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I am speaking twice this week at George Mason University: on Thursday and Friday. Check your local listings.

“Palestinian supporters in Egypt are taking the government to court to prevent them building an impregnable barrier along the border with Gaza.”

“”They made us sit on each other’s laps,” he said. “They were enjoying humiliating and abusing us, I wished I was dead at this moment.” (thanks Suha)

“Constitutional jurist Ibrahim Darweesh says that amendments to the constitution have already settled the outcome of the upcoming presidential election in favor of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) candidate, particularly Gamal Mubarak, the head of the NDP’s Policy Secretariat and the son of President Hosni Mubarak.”

“President Barack Obama has said on the Jewish state’s 62nd anniversary that the United States shares an “unbreakable bond” with Israel and he was confident the relationship “will only be strengthened” into the future.”

“Prime Minister Salam Fayyad testing a massive dish of musakhan, a traditional Palestinian food, in the West Bank village of Arura, near Ramallah on 19 April 2010. The dish has a diameter of 4 meters. “

“”I don’t want my work to be used as a piece of anthropology, a textbook for people who don’t know about the Arab world,” explained Egyptian writer Youssef Rakha, one of 39 Arab authors younger than 40 selected for the Beirut39 book festival. “I think [Arab literature] is in danger of becoming something else — something non-literary,” he added.”

“As Egyptian activists have grown more brazen in recent weeks, three members of the nation’s parliament have criticized the Interior Ministry for not harshly cracking down on demonstrators calling for widespread political reforms. “Shoot them [activists] and use bullets against those outlaws. We are 80 million Egyptians, and we don’t care if we lose a bunch of contraveners like them,” said Nashaat Kassas, a lawmaker. His comments, aimed at Interior Minister Habib Adli, came after opposition protests on April 6 and April 13. “If it was my decision, I’d have questioned the minister [Adli] about his leniency towards those demonstrators,” said Kassas, a member of the ruling National Democratic Party.“

“CPJ’s 2010 Impunity Index spotlights countries where journalists are slain and killers go free”

“A senior Iranian cleric says women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes.”

Lamenting the decline of the so-called Israeli left.

“City bureaucrats may withdraw funding from Pride Toronto next year if the activist group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid is allowed to march in this summer’s Pride parade.”

“The army has begun looking into ways to crack down on the Palestinian Authority’s financial support of the so-called nonviolent public uprising it is supporting in the West Bank, The Jerusalem Post has learned.”

Saudi clumnist, Dawud Shiryan, rules that the traditions of kings are superior to the conduct of strugglers and rebels.

“The models of Gandhi and King can be a powerful tool to peacefully oppose the occupation, while not opposing Israel itself.” Fortunately, such a view has the support of 0.000004 of the Arab people.

“But Tunisian citizens see another side of the country: a repressive state obsessed with maintaining the ruling party’s monopoly on power. My Human Rights Watch colleagues and I came up against Tunisia’s harsher side last month when we traveled to Tunis, the capital, to release a report critical of the country’s authoritarianism.”

“Pope: church will protect young from abuse”

“”The whole system sounds a bit unsavory to Western sensibilities but the system is ubiquitous in Bangkok…” Yes, genius. Western sensibilities are so hostile to porn, sleaze, prostitution and denigration of women. Oh, yeah.

I thank my Saudi sources for unearthing this for me. Witnesses told me that Prince Salman invited Saqr to perform the dance and Saqr, of course, obliged.

“Much has been made of Martin Kramer’s suggestion that Palestinians be denied food and medicine in order to weaken their opposition to the Israeli occupation. We, along with a group of 25 other professors, scholars, and Harvard alumni, add our voices to the chorus of condemnation directed towards Dr. Kramer and express our concern that the Weatherhead Center has lent him its credibility. As academics, we question both the ethical and scholarly basis of Dr. Kramer’s public statements. We maintain that this is not a question of protecting Dr. Kramer’s free speech, as was indicated by the Weatherhead Center’s response to criticism. Rather, it is about maintaining appropriate standards of ethical and intellectual conduct; Dr. Kramer’s repellent statements evince a clear failure to meet those standards.”

“The reason the Communications Ministry is blocking the entry of iPad tablet computers into Israel is that the device’s wireless communications could interfere with frequencies used by the military, said MK Robert Ilatov (Yisrael Beiteinu) yesterday. He wrote a letter to Communications Minister Moshe Kahlon, calling on him to allow the importation of Apple’s new computers, which the ministry banned last week. Ilatov said the ban had harmed Israel’s image around the world, and kept Israelis from using cutting-edge technology.”

“Noam Chomsky, the leading leftwing intellectual, warned last week that fascism may be coming to the United States.”

The Saudi king and the Bahraini king feel like dancing. (Saudi news agency)

“IMAGINE that the world consists of 20 men and 20 women, all of them heterosexual and in search of a mate. Since the numbers are even, everyone can find a partner. But what happens if you take away one man? You might not think this would make much difference. You would be wrong, argues Tim Harford, a British economist, in a book called “The Logic of Life”. With 20 women pursuing 19 men, one woman faces the prospect of spinsterhood. So she ups her game. Perhaps she dresses more seductively. Perhaps she makes an extra effort to be obliging. Somehow or other, she “steals” a man from one of her fellow women. That newly single woman then ups her game, too, to steal a man from someone else. A chain reaction ensues. Before long, every woman has to try harder, and every man can relax a little. Real life is more complicated, of course, but this simple model illustrates an important truth. In the marriage market, numbers matter. And among African-Americans, the disparity is much worse than in Mr Harford’s imaginary example. Between the ages of 20 and 29, one black man in nine is behind bars. For black women of the same age, the figure is about one in 150. For obvious reasons, convicts are excluded from the dating pool. And many women also steer clear of ex-cons, which makes a big difference when one young black man in three can expect to be locked up at some point.”

See: www.theangryarab.blogspot.com

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