BLOGS OF THE CONFLICT. I
I came across LebanonHeartBlogs originally via Elijah Zarwan‘s wonderfully written The Skeptic. Zarwan is a former Human Rights Watch worker and part of a network of Cairene bloggers I discovered in the past few months. The most frequently read such blog stateside is probablyIssandr El Amrani‘s The Arabist. El Amrani, an LSE-educated young journalist based in Cairo, provides great news an updates on the pro-democracy reform movement in Egypt and around the region, as well as a useful selection of regional conspiracy theories about the Jews — have you heard the one about how the re-invasion of Gaza is really all about Israel trying to maintain control of Gazan natural gas deposits? — and by the Jews. Via The Arabist you can check out the network of Egyptian bloggers, including Malaa and Alaa’s TK, one of the best-known Egyptian blogs. (Alaa TK, who runs the site, recently spent 45 days in Tora prison for protesting for judicial freedom and honest elections, and I suspect most of what makes this site interesting is untranslated.)
Stateside, Shadi Hamid at Democracy Arsenal is essential reading for all things Egypt-related, while California State University, Stanislaus professor ‘s rather propagandistic The Angry Arab — a place where bombs rain down on “Northern Palestine,” not Northern Israel — is an accurately titled home for a rather different perspective — “the Nation magazine is as racist toward Arabs and as hostile to Muslims as the New Republic,” he recently wrote — as well as plenty of news photos circulating in Arab media that don’t make into the American papers.
http://thehumanprovince.blogspot.com/