Arab News Blog

I’m happy to make available to JWN readers Part 1 of a seven-part series I wrote about Jerusalem for Al-Hayat, back in July 1995.. It’s uploaded as a Word docx, here.

Getting this series into uploadable (and also, potentially editable) form is part of an ongoing project to data-mine my own past writings– especially those that are not readily available, even to me. This Jerusalem series from 1995, for example: I think I have it on a floppy disk, someplace. But I don’t have a floppy disk reader any more, and anyway I’ve shifted from a PC to a Mac… What I do have are two yellowing paper copies of the whole series, a scanner, and some new OCR software that I’m still assessing. (ReadIris… not too bad, but not great either. On the other hand, a lot more affordable that Adobe Acrobat.)

Actually, I got the series commercially scanned since my scanner doesn’t have a sheet-feed, and then started dong the OCR.

Working with this material has been interesting: poignant and also extremely depressing. I spent about three weeks in Jerusalem in the summer of 1995, doing the research and interviews for it… Oh my goodness, how much worse the situation of the city’s Palestinians has gotten since then!

Poignant: There was Faisal Husseini, who passed away in 2001 (RIP). There was Faisal’s great but already heavily threatened institution, Orient House, which Ariel Sharon shut down a few months after Faisal’s passing.

That latter Wikipedia page there notes,

Items confiscated by the Israeli government included personal belongings, confidential information relating to the Jerusalem issue, documents referring to the 1991 Madrid conference and the Arab Studies Society photography collection. Also the personal books and documents of the late Faisal al-Husseini were summarily impounded.

What hooligans the Israelis sometimes are…

One of my main aims in republishing the 1995 series on Jerusalem now is to underline a couple of things:

1. The kinds of stuff challenges the Jerusalem Palestinians face today are by no means new. They’ve been living in this situation of extreme threat for a long time already.

2. The fact that the policies pursued by the Israeli authorities toward the Jerusalem Palestinians started to become significantly harsher right after the conclusion of the Oslo Accord in 1993. from the point of view of Faisal Husseini or any other Palestinian Jerusalemite, Oslo was a crock of nonsense that radically undermined rather than increasing their security.

One last note. The OCR really isn’t that great. (Or maybe I need to use it more smartly.) So I’ll put up the pieces in this series one at a time, as I can.

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Part of the Ministry of Business and Trade, the CPD recorded 800 official complaints in 2009, compared to just 200 in 2008. According to Qatari daily The Peninsula, the department said the huge jump w…
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A top US diplomat describes as “candid” his talks with Syria’s leader, part of a US move to improve ties with Damascus.
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It is official. An-Nahar’s Nazi scientists declared the Lebanese in Haiti as part of the white minority. (the link is from an-Nahar’s story). (thanks Mohammad)

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As part of the 50th Anniversary of the Aswan High Dam the Egyptian media has been writing a lot about the period. Here’s an interesting interview in Al-Masry Al-Youm’s English pages with a Nubian displaced by the High Dam, remembering the lost villages of Nubia and showing distinctly mixed views of Nasser.

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I came across this interesting blog, devoted in part to Saudi Arabia’s economics, by Essam al-Zamel [Ar]. In this post he discusses land speculation in Saudi Arabia and its dampening effect on entrepreneurship. The graphic is from his site.

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CNN/ here

“… China has threatened to slap sanctions on American companies that sell arms to its rival Taiwan as part of a range of punitive actions Beijing is taking to protest the deal.

China also summoned U.S. ambassador Jon Huntsman to express its anger over Washington’s announcement, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua said, citing the Foreign Ministry.

Beijing also suspended plans for visits between the Chinese and U.S. militaries and postponed a high-level arms control meeting, it announced Saturday, following Washington’s $6.4-billion arms deal with Taiwan….”

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He would be on my list of people in the US media with least knowledge of the Middle East region. He is a favorite commentator on Middle East affairs at Fox News. You get the point. And he has an annoying smile, to boot. Look at this jumbled piece here: he assembled the first part from Wikipedia to show his knowledge of Yemeni history, and the second part is the reflection of his jumbled and confused mind. Note his analysis of the Yemeni conflict, and his identification of the exact identity of external support for the Huthi rebels. With people like Ginsberg, we can count on the preservation of public ignorance about the world in the US. And notice that he is trying to be grand in the title.

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” this is where the government trains Americans who are part of the most ambitious civilian campaign the United States has mounted in a foreign country in generations — a “civilian surge” intended to improve the lives of Afghans.”

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Amman – Arab stock markets suffered from inertia throughout 2009, failing to recover a major part of the losses they incurred due to the global financial crisis that erupted in late 2008. Throughout t…
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