The National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD), a leading bank in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), is planning to open 50 branches in Egypt over the next few years.
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Entertainment company Imagination Abu Dhabi launched an online portal to tap acting talents in the region.
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The Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank (ADIB) was Tuesday named 'Best Islamic Bank' in the Middle East at the Banker Middle East Industry Awards 2010.
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A commenter left a question about yesterday’s links, regarding my reservations about Ali Abunimah’s post on Noam Chomky’s attitude towards Salam Fayyad. There’s an excellent article addressing Fayyad’s difficult position in The Economist:
A PORTLY official from the office of the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, planted a kiss on Musa Abu Mariya’s right eye, enveloped him in a bear hug and sped off in his sport utility vehicle trailing a cloud of dust. Mr Abu Mariya organises protests in Beit Omar, a town on the West Bank, against Israel’s appropriation of land for settlements and security walls that can cut through Palestinian farms and hurt the villagers’ livelihood. As official visits go, it was better than most. But the kiss left Mr Abu Mariya squirming. These days he no longer knows whether the pre-dawn knock on his door heralds Israeli or Palestinian security men. In recent weeks, both have hauled him off to their prisons.
The Palestinian official’s visit illustrates the dilemma faced by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Mr Fayyad. Publicly, the PA celebrates Mr Abu Mariya’s peaceful protests beneath Israel’s concrete watch-towers. His sit-downs in Beit Omar, on the main road that Jewish settlers use between Jerusalem and Hebron, the biggest Palestinian city in the southern part of the West Bank, chime with the PA’s own boycott of anything to do with the settlements. The PA recently gave the 25,000-odd Palestinians who work in them until the end of the year to give up their jobs or face up to five years in jail. And both the protesters and the PA share the common aim of ending the occupation in the 80% of the West Bank, known as Areas B and C, that are controlled directly by the Israeli army.
Yet the increasingly vocal protests by Mr Abu Mariya and others like him are disturbing the quiet that the PA has preserved since Israel crushed the Palestinians’ second intifada(uprising) some four years ago and that has given Mr Fayyad the space to start building a state from the bottom up. While the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, looks to American-mediated negotiations, which have just resumed indirectly, to bring about a future Palestinian state, Mr Fayyad has used the calm to try to resuscitate the economy and train security forces. Should protests, now concentrated in the rural parts of the West Bank and numbering around 40 a week, turn violent, Israel may once again feel obliged to rumble in and upset the PA’s plans. “Things are happening outside the cities beyond our control,” says a PA security official. “You can ride the tiger, but you have no idea where it is heading.”
Read more of the article for the impossible situation Fayyad is in, as well as some of the security provision he provides for the Israelis. The lesson I would take from it is that, with the failure of the political process almost certain, West Bankers should not rush, but make the next intifada one that counts (like the first before it was subverted by Arafat and Fatah and unlike the second, which led nowhere.) There needs to be strategic as well as tactical thinking.
Who’s Afraid of the Free Speech Fundamentalists?: Reflections on the South Park Cartoon Controversy
by Jeremy F. Walton, The Revealer, April 28, 2010
Recent days have, alas, been marked by a sense of déjà vu all over again for scholars of contemporary Islam. On April 14th, the American cable network Comedy Central aired the first half of a double episode of the immensely-popular cartoon sitcom “South Park.” The episode specifically parodied Islamic prohibitions on the pictorial representation of the Prophet Muhammad by portraying him in concealment, first within a U-Haul truck and then inside an ursine mascot costume. On the day prior to the episode’s airing, the American website revolutionmuslim.com posted the following comments by one Abu Talhah al-Amrikee:
We have to warn Matt and Trey [Matt Stone and Trey Parker, co-creators of South Park] that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show. This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them.
thedailynewsegypt.net, Islam Online staff to launch new website, 17 May 2010 "Staff of disputed Islamic Resource Islam Online (IOL) are preparing to launch a new website after a two-month row between its employees and the website’s Qatari funders, according to Fathy Abu Hatab, former journalist at IOL."
See onislam.com
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AFP: Qaeda in Iraq names new ‘war minister’: SITE "The US-based SITE Intelligence Group service said that the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), the branch of Al-Qaeda in the country, named him in a statement posted on jihadist Internet forums.
""The new War Minister is identified as al-Nasser Lideen Illah Abu Suleiman, ‘The Supporter for the Faith of Allah, Abu Suleiman’," it reported."
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This exchange already occurred in the comments of another post, but deserves to be shared. The Christian Science Monitor ran a piece a couple of days ago on “Surfing the Blue Line between Israel and Hizbullah.”
My commenter presumably thought I’d find it interesting, and indeed I do.
Interesting, but old news. Jesse Aizenstat, aka Abu Guerrilla of the Blogging the Casbah blog, was noted here for his surfing posts on Israel and Lebanon back in December and yet again in January.
Congratulations on his forthcoming book and on his getting the notice of the mainstream media. But you read it here first.
And the CSM article didn’t seem to mention his blog.
Oh, and while I don’t want to rub it in (well, maybe just a little), the Monitor article also carries this correction: “Editor’s note: The original photo caption misidentified Imad Mughniyeh as Khaled Mashal.”
Yeah, they’re easy to confuse. All men with beards look alike. Except one of them’s dead. And one’s Sunni and one’s Shi‘ite. And they are from different organizations and countries. Other than that, though . . .
Umm, not so much.
Husni Mubarak returned to Cairo earlier today after 38 days in Sharm al-Sheikh, just when speculation about his health was reaching a high pitch again. (Link is in Arabic.) He also met there with Abu Mazen (Mahmoud ‘Abbas), and will apparently soon be giving his postponed May Day address to the nation.
Now for those who read my post of yesterday, based on Egyptian blogger Zeinobia’s astute observation, you may notice that in the first picture here, the left arm and hand are in the same position as in all the other recent summit photos.
On the other hand, the picture on Al-Ahram’s web page (rotating, so it may not appear at first click) is a bit different: 
Here, he clearly seems to be gesturing with the left hand, though it’s still held at about the same zangle and position.
For those who don’t read the comments on these posts, I should note that commenter “A”, on my earlier post on the issue, brilliantly noted that “they’ll eventually be forced to release pictures of Mubarak armwrestling Omar Suleiman.” Well, he isn’t exactly arm wrestling Abu Mazen, but he is gesturing.
But it still looks stiff. I know we’re playing the game the Kremlinologists used to play to figure out how nearly dead Leonid Brezhnev was, but remember, an Egyptian blogger started this discussion, not I.
;)
Learn To Read And Write Arabic
Find out all about the revolutionary secret technique for learning to read and write Arabic. Read the article here.
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