Category Archives: Journalism and Media

Streaming Revolution, Screaming Revolution

"Arab Spring", CyberOrient, Egypt, Journalism and Media, Tunisia


Al Jazeera offers live coverage of events in Egypt on the internet

Not even Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who I suspect lies awake at night (just as many of his news outlets lie throughout the day) thinking of new ways to manufacture news, could have imagined the current crisis streaming live on the cable channels and over the Internet for well over a week. America has had its tea party and birthers with Fox gobbling up Sarah Palin to supplement the loonies already on the payroll. I suppose the Israel/Palestine issue was getting too stale, so why not a domino fury across North Africa and the Middle East? No, Murdoch did not cause the overthrow of Ben Ali, the massive anti-Mubarak protests in Egypt, the ripple effect of less virulent protests in Yemen, Jordan, Syria, and Sudan. There are very good local reasons why the streets are filled with angry people from all walks of life (well not the corrupt elites who benefit from dictatorial spoils).

It is not about hating the United States, not when the signs spell out freedom and democracy instead of “Death to America.” It is not even about Islam, certainly not the silly rantings of Glenn Beck that a new chalkboard caliphate is in the making. It is about frustration that reached the boiling point, the astronomical rises in food costs, the lack of jobs, the growing income gap between the average person and friends of the regime. When you have a president alleged to be worth 40 billion dollars, you get the picture of why there has not been an end to the takeover of Tahrir Square in Cairo. Continue reading Streaming Revolution, Screaming Revolution →

Alwan for Egypt and Tunisia

"Arab Spring", Egypt, Journalism and Media, Tunisia


Egyptian Christians holding hands to protect, if in name, if in symbolism only, their Muslim countrymen during prayer as the protests continue; photo by Nevine Zaki in Cairo

Alwan for the Arts is sponsoring a fundraiser: In Solidarity -The Morning After on
Saturday, February 5, 2011 12:00 pm at Alwan for the Arts (16 Beaver Street
4th Floor, New York, NY 10004 (646) 732 3261

12:00-2:00 Reception
2:00-4:00 Al-Jazeera Live Feed
4:00-5:00 Skype and phone Conversations with Egypt and Tunisia
5:00-5:30 Break
5:30: Live Concert by Arab Performers

Suggested Donations: $25

Over a pier, the first beacon inflamed —
The vanguard of other sea-rangers;
The mariner cried and bared his head;
He sailed with death beside and ahead
In seas, packed with furious dangers.

By our doors Great Victory stays …
But how we’ll glory her advent?
Let women lift higher the children! They blessed
With life mid a thousand thousands deaths —
Thus will be the dearest answered.- Anna Akhmatova Continue reading Alwan for Egypt and Tunisia →

What the Arab papers say

"Arab Spring", Egypt, Journalism and Media

The Economist has a roundup of views from the Arab press on the unfolding events in Egypt (in English translation):

THE Arab press has been following the unrest in Egypt closely since the country’s first “day of rage”, over a week ago.

In Al Shorouk, an independent Egyptian daily newspaper, Emad El Din Hussein describes the sudden disappearance of religious and political barriers that have divided Egyptians in the past decades:

I swear by Almighty God that I cried with joy to see Egypt reborn in Tahrir Square on Tuesday night…Members of Muslim Brotherhood, Nasserists and Marxists were all present; you could recognize them from their physical appearance and the way they spoke or dressed. But they were few and far between…The majority of those present were ordinary citizens…thousands of people mingled together shouting different slogans and singing together…other demonstrators sat talking about poverty, unemployment and violation of human dignity.

Continue reading What the Arab papers say →

Yemen is Not Tunisia, not Egypt

"Arab Spring", Ali Abdullah Salih, Anthropology/Sociology, Journalism and Media, Terrorism Issue, Yemen

Yesterday I published a commentary on CNN Opinion about the recent protests in Yemen. I attach the start of this here, but the full account can be read at CNN.com.

(CNN) — “Yemen is not Tunisia.” These were the words that President Ali Abdullah Saleh spoke to his people on television last Sunday.

As street protests erupt in Yemen’s capital, it is not surprising that an Arab leader who has held power since a bloodless coup in 1978 would dismiss calls for his ouster.

But he was correct.

Although his regime has been accused of corruption, Saleh is no Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, nor even Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. Instead of using an iron fist, he has maintained power by cleverly playing off rivalries among tribal, religious and political divisions.

When he became president of North Yemen, he allied himself with Sheikh Abdullah al-Ahmar, who headed the most powerful tribal alliance in the North. After negotiating the unification of Yemen’s North with the socialist South in 1990, Saleh fostered a climate of grass-roots democratization before outmaneuvering the socialists for total control of the country.

Power is shared in Yemen largely because of the continuing local importance of tribal affiliation. This is not always understood. A major conflict near Yemen’s border with Saudi Arabia, for example, has been wrongly characterized as an Islamist rebellion. Like most political conflict in the region, the battle has religious overtones, but it is mainly over tribal autonomy…

I was interviewed this morning for the program Worldview of WBEZ in
Chicago and this interview aired today but is archived on the website.

Daniel Martin Varisco

Good Sufi, Bad Muslims

Islam in America, Islamophobia 101, Journalism and Media, Sufism


by Omid Safi, Sightings, January 27, 2011

One of the lower points in the Park51 Center controversy was the comment by New York Governor David Paterson: “This group who has put this mosque together, they are known as the Sufi Muslims. This is not like the Shiites…They’re almost like a hybrid, almost westernized. They are not really what I would classify in the sort of mainland Muslim practice.”

In a few short sentences, the governor managed to offend Sufis, Shi’i Muslims, as well as westernized Muslims, non-westernized Muslims, and “mainland Muslims” (whoever they are). Paterson overlooked the fact that some Shi’i Muslims are mystically inclined, and that six million American citizens are Muslims, thus there is no question of “westernizing” or “almost westernizing” for them. There is a more disturbing implication hiding in his assertion: the ongoing way in which the general demonization of Muslims, of the kind now routine on Fox News, is accompanied by an equally pernicious game of Good Muslim, Bad Muslims.

There are many versions of this game, but the basic contour stays the same: The assertion that the general masses of Muslims are evil, terrorist-supporters, anti-western, patriarchal, misogynist, undemocratic, and anti-Semitic; and that these masses are set off and defined against either the solitary, lone Muslim good woman or man. The “Good Muslim” is often an individual, or a small circle, because to admit that the larger group of Muslims could be on the right side of the human-rights divide is to have the house of cards of the Muslim demonization game collapse on itself. Continue reading Good Sufi, Bad Muslims →

Tuning into Tunisia

"Arab Spring", Anthropology/Sociology, Egypt, Journalism and Media, Terrorism Issue, Tunisia, Yemen

The recent revolution in Tunisia has exploded across the blogosphere, with pundits talking about a popular tsunami that may promote democracy out of the ashes of a lifelong dictatorship. In yesterday’s New York Times, Roger Cohen provided an optimistic view from his journalistic perch in Tunis: “These are heady days in the Arab world’s fragile democratic bridgehead.” Cohen, and others, are wondering aloud if Tunisia can become the new Turkey, a more or less secular democracy in which the “Islamists” are moderate members of a political mosaic. If so, then he warns that the “tired refrain of all the Arab despots that they are the only bulwark against the jihadists will be seen for the self-serving lie it has become.”

Perhaps, but one does not have to go far back into the regime of Saddam Hussein to realize that his Ba’athi party did not tolerate religiously motivated sectarian violence. Brutal as it was, his regime was a bulwark (if such a metaphor really makes sense politically) against the continual round in “liberated” Iraq of sunni killing shi’a and vice versa. But then Saddam was not brought down by a popular street uprising. Continue reading Tuning into Tunisia →

New book on Lawrence

Archaeology and Antiquities, Books You Should Read, Journalism and Media, Orientalism



A new book has appeared by Michael Korda entitled The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (Harper/HarperCollins Publishers, 762 pages). A review by Ben MacIntyre was published in yesterday’s New York Times, the beginning of which I attach here.

Lowell Thomas, the pioneering American journalist and filmmaker, was buying dates on a Jerusalem street soon after the holy city had been wrested from Turkish control by British forces in 1917, when he spotted a group of Arabs, led by a most remarkable figure. “A single Bedouin who stood out in sharp relief from his companions; . . . in his belt was fastened the short curved sword of a prince of Mecca, . . . marking him every inch a king. . . . This young man was blond as a Scandinavian. . . . His expression was serene, almost saintly, in its selflessness and repose.”

The robed figure was T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, Laurens Bey to his Arab comrades in arms, the “Uncrowned King of Arabia” according to his boosters. And if Thomas’s description seems sensationalist, that is hardly surprising, for the American did more than any other single person to turn Lawrence into a glittering multimedia global celebrity, a fable, a saint and a myth.

Lawrence was an ambiguous figure in his lifetime, and has remained so ever since, in part because the fog of fame made it virtually impossible to see him clearly, then and now. He was a scholar and warrior, an imperialist and supporter of Arab independence, a politician and rebel, a publicity seeker and recluse. Fighting alongside Arab irregulars in the revolt against Turkish Ottoman rule during World War I, he was fanatically brave and chillingly ruthless. He was fastidious, inconsistently vegetarian, sexually repressed, allergic to physical contact and addicted to danger, flagellation and roasting baths. He was fabulously weird. Continue reading New book on Lawrence →

Rediscovering the Uncovering of King Tut

Archaeology and Antiquities, Egypt, Journalism and Media


bottom right, Car used to transport Lord Carnarvon to and from Tut’s tomb in the 1920s

Conspiracy theorists and Hollywood movie moguls love King Tut. Take a young boy who becomes Pharaoh at age 9, only rules for a decade, marries his sister, and whose long forgotten tomb with gold aplenty is discovered in full media light in the Roaring 20s … and what do you have: an Ancient Egyptian prequel to Star Wars. Add to it a curse like “Death shall come on swift wings to him who disturbs the peace of the king” and there is even more mummy stardust. But the curse has it wrong; it should have read “Profit shall come on swift wings to him who distributes as many pieces as possible about the king.” Millions of people worldwide have read about King Tut, stood in line to see the major exhibitions and come under the spell of the glittering gold. I remember the long lines outside the Met in 1976, the emptiness on descending tourist-style into King Tut’s tomb in the Valley of the Hidden Kings, and the less than spectacular ambiance of Tut’s remains in Cairo’s old museum.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to rediscover Tut in the exhibit still running at the Discovery Times Square Exhibition. But hurry, if you are in New York, because Tut moves on to another set of paying admirers after January 17. Continue reading Rediscovering the Uncovering of King Tut →