Category Archives: Uncategorized

In Egypt, watch the Nour Party

Nervana

This piece is published in Al-Monitor

It’s hard to see any winner in Egypt’s messy political arena — one that is dominated by near-daily deadly confrontations between the Muslim Brotherhood and the military-backed interim leadership. However, there’s one political party steadily reinforcing its place in Egypt’s political scene: the Salafist Nour.

Since its establishment in 2011, the Nour Party has raised many eyebrows among pundits and observers. Many did not take the ultra-conservative party seriously, despite its substantive gains in the first post-revolution parliament (111 out of 498 seats). The Salafist party is considered an indirect beneficiary of the rising fortune of Islamism in post-Arab Spring Egypt.

Two years later, the underestimation of Nour has continued. Analysts have considered the party window dressing used by the army to legitimize the coup. Some went further and predicted that Nour’s support of the military-backed government following the ousting of former President Mohammed Morsi would finish its political career. But the political…

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Egyptian Aak 2014 (Dec 30 – Jan 5)

Nervana

Main headlines

 Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

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UK police step up search for 400,000 missing Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants

Pride's Purge

(satire?)

Police have launched a large-scale operation including sniffer dogs and up to 30 officers to search for 400,000 missing immigrants from Bulgaria and Romania.

The immigrants were last seen boarding planes in their hundreds of thousands on the front pages of the Daily Mail and Daily Express newspapers in the early hours of Wednesday morning but authorities say there has been no sign of any of the immigrants for the last two days.

Police have made detailed searches in the vicinity of Heathrow and Gatwick airports with officers making house-to-house inquiries in various locations around the country and alerts have been placed at all entry points into the UK for authorities to keep a look out for the missing eastern Europeans.

Authorities are concerned for the safety of the immigrants, 400,000 of whom had been expected to turn up on Nigel Farage’s doorstep, wearing scarves on their heads, old trousers tucked…

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the waiting room

Leelouz Café

Yesterday while driving home from work, my thoughts were about shopping or no shopping. During the day my phone beeped endlessly with enticing messages; up to 50% on your favorite shoe brand. 30% off on all new clothes. come and be the first to benefit from the sales… as we were the 2nd of January, I knew my bank account was happy and that I could afford splashing myself with “up to 50%” items and find stuff for my kids who seemed to be busy growing 1 size per month!

As trivial as my thoughts were at that moment, something tragic happened few kilometers away. A bomb exploded in Beirut’s southern neighborhood, blinding everyone around with its terrible light, site, noise and then silence. I cannot imagine what goes through the people around at that moment. I cannot imagine what they are seeing, hearing or feeling. smoke? sharp smells? raging…

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Lebanon Loses 78000 Books To Terrorism: Tripoli’s “Al Sa’eh” Library Burned

A Separate State of Mind | A Blog by Elie Fares

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2014 is off to a horrible start in Lebanon. The explosion that took place in Beirut yesterday, in the year’s first few days, has been paralleled by another act of terrorism in Lebanon’s northern capital, where extremist gunmen torched the city’s biggest library, Lebanon’s second, burning it to the ground.

They accused the priest running the library, a man who has been fighting to keep that place alive against contractors who worked to dismantle the building in which it resided, of publishing an article that offends Islam. I guess offenses are in the eye of the beholder. In this case, the eyes are for illiterate people who can’t read and who don’t know the value of a book.

This is the supposed article in question:

Srour article

The country is burning, let’s not worry about a library. A lot of people might say that. But the library in question was a true…

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We are not martyrs

Hummus For Thought

The “I Am NOT a Martyr” Campaign (#notamartyr) has less than a day of existence and can already boast over 1,000 followers on itsFacebook page. You can understand why: We Lebanese are pissed at innocent victims being called martyrs in someone else’s war.

Yes, someone else’s war. 16 year old Mohammad Chaar is neither a Martyr nor a Hero. He’s a victim. And so was Georgette Sarkissian. And so were all other civilians murdered in the past years. They are victims of someone’s war against someone else for something which only affected them, and affects us, in that it is making our daily lives harder and harder.

We have become a nation of justified claustrophobia and justified paranoia; we have stopped hoping that this bomb would be the last because we know that another bomb will soon follow; we are living in the not-so-discreet shadow of our catastrophic civil war and are…

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Middle East Digest: December 2013. Turkey

Nervana

Turkey

(Photo from an anti-corruption protest in Ankara, via Twitter)

This is a special edition covering December’s events in Turkey, particularly the recent corruption scandal.

Hope you enjoy it

Main Headlines

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Hopes For A Better Lebanon: I’m Not A Martyr

Pray, Hope, Act!

A Separate State of Mind | A Blog by Elie Fares

“I just heard. I hope you’re okay,”  is the text I sent to the people who mattered to me this past Friday, moments after I had seen a column of smoke erupt in the distance from the hospital floor I had been rounding on.

I stood in patients’ rooms, transfixed as residents inquired on those patients’ state while television screens were lit with the bodies of people who had just perished. I was angry. I’m always angry. I was sorry. I was disgusted. It was an all too familiar sensation.

“Let’s continue the round,” the chief resident told me. “But people just died,” I replied. “It’s okay, life goes on.” It had only been a few minutes.

I don’t have suicidal ideations, but I wondered that day about how it’d be to die like those poor people, a burning corpse on a careless tarmac that has seen more than its…

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