Blog archive all
2nd September 2010
It's good to see the endemic ill-treatment of domestic workers in the Middle East finally getting some attention from the mainstream international media. Under the headline "Little better than slavery", this week's Economist says:
Huge numbers of migrant domestic workers, mostly from Asia and… Read more
1st September 2010
A couple of useful articles about Yemen in the September issue of The Majalla. In the first, Professor Fawaz Gerges of the London School of Economics discusses Yemen's summer of discontent. He writes:
What is alarming about the growing brazenness and activism of [al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula]… Read more
30th August 2010
Salam Kawakibi, of the Arab Reform Initiative and the University of Amsterdam, has produced two interesting papers about Syria: one on the media, the other on the internet.
The Private Media in Syria gives a brief history of the official media under the Baathist regime then looks in more detail at… Read more
29th August 2010
With mediation from Qatar, the Houthi rebels and the Yemeni government have signed an agreement aimed at consolidating the ceasefire announced last February. Reuters reports:
"Among the main points of the agreement, rebels were required to return stolen Yemeni military weapons to their Qatari… Read more
28th August 2010
This ad promoting Coca-Cola in bottles with a twist-off cap is one of a series produced for the Egyptian market by theFortunePromoseven agency and it's causing a stir on the internet, if not in Egypt itself. One (western) blog sees it as "groundbreaking" in a country where same-sex relations… Read more
27th August 2010
The Saudi king has reprimanded a conservative religious scholar for apparently defying a royal decree issued earlier this month imposing restrictions on public fatwas.
The scholar, Yousef al-Ahmad, used a TV programme to call for a boycott of the Panda supermarket chain unless it stopped employing… Read more
25th August 2010
Thousands of Yemenis – possibly as many as 80,000, according to al-Jazeera – are reported to to have fled their homes in Lawdar (or Loder) as the authorities conduct a massive house-to-house search ostensibly aimed at rooting out al-Qaeda militants.
Details are sketchy because the city, in the… Read more
25th August 2010
Amnesty International says it is "extremely likely" that Saudi Arabia used British-supplied Tornado warplanes to bomb northern Yemenat the height of the Houthi conflict last year.
Saudi forces came to the aid of the Yemeni military against the rebels in November and operations continued until a… Read more
24th August 2010
I wrote a short article for Comment Is Free yesterday linking low taxes and rentier states to the lack of government accountability in the Middle East. I wouldn't claim it's an original argument, though it's rarely discussed outside a fairly specialised field and it seems to have annoyed the… Read more
23rd August 2010
After spending two months among the jihadists in southern Yemen, Iraqi-born journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad presents the first of two reports for the Guardian. Choice quote:
At Faisal's house, I asked him what he thought of the government's attempt to crack down on al-Qaida.
"Don't believe the… Read more
ARAB ART ONLINE: Susan Hefuna: Al Sabr Gamil (Patience is Beautiful) 2007. Ink stained on wood 140 x 170 cm. More information | Click to enlarge
