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The Egyptian government mounted a small demonstration of defiance of the Olmert government in Israel on Thursday. Palestinians destroyed the blast walls that artificially box them in to the tiny, slummy Gaza Strip and cut them off from their natural markets in Egypt. Perhaps a fourth of Gaza’s population then flooded into the nearby Egyptian […]

The humanitarian impact of Israel’s electricity blockade of the Gaza Strip. Raw sewage in the streets, which will soon seep into houses; asthmatics choking; hospitals on the verge of switching off life support. Robert Malley of the International Crisis Group is eloquent in the Boston Globe/ IHT on why this Israeli tactic is self-defeating. But […]

It is a perfect time for the Israeli government to commit a war crime on the miserable civilians of the Gaza Strip. The US primary season has created a news blackout on US television about foreign news (apparently the public of the world’s sole superpower is not estimated by corporate news executives to be able […]

As Clinton and Romney win the Nevada primaries, Justin Elliot asks at Mother Jones why the leading candidates don’t have more to say about crucial Middle East policy, including Israel-Palestine issues. The new issue of Arab Media and Society is available online. It is an exciting journal, and this crop of articles is especially germane […]

See Charles Smith’s important comments on Bush’s Arab-Israeli diplomacy at our Global Affairs group blog. The USG Open Source Center translates excerpts from opinion pieces in the Lebanese press concerning Bush’s visit to the Middle East (he did not visit Beirut, where politics is so polarized that parliament has been unable to elect a new […]

Mike Huckabee says he wants to amend the US constitution to bring it into line with the divinely revealed law of the living God: ‘ “I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to […]

My new Salon.com column is out, entitled McCain runs on Iraq in Michigan. The Intro is here: On the stump in Michigan, John McCain campaigns on victory in Iraq. It’s a risky strategy, as the recent surge in violence shows.’ Read the whole thing.

So the big political news today is that the Iraqi parliament on Saturday finally passed a revision of the “De-baathification” law issued by US viceroy Paul “Jerry” Bremer in May of 2003. That law got tens of thousands of Sunni Arabs fired from their government jobs and excluded from public life and helped kick off […]

My readers sometimes ask me about Arabic software tools for the web. I just wanted to flag for them Yamli.com, which I’m finding a real delight. It would be slow for someone who was a good touch typist in Arabic, but for those of us who peck out the letters, it is wonderful, and it […]