Since the end of March, the
Wall Street Journal's new
Middle East Real Time blog has written about
Turkey's "unstoppable" export boom in soap operas,
Saudi Arabia's "life after jihad" rehab program,
the persistence of obviously fraudulent bomb detectors across Iraq,
YouTube branding discussions among Syrian rebel factions,
a rising media star Sunni cleric in Lebanon,
a post-revolutionary Cairo arts festival, and attempts to
overcome conservative objections and change the Saudi Thursday-Friday weekend to match the rest of the business world. Previous non-paywalled
WSJ Real Time blogs include
Korea,
China,
Canada,
India,
Brussels,
Emerging Europe,
Japan.
posted by mediareport
on May 9, 2013 -
16 comments
I feel creatively emboldened to personally say something on the subjects that I am documenting. In terms of how it is produced, intellectually I am more excited than I have been in years. I am envisioning so many more possibilities for the work ... I feel for first time empowered on my own terms. We are calling our own shots and have created somewhat of our own institution.
An
interview with the six-woman Middle Eastern documentary photography collective
Rawiya, whose name means "female narrator" in Arabic.
[more inside]
posted by nangar
on Mar 13, 2013 -
2 comments
'Homeland,' Obama’s Show. The award winning TV show does little to alleviate the myths and misconceptions about Arabs and Muslims, writes
Joseph Massad, a
scholar at Columbia University. "The racist representation of Arabs is so exponential, even for American television [..] that one does not know where to begin."
[more inside]
posted by kiskar
on Dec 12, 2012 -
84 comments
"The Ideology of Hatred": An interview with Niza Yanay - "Once we understand how hatred operates as an apparatus of power relations, and particularly how the discourse of hatred is motivated and mobilised in national conflicts, serious questions about misrecognition, veiled desires and symptomatic expressions arise. These questions have, to a large extent, been left unaddressed in studies of hatred between groups in conflict."
[more inside]
posted by flex
on Nov 15, 2012 -
13 comments
The Checkpoint. An essay which looks inside the conflicted mind of an Israeli soldier, stationed at a West Bank checkpoint. By Oded Na'aman, currently a student in the Philosophy PhD program at Harvard University, who served in the Israeli Defense Forces from November 2000 to October 2003. Mr. Na'aman is also a member of
Breaking the Silence, a website that gathers and publishes anonymous
testimonials from IDF soldiers -- combat veterans -- about their experiences and the realities of life in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.
posted by zarq
on Jul 24, 2012 -
6 comments
Larry Cohler-Esses from the Jewish Daily
Forward interviews Abu Marzook, Hamas' deputy political director. The interview captures Hamas in a state of transition and includes a segment (with audio) of Cohler-Esses explaining to the confused Hamas leader that the 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion' is a Russian hoax.
posted by the mad poster!
on Apr 21, 2012 -
18 comments
"I get up every morning at 5, go for a half-hour walk in the desert, come home and have a cup of coffee, sit down at the desk and ask myself what I would say if I were him, and what I would do if I were her. I think curiosity is actually a moral virtue. I think a person who is curious is slightly more moral than one who is not curious, because sometimes he enters into the skin of another. I think a curious person is even a better lover than one who is not curious. Even my political approach to the Palestinian question, for example, sprang from curiosity. I am not a Middle East expert or a historian or a strategist. I simply asked myself, at a very young age, what it would be like if I were one of them. So, that’s what I do − get up in the morning and ask myself: What if?" - Israeli writer
Amos Oz reflects on his life, on Israel, on writing, and discusses his newest work [more inside]
posted by beisny
on Mar 29, 2012 -
4 comments
Tomorrow, Friday the 23rd of September 2011, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister
Mahmoud Abbas will go before the UN and set out his request for formal recognition of the state of
Palestine. There are many problems with this, and not just for the Palestinians...
[more inside]
posted by dougrayrankin
on Sep 22, 2011 -
99 comments
Last year, the unofficial Dean of the White House Press Corps,
Helen Thomas, spoke about the State of Israel on camera.
(Previously) Her
replies:
"Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine," and that the Jews
"can go home" to
"Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else," sparked media
outrage, prompted her to issue an apology and
retire. After months of being out of the the public spotlight, she has now given
her first long-form interview, which will appear in the April issue of Playboy Magazine. In it, she explains what she meant, tells us how she would like to be remembered and expands upon her positions regarding Israel, Jewish political influence, Presidents Bush and Obama, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
posted by zarq
on Mar 22, 2011 -
224 comments
Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens.
The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment
posted by y2karl
on May 18, 2010 -
105 comments
Suicide bombers from Lebanon, the West Bank, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Chechnya have two things in common: they are Muslim and they live under occupation.
University of Chicago Professor Dr. Robert A. Pape, who has assembled a comprehensive database of every (or nearly every) suicide bombing since 1980, has been the most prominent proponent of the view that it is occupation, not religion, that is the single most important motivating factor for suicide bombers... more than 95% of suicide bombers come from countries under occupation...
Pape and his colleagues at the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, ask What Makes Chechen Women So Dangerous?
-Via The Washington Note
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey
on Apr 1, 2010 -
88 comments
Soup Over Bethlehem - The mloukhieh in the soup bowl represents the shared national heritage and the meal itself becomes a gastronomic anchoring of a Palestinian identity in eternal flux.
[via]
posted by tellurian
on Apr 2, 2009 -
17 comments
