind.

”English is a divider but also a dream,” says Deena Boraie, dean of the School of Continuing Education at the American University in Cairo.

The hopes and misgivings about the spread of English in the Arab world illustrate the tensions that surround the world’s most widespread lingua franca. Even universities in the United States have something to lose, says Rosemary C. Salomone, a professor of law at St. John’s University, in New York, who is writing a book about the spread of global English. The complacent belief that the whole world speaks English leads to less study of foreign languages and less curiosity about the rest of the world.

The English language is “washing over the world,” says Ms. Salomone. Many countries fear an “erasure of [their] culture and loss of global status.””

I reported in Qatar, Egypt and Morocco, and there are some big variations -- in the Gulf the concerns regarding English are tied up with anxieties about identity, being a minority in one's own country and the pace of change. In Egypt English has theoretically been part of the curriculum and a language of instruction for decades but the real problem is the abysmal quality of education, growing privatizations, and the gap between rich and poor (which foreign language universities and programs can exacerbate). In Morocco there is a growing interest in introducing English -- something that is somewhat surprising given that the country is already dealing with a very complicated post-colonial linguistic tangle, with the educational system divided between Arabic and French and with the place of darija (the local dialect) and Berber languages (recently recognized) to be ascertained. In all countries the feelings about languages taught and used at schools are of course passionate, because they are feelings about identity and the future opportunities of one's children. 

The piece is behind the paywall. For those interested (in this and other coverage of scholarship, ideas, academia, including my own reporting on the Arab world and the debate over rules on sexual conduct, feminism and freedom of speech on campus triggered by this essay), think about subscribing. 

I am ready to be held accountable by the people: Al-Sisi→

As reported in the Daily News Egypt:

Sunday evening, titled “A year of achievements: the president’s untraditional activities,” in which it listed 24 activities as achievements. With the exception of the international Economic Summit held last March, the report did not tackle other economic steps, nor was there a mention of the ambitious New Suez Canal project.

Furthermore, the 24 attainments in the report included seven meetings with different social factions and organisations, excluding any politician, where potential projects had been discussed. The report also counted Al-Sisi’s participation in a bike marathon and Cairo Runners’ marathon as achievements.

“Al-Sisi’s first phone interview” was also the title of one of the president’s achievements.

A review of the film Timbuktu

I had the pleasure of seeing the movie Timbuktu recently at the Cinematheque of Tangier (a beautifully restored old movie theater). It's not to be missed. A film full of grace and depth. I wrote about it for the LRB blog: 

In his film Timbuktu, Abderrahman Sissiko shows a traditional Muslim society overrun by outsiders claiming they have the God-given authority to tell everyone what to do. The film is inspired by the 2012 takeover of much of Northern Mali by jihadist and other rebel groups. It is both specific to its setting and raises questions about struggles playing out across the Muslim world. I can’t think of another creative work that takes such an imaginative, subtle, assured look at Islamist militancy and its effects.

The landscape that Sissiko films, dramatic and simple as a stage, is naturally abstract: a lake with perfectly flat shores; a hillside of dunes with a few tents and a few trees; a city of narrow sandy lanes and earth-colored rooftops (Oualata in Mauritania, standing in for Timbuktu).

At first the masked outsiders with their flags and announcements seem bumbling and almost ridiculous, actors playing their part with fragile confidence. A veteran jihadi tries and fails to coach a young member into recording a convincing recruitment video. Fighters track forbidden music floating over the rooftops, only to have to call their superiors for instructions, at a loss when they realise the criminals are singing the praises of the Prophet.

Links May 15 - June 7 2015

The Arabist's editors have been on the move lately, traveling and showing visiting friends around Morocco. Hence, a few pictures and a very late, large set of links.

A detail from a work by the early modern  Moroccan painter Ben Ali Rbati (held at the Musée de la Fondation Slaoui in Casablanca), one of the earliest artists to use perspective and to depict more casual and domestic scenes. This is of a Coranic school. 

• The Algerian Exception by Kamel Daoud - NYT
• Battle to write constitution for a Libya at war with itself - FT
• Missed this interview with Tarhouni
• Egypt: 2,600 Killed After Ouster of Islamist President
• Entangled | The Economist
  America and the the Middle East.
• Syria’s Sunnis and the Regime’s Resilience | Combating Terrorism Center at West Point
  On Sunni support for Assad.
• Yemeni officials under ex-president Saleh 'worked with al-Qaeda' | Middle East Eye
• CIA duped.
• Matariyya, Egypt's New Theater of Dissent | MERIP
• Good reporting by Amira Howeidy
• Saudi Arabia Shoots Down Missile Fired From Yemen - NYT
• Surprising Saudi Rises as a Prince Among Princes - NYT
  On Muhammad bin Salman
• Why Jihadists Write Poetry - The New Yorker
• The Administration Should Not Meet With the Muslim Brotherhood in Washington - WINEP
  Because if you ignore it all will be well?
• Mohamed Morsi is no Nelson Mandela
  @belalfadl on MB: "All they have left now is empty threats of revenge against everyone, if their deluded fantasy of returning to power ever comes true"
• Illegally detained activists summoned by prosecutor amid wave of forced disappearances | Mada Masr
• Orwellian Times in Egypt: A Conversation with Emad Shahin - YouTube
• Saudi Arabia's Widening War - Gary Sick - POLITICO Magazine
• Rethinking nations in the Middle East - The Washington Post
  POMEPS collection of essays on nationalism.
• Defense Minister exempts 574 military installations from real estate tax | Egypt Independent
  Geish Inc.
• Moroccan Film About Prostitution Creates Uproar - NYT

Plumbers' shop in the Tangiers medina

Two Egyptian Policemen Shot Dead Near Pyramids of Giza - NYT

• Congress seeks to lift last restrictions on aid to Egypt - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East
  No longer requires HR progress, free elex.
• New Left Project | The End of Empire?: Violence and US Hegemony in the Middle East
  Gilbert Achcar on Kaplan's plea for a more assertive US imperialism in the Middle East
• A League of His Own | Bloomberg Business
  Great profile of Sepp Blatter, much mention of Arab money in FIFA.
• From Belgium to ISIS
  Great, strange, sad story of one wannabe jihadi
• Partition en vue d’une succession contrôlée - Actualité - El Watan
• U.S. citizen Mohamed Soltan freed from Egyptian prison
  After such an ordeal
• Opening the black box of Egypt's slush funds | The Angaza File
  Important read.
• Egypt's military establishes multi-industry company - Ahram
  al-Geish Inc.
• Egypt's new justice minister called for hardline Sharia - Telegraph
  And considers citizens "slaves".
• Libyan Prime Minister Survives Assassination Attempt Amid Protests - NYT
  Just as likely Haftar as it is Fajr Libya
• It’s Time to Bring Imperialism Back to the Middle East | Foreign Policy
  Robert Kaplan, being a silly neocon.
• Maybe He Found Gaddafi's Billions. Or Maybe It’s All a Giant Scam
  Bizzarre con seems to have worked in Washington
• “Cairo," cityscapes by cartoonist Mohamed Wahba Elshenawy
  I want this.
• Islamic State "institutionalizes sexual violence" and sexual slavery
  Interview with head of UN sex crime investigators
• Obama to the Arabs: We don’t care - Al Arabiya
  Hisham Melhem.
• Obama Upgrades Tunisia’s Status as a U.S. Ally - NYT
• الدولة ترد على تحركات شفيق «المريبة»: إنسى - بوابة الشروق
  Sisi regime tells Shafiq to fuggedaboutit.
• Egypt Nile water pollution on the rise - Al-Monitor
• The challenged kingdom | The Economist
  Saudiland.
• World's biggest hotel to open in Mecca
  Saudis go on desecrating holy city with crassness
• Egypt’s cyber crime bill
  It's open season on all forms of online expression
• Egypt: Rape and sexual violence perpetrated by security forces 'surges' under el-Sisi's regime
  But nobody wants to know
• Egypt Tax Delay Means Rich Pay Less to Cut Deficit: IMF
• Clinton Friend’s Memos on Libya Draw Scrutiny to Politics and Business - NYT
• Elite Iraqi units abandon Ramadi in biggest Islamic State win since Mosul
• Meet the director of the BuSSy Project, Egypt's answer to the Vagina Monologues
  Good interview with Sondos Shabayek
• Egyptian court labels Ultra soccer fans as terrorists
  Why not, who's next?

Casablanca architecture reminds me of Cairo

The banality of the Islamic State→

Interesting post by Reyko Huang about "the Islamic State as an ordinary insurgency", over at Monkey Cage:

The point here is not to downplay the threat posed by the Islamic State or to “normalize” its behavior by highlighting the group’s ordinariness among violent political groups. It is simply to stress that comparatively speaking, the group is not as exceptional as observers and the media have often characterized it. Putting the Islamic State into a broader theoretical and historical perspective – that is, beyond the frame of “Islamist terrorism” and beyond the post-9/11 period – is important because there are clear dangers in hyperbolizing the group’s own claims to exceptionalism. To unduly emphasize the Islamic State’s distinctiveness is to distort its threat, inadvertently boost its legitimacy, and worst of all, to directly play into its leaders’ hands. Whatever the Islamic State has achieved so far, history has seen much of it before in other contexts. Knowledge of these other contexts can therefore inform both scholarship and policy on this pressing issue.

Well worth reading the whole thing, particularly as the Islamic State is being used by so many in the region as a boogeyman to advance their own agenda, from Sisi in Egypt to the Iranian regime to Bashar al-Assad in Syria to the very IS-like (ideologically) Saudi regime. 

Diary: In Sanaa→

A must-read piece on the Houthis by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad:

The Houthis’ supreme military commander, Abu Ali al-Hakem, is a delicate and compact man, one of the original 75 who fought alongside Hussein in the first battle in the mountains of Marran and one of the few who survived. In Sanaa one evening I watched him enter the Houthis’ headquarters accompanied by two gunmen; his arrival caused a flutter among even the most senior apparatchiks. He wore a dark blue coat over a crisp white dishdasha, with a leather pistol holster strapped to his chest. He spoke of his memories of the war, of a day of heavy battle, it was the third or fourth war, he couldn’t remember. The Houthis had lost many men and they were besieged. ‘At dawn the fighting stopped and I decided to take a break. I switched on the TV. I wanted to see what the world was saying about us: the whole world would be speaking of this battle. I flipped through the channels. There was nothing, even from countries we call our friends, nothing in Iranian or Arabic. There was no mention of us. We were alone and there was no one to help us.’ He spoke in the language of good and evil. ‘How can we not win if we have God with us?’ The Houthis – from Abu Ali al-Hakem to the lowliest fighter – all spoke in the same terms, a logic developed after a decade of war and siege in the mountains. They were the pure and all their enemies or those who raised their voice to oppose them – leftists, the media, the Muslim Brotherhood, jihadis – were all Daesh, or Isis, or agents of the US and the Saudis. Their enemies in turn portrayed them as an Iranian militia, alongside those of Bashar al-Assad and the Sadrists in Iraq.

Links May 2 - May 15, 2015

• Diary: In Sanaa 
  The lead-up to the current war, by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
• Syria’s truth smugglers 
  Very worthwhile read on the effort to document Assad's and others' crimes
• Wadi Barada: Snapshot of a Civil War 
  #syria
• Leaks Gain Credibility and Potential to Embarrass Egypt’s Leaders 
  If they were susceptible to embarrassment
• Promises and figures from Sisi's latest speech
• To Make the World a Better Place, Teach Arabic
• Mafia in Africa 
  Interesting investigation
• Egyptian Journalist Mohamed Fahmy Sues Al Jazeera for $83 Million in Punitive Damages
• Ursula Lindsey on Correspondents Club 
  ABC Melbourne interviewed me on being a journalist in the middle east these days
• Egypt’s Megafantasies 
  Good review of David Sim's latest book on desert development
• Tunisian novel wins ‘Arabic Booker’ in Abu Dhabi despite UAE ban
  Sounds like the ban has already been lifted though
• Al Jazeera America, Its Newsroom in Turmoil, Is Now the News
  Are they extra dysfunctional or just extra scrutinized?  
• Why Peter Kennard's montages are political dynamite
  Can't believe I'd never seen his Blair "Photo Op"
• A French Freelancer in Lebanon on the ‘Slow Death’ of Foreign Correspondents
• Progress in Tunisia, but much still to be done
  Op-ed by Rached Ghannouchi.
• The Day After · LRB 4 May 2015
  Neve Gordon on the IDF’s new tactics
• Fear Makes Everything Possible
  Wael Eskandar on Egypt today
• Saudi-Led Group Said to Use Cluster Bombs in Yemen - NYT
• Aleppo’s Real-Life Soap Opera « The Majalla Magazine
• Repression in Egypt: Worse than Mubarak | The Economist