Links January 29th and February 3rd

Automatically posted links for January 29th through February 3rd:

• Qatar reports new damage to Gulf undersea cables - Fourth time in a week - I think there's a conspiracy afoot


• Libya Sovereign Wealth Fund to Shun U.S., Ghanem Says - Qadhafi puts his country's money elsewhere


• Ezzedine Choukri: "?? ???? ????? ?? ????? ???? ??? ?" - Rafah episode shows current situation is losing one for all


• The path of centrist political Islam by Khalil Al-Anani - Al-Anani says MB hopeless, Wasat way forward


• Robert Fisk: The curious case of the forged biography - Fisk, hagiographer of Saddam Hussein


• Making a Great Arab City - I like this Rami Khouri piece on Dubai even though I am skeptical, because it praises the tradition of Arab cosmopolitan urbanism


• Arab Media Watch Arab Media Watch > Home - UK outfit combats anti-Arab bias in press


• Hamas explodes a giant hole in Egypt's political cover - Op-ed takes Egypt's hypocrisy on Palestine to task


• It's time to herald the Arabic science that prefigured Darwin and Newton - Faraday prize winner defends historic Arab scholarship


• For sale: West?s deadly nuclear secrets - Whistleblower says top US officials sold nuke secrets to Pakistan (the person is not named in the article, but others say it's Marc Grossman)


• Al-Jazeera Journalist Arrested in Egypt - Howeida Taha arrested, again


• AFP: Egypt censors book fair - Mohammed Choukri, Milan Kundera, Elias Khoury, Hanan al-Sheikh censored from Cairo Book Fair.

Comments

[ash-shakkak]

Giant squids...

[Sarah]

Can anyone explain why they would have seized Mohammad Choukri's works when you can buy For Bread Alone in Egyptian bookstores anyway?

[SP]

Yes, definitely fishy, this string of cable outages. I wonder how the poor jihadis are getting on without their internet forums?

[Paul]

Rami Khour's thing on the Great Arab Cities of the Gulf, especially Dubai, is a bit silly. While I firmly believe in the great Middle Eastern urban tradition that he invokes, I don't think that's what's going on in Dubai. Cosmopolitan is putting it politely. Dubai is 3% local population, a smattering of other Arabs, and the vast majority is a south Asian slave class, supporting a service class of East Asians, with European managers near the top, presided over by a thin later of Emirati aristocracy. That follows no Arab historical model and cannot result in an Arab cultural flowering. The "Arabs" aren't putting up these fantastic buildings, foreign architects and workforces are. A city without sidewalks or any form of public transportation or any common public institutions is not something to be lauded. Rami, give me Beirut any day.

[SP]

While sharing your general opinion of Dubai, Paul, I'm compelled to point out that Dubai does have a public transportation system - buses, if you're prepared to wait 45 mins in the heat for one, and they're building a metro currently.

But yes, it's "cosmopolitan" only in the way that Vegas is cosmopolitan. A more global version of Julian Barnes' 'England England' theme park.