Life and Culture

The award for curious news story of the day goes to this piece from Politico's Josh Gerstein, who reports that a federal magistrate in Washington, D.C., has denied an effort by the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization to get Atlantic writer and stubborn, fiery Israel-defender Jeffrey Goldberg to testify on their behalf in a case brought by a Jewish settler.

More than 30 people were injured yesterday in a sectarian riot (عربي) in Egypt's Matrouh governorate.

The fighting reportedly started when Muslim residents threw stones at Christian construction workers who were building a fence around a lot owned by the El-Shahideen church. The rioters thought the laborers were blocking off the site to build a new church; the workers say they were actually building a fence around a hospice.

Mohamed Tantawi, the sheikh of Al-Azhar University, passed away from a heart attack (عربي) in Riyadh this morning while boarding an airplane.

Tantawi was in Saudi Arabia for the King Faisal Awards;Al-Jazeera reports that he looked fine during the ceremony; an adviser to Tantawi says the sheikh was in "excellent health" before the trip.

Tantawi made headlines most recently for his edict against the niqab, in which he declared the full-face veil a "tradition" with no basis in Islam, and for an incident in which he lifted a young girl's niqab. His legacy includes a number of other controversial decisions -- rulings on banking reforms, for example, and a meeting with Israeli president Shimon Peres.

Issandr El Amrani has a detailed obituary with a lot of interesting detail about Tantawi's place in Egyptian society. His immediate verdict:

... he was too liberal for conservatives, too conservative for liberals, too compliant with the regime for those who want al-Azhar to be independent, and too independent for those in the regime who needed Azharite support to enact policy changes on issues as varied as Palestine, banking and TV game shows.

Tantawi's body will be buried in Medina, according to the BBC.

Forget all the doom and gloom, the United Arab Emirates are going up, up, up! At least, that's what Rupert Murdoch, the conservative media baron and owner of News Corporation believes.

From the National>:

Fox International Channels, a subsidiary of News Corp, is making Abu Dhabi its regional hub for online advertising sales, documentary production and satellite television broadcast.

Murdoch and Fox are betting that the booming wealth of the Gulf states, combined with the enormous Middle Eastern youth population that consume media products produced in the Gulf, will spell big profits for online advertising in the region.

The BBC has a somewhat alarming story about exponentially higher rates of birth defects in Fallujah in the years following the U.S. invasion.

That's what the story claims, at least. But there's not much analytical rigor in the piece, which doesn't define what it means by "birth defect" and presents mostly anecdotal data. The topic deserves further study before we conclude there's a crisis.

Move over, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh -- another Dubai murder made the headlines today: Egypt's Court of Cassation ordered a retrial for Hisham Talaat Mustafa, the billionaire businessman accused of killing Lebanese pop star Suzanne Tamim in Dubai in 2008.

Mustafa was sentenced to death in May, after a Cairo court found him guilty of paying a retired Egyptian police officer US$2 million to kill Tamim, his former lover. Prosecutors said Mustafa had Tamim killed after she refused to marry him.

The New America Foundation's "dronology" tag-team of Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann released a new paper on the U.S. drone campaign in northwest Pakistan last week, and the accompanying Web page devoted to tracking all strikes since 2004 is the most exhaustive open source account of the drone war I've yet seen.

The Google Map documenting six years of strikes, sourced from publicly accessible press accounts, is highly useful, but the news value of the new NAF report is Bergen and Tiedemann's conclusion that the rate of civilian deaths from drone attacks is somewhere around 32 percent.

Somalia's Shabab rebel group says it will no longer allow the World Food Programme to operate in Somalia -- and will retaliate against any local contractors who work with the WFP.

"The contractors working with WFP must avoid collaborating ... anyone working with the agency will be seen serving the interest of WFP," the group said in a statement.

Shabab says the WFP delivered food that made people sick (probably not true); that WFP aid causes market distortions (probably true, but also unavoidable); and that the group's work in Somalia is "political."

Is Fethullah Gulen pulling the strings behind the Turkish coup investigation?

Gulen -- a Turkish preacher who heads the eponymous Fethullah Gulen Movement -- has long been a bogeyman to many American (and Turkish) conservatives, who view him as a sort of Turkish Ayatollah Khomeini, waiting in exile to swoop in and topple the Kemalist republic.

James Rainey, the Los Angeles Times' media critic, waded into the month-old controversy over New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner yesterday, concluding that Bronner should be allowed to remain in his post, despite his son volunteering to join Israel's army, the Israel Defense Forces.

In his piece, Rainey argues that Bronner is a skilled reporter who should be judged on the content of his journalism, not on potential biases and internal thought processes that nobody besides Bronner himself can fully understand.

Rainey makes a good case for judging journalists by their work, but he also sidesteps the most powerful arguments against Bronner's remaining.

I've only been to Hebron once. It was one of the stranger experiences in my travels in the Middle East -- the overwhelming military presence to protect a few hundred settlers, the settler-only road, the grave of Israeli terrorist Baruch Goldstein. The tension is palpable.

The city is a flashpoint again this week, after Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to add two West Bank religious sites -- the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem -- to a national heritage plan. The list includes other religious sites and "historic sites in Zionist history"; the Israeli government has earmarked NIS400 million (US$106 million) to refurbish the sites.

Al-Jazeera is one of the big dogs -- if not the biggest -- among Middle East news organizations; that much is clear. But could the Qatar-based satellite television station's enormous influence wind up dooming the Palestinian - Israeli peace process as well? Jeb Koogler and Noah Bonsey, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, seem to think it's possible.

One more word on Bronnergate: Al-Jazeera's Listening Post program did a thoughtful segment on the controversy this weekend. It discusses Bronner's son's service in the Israeli Defense Forces, but it also explores a bigger question: the extent to which Bronner is enmeshed in Israeli society, and how that affects his coverage.

In the department of "things that should have been done a long time ago," the U.S. State Department has finally lifted its Syria travel warning.

I was never entirely clear on why Syria fell under a travel warning in the first place: The State Department's warning (which has since been removed from the Internet) never referenced any specific threats -- just some ominous language about "large-scale demonstrations" in Damascus, and the fact that Hamas and Hizballah have offices in the country. It always struck me as a product of politics, not legitimate security concerns.

In any event, glad to see it has been lifted. The State Department's full announcement is after the jump.

Wondering why Israeli deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon is so eager to transfer Israeli Arab villages into a Palestinian state? Here's a clue.

Israel's northern Arab population now stands at 53 percent, according to a February report published by the Central Bureau of Statistics.

Muslim families in Israel have an average of 3.8 children; for Jewish families, the average is 2.5. And the number of Jews making aliyah has declined significantly over the last two decades. So the Arab population will continue to grow rapidly -- both in absolute and relative terms.

It was a mixed week for women's rights in Egypt. First, the good news: The Egyptian parliament is considering two bills that would criminalize sexual harassment. One of them was presented to the parliament this week; the other was approved by the Justice Ministry, and will be presented to legislators later this month.

Both are fairly tough measures. The bill presented this week, for example, would impose up to a one-year prison sentence, and an LE1,000 fine, for anyone who commits sexual harassment -- a rampant problem in Egypt.

Interpol posted wanted notices this morning for the alleged Mahmoud al-Mabhouh killers. Here's the notice for Gail Folliard, for example, the lone woman in the group of 11; here's Melvyn Adam Mildiner, the Israeli/British dual citizen who appeared on Channel 10 news last night and said he hasn't left Israel in two years.

All 11 are wanted for "crimes against life and health" in Dubai, but the notices don't provide much more detail.

A poll released last month found that 91 percent of Israelis think their country has "an image problem." The Israeli foreign ministry has settled on a solution: A new public relations Web site, an advertising campaign, and PR coaching for groups of Israeli travelers heading abroad.

The new Web site presents a conservative interpretation of the issues over which Israel is most often criticized abroad -- its settlements in the West Bank and treatment of Palestinians, including the war in Gaza a year ago. But it also seeks to puncture what the ministry considers common myths about Israel -- that it is a big and primitive country, that food consists of little more than hummus and falafel, and that Israelis as a group do not seek peace.

Oy. I mean, in a general sense, yes, public diplomacy is important for Israel: there are people who think Israel doesn't have a right to exist, and (from an Israeli perspective) it's important to push back against those arguments.

Making news out of Yemen this week: Huthi rebels in the country's north have returned a prisoner of war to Saudi Arabia, and Christmas Day underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab told investigators that he trained with other English-speaking Al-Qaeda terrorists-to-be in the country.

Not making news out of Yemen this week: American aid to the hundreds of thousands of Yemenis displaced by the Huthi rebellion.

Two headlines from Lebanon's Daily Star (which desperately needs a new Web design, by the way).

Conference debates Palestinian refugee population's right to work in Lebanon
Gun battle in Ain al-Hilweh leaves one woman dead

Not implying a causal relationship between the two! Ain al-Hilweh won't suddenly become a paradise if the Palestinian refugees living there get better access to well-paying jobs (though it certainly wouldn't hurt).