Arab News Blog

Comrade Khalid on the death of Egypt.

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A ship with supplies for the Gaza Strip will dock in Egypt, officials say, following pressure by Israel not to allow it to break the blockade.
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Egypt is confident it can iron out its differences with upstream Nile countries, somehow, Dina Ezzat reports
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Dina Ezzat tries to understand what Egypt is up to on the Strip
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UPDATE 2: Hundreds of Palestinians travel into and out of Gaza Strip as Egypt opens Rafah crossing.
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Egypt’s ruling party to not announce until next summer whether 82-year-old president will seek sixth term.
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A new report says that Facebook now has 15 million subscribers in the Arab world while all Arab newspapers — in Arabic, French and English combined — sell ony 14 million copies.

That link is to a BBC story. You can find the summary from Spot On Public Relations (a Dubai-based PR firm) here. The full report in PDF is here. (And yes, the PR firm is on Facebook.)

Some of their findings from their website:

— MENA’s top five Facebook country markets, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, account for 70% of all users in the region.

— 50% of MENA Facebook users have selected their primary language for using Facebook as English, with 25% preferring French and just 23% Arabic.

— Only 37% of Facebook users in MENA are female (compared with 56% in the USA and 52% in the UK). Only Bahrain and Lebanon Facebook communities approach gender equality with female users accounting for about 44% of total users.

— The GCC has five million Facebook users, which Saudi Arabia and the UAE representing 45% and 31% of that total respectively.

— North Africa has 7.7 million Facebook users, with Egypt accounting for 3.4 million users (or 44% of all North Africa users). Egypt has the largest Facebook community in MENA.

— Francophone countries Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia together account for 3.7 million French speaking Facebook users, equivalent to nearly 25% of all MENA users.

As the BBC report notes, the study doesn’t go into how many of these users are using Facebook: political activisim gets a lot of attention but presumably there’s a lot of the same kind of social chatter we see in the West; the Middle Easterners I’m linked to on Facebook seem all over the place in what they post.

And of course, if you equate the sale of one copy of a newspaper with its having one reader, you’ve never been in a Middle Eastern coffeehouse.

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While I’m citing The National, I’d also note this piece about how Mohamed ElBaradei’s “prolonged absences from Egypt” are “confusing” his followers; he’s visited the US, Cameroon, and other places, and many of his chief aides have been attending a conference in the US.

This would seem to reinforce the sense that ElBaradei’s appeal is to an elite group, perhaps even to expatriates, and may not run too deep at home.

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57 ancient tombs, most of which hold an ornately painted wooden sarcophagus with a mummy inside, have been unearthed in Egypt, the country's Supreme Council of Antiquities has said.
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I’m halfway through a trip to New York and Rabat, with not much time to blog. Yesterday I got around to putting up a bunch of links for the past week, although I’m sure there’s a lot I missed. Here are they are…

• New report about carcinogens and fetotoxic materials in Gaza war wounded

  It never ends.

• West doesn’t want a democratic Middle East | The Japan Times Online

  Which may lead to, ultimately, an undemocratic West.

• The Muslim Brotherhood’s (and Egypt’s) Qutb Conundrum – Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

  This piece raises an important and interesting question but I wonder: maybe the MB clings on to the Qutb of “In the Shadow of the Quran” and “Social Justice in Islam” rather than the one of “Milestones”?

• Palestine: the forgotten mandate – Le Monde diplomatique – English edition

  Read this: “With the scholarly work of the Israeli new historians Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris, plus Catling’s records, the truth surrounding the creation of the state of Israel becomes clearer: the Jewish Agency provisional government did not accept the Jewish state designated under UN resolution 181 with the intention of abiding by the General Assembly goal of providing a state for two peoples in the land of Palestine. Rather, it sought to use it as a means of gaining control of all the land and ridding it of its indigenous people so far as possible.”

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