Election day carnival

I started blogging a year and one month ago, because I was getting so many queries about how things were going in Beirut after the little 7 May dustup between the opposition and the loyalists, that I figured it would save a bit of time to collect everything in one place and let anyone who wished read about it.

Things are coming to a bit of a conclusion in that regard. The elections are being held today, and I'm watching from the balcony in much the same way I did when the dustup was occurring. (Obviously there was no fighting on my street, because then it would have been suicidal to watch from the balcony). What a difference a year made.

Things have been busy since early this morning with people passing in the street. Slogans being broadcast loudly from passing cars (and today the traffic rules are completely suspended; cars enter and exit as their drivers see fit; regardless of one-way signs; facing good natured cooperation from whomever happens to encounter them at corners and tight spots).

There is a carnival spirit in the air. Right downstairs there are big parasols and chairs set up for people to hang out at. For about three weeks the resistance election office of Beirut has had its doors open for business, and more people than usual are arrayed on their chairs out front. A lot of the early morning noise was coming from there.

There are streams of people passing in the street heading to the YWCA where one of the polling places is set up. Before they get there, they must pass by scores of young volunteers, their party affiliation identifiable by the color of their t-shirts and caps. There are the light blues of the Future Party; the whites of the Phalange; the yellows of Hizbullah; and at the resistance headquarters, the greens and blacks of Amal. All of them are haning out together and having a grand old time of it.

Unlike the regular idealistic youths of the other partys, who look like college students and keep their places as close the polls as they can legally remain. The Amal fellows are BIG (but also young) and wearing combat boots and move around some. This is basically an Amal neighborhood, so they are here to keep the peace. But there is no tension at all. Everyone is greeting everyone else, regardless of political affilation, and all getting along fine.

People are flying Lebanese, Hizbullah, and Amal flags from their balconies. Our doorman is handing out croissants to anyone who wants them. And across the street the local mana'iish bakery is doing a land office business. One of the bakers said to me, "we should have an election every week"!

The weather is lovely. May seems to have extended into June. People are out in their summer clothes, heading to the polls with their cute little kids in tow.

So far, no sign at all of the tensions everyone was fearing. We'll see what happens after the votes are counted. It may be a wild night of celebrating.

Update 13:00

Things have calmed down a bit. This might have been expected. A colleague at the University was telling me that she and others like her would vote early. And those whose votes have been purchased or who wish to sell their votes would go to the polls just before closing. She said, "We stupid ones go out and do our duty early; the smart ones vote later"! About stupid and smart Lebanese voters, see Davidovitch's comment at Remarks .

Update 17:00

It has gotten really quiet. There are a few occasional people wandering over to the polling place, but no crowds out front at all. By the way, even with the crowds, it seemed that turnaround was fast, judging by the people I would see going then returning. The only volunteers left on the street are the Amal young men. But they have been living in the street for weeks. They are the only thing now disturbing the usual Sunday peace. The tellie is reporting quiet, orderly polling all round the country.

The opposition anthems to be heard blaring out of the passing autos were party workers ferrying people to and from the polling place.

If you click on the picture, you'll see and enlargement of the early morning crowds at the end of the street in front of the YWCA.

Update 18:50

Ten minutes to closing time and it is so quiet, all I can hear is the neighbors' birds singing. Even for a Sunday, that is quiet. The shabab are still hanging out downstairs but they are quiet too.

Reports round the country are that there have been very few incidents. Tripoli seemed to suffer a bit of a fight. Someone's car windows got broken out by a rock.

Some are saying that if there is to be any unrest, it will be tomorrow after all the results are in and announced. I somewho doubt that much will happen. But we'll see.

That's all for me for today, unless something untoward happens. But I doubt that it will.

10 Conceptual Sins in Analysing Middle East Politics

Another posting will be coming soon about themes over which I am gaining a certain amount of expertise, that of the discourse about Arab antisemitism. Meanwhile, take a look at this posting by Eric Davis, a relatively new blogger, but an old hand at analysis of things Arab and Middle Eastern. And while you're at it, read his analysis of expertise gained through riding in taxis. I love this quote: "American reporters need to get 'out of the taxi cab'"! Every one of his 10 points is spot-on. It seems that many of us are concerned with the same issues.

Demonizing, exoticising and domesticating the Arab world - all at once

Here we go with another of my very sporadic diatribes.

Update below.

I am not the only one to use the term 'pornography" to describe the quality of writing on the Arab world appearing in the western media and its minions. Davidiovich over at Remarkz, (for whom I should and do have an affinity, for the sake of his name, if not for everything else too) a blog mostly about Lebanon, gets it too, although he archly borrows the name of the band Porno for Pyros, evoking the true dual meaning of the term pornography and pyromania and applying it to this offensive style of writing. (Aside: D-vich credits the lead Perry Farrell, but in my opinion, the real genius there was Steven Perkins - listen again, and then talk to me.)

there is something pornographic in the way these writers describe Lebanon and the Lebanese (one can almost hear Ms. Miller exclaiming: ‘Lebanese chicks are hot, dude!’). And pyros, because many of these fire-starters were disappointed that the Israelis did not incinerate even more Lebanese back in 2006.

He's talking here about Judith Miller, formerly of the New York Times, now writing for, among other things, the Daily Beast, where she has apparently landed after being obliged to leave the Times when her mendacity became too much of a public spectacle. She's just had her obligatory one-day whirlwind tour of the environs of Beirut, which resulted in the usual enormously shallow analysis.

It seems that a new Beirut spring has arrived (a lovely time of year). Now that the political situation really has quieted down, we are being served pulse-racing travelogues about trips into the forbidden zones. And I now venture yet another term for this kind of writing, especially when it describes Beirut: terror-tourism. Christopher Hitchens, not at all unfamiliar with the Arab world, glories in it. Juan Cole, otherwise no slouch in analysis of the Islamic/Arab world, does too.

Such well-worn discussions strike some familiar themes among them a fascination with Hizbullah and another what the women are wearing. Both of these obsessions are embedded in a larger narrative of westernizing and modernising the Arab world. Some of it comes from a shrewd - maybe we should say cynical - assessment by editors of what readers want. Here's Michael Young, a writer who, like Thom Friedman, usually gives me blisters, on that:

Why this interest in Hizbullah, and why does this interest quite often morph into measured, even unmeasured, attraction? I can offer up several hypotheses, not mutually exclusive. First of all, for a Western journalist or analyst, Hizbullah is an easy story to sell to a publication or think tank. There are guns and strange bearded men, and both will grab an editor back home and a writer eager to show off his access to a closed world that is vaguely menacing. There is the legitimate fact that Hizbullah plays a definable role in Lebanon, so that it makes no sense not to cover the party. However, when was the last time a journalist sold a story on the inherent pluralism in Lebanese sectarianism? Once you've woken the editor up and told him that this defines Lebanon more accurately than Hizbullah does, he'll still choose the riveting clarity of a Hizbullah peg [my emphasis].

Leave aside that Hizbullah is not so terribly closed an institution. It is in fact very easy to gain access to Hizbullah, it's leadership, functions, and neighborhoods of influence. Hence some of the journalistic stuff struttin'. Beirut still holds the reputation as being the space of civil war and kidnappings by those strange and bearded men. And to have been there marks one as having gained some kind of arcane insight into the netherworld. The next time you watch a film in which part of the plot involves establishing the bona fides of any particular character, listen how often Beirut's name is dropped. Even though by now the age of the particular character and the time period being referred to don't match! But, to write about it first hand makes the reporter seem so daring, so on-the-spot, so in-the-know. And now it is so easy to do it without incurring much risk, despite Mr Hitchens' attempt at playing the hero against the scary thugs. (There is some speculation that the incident he so heroically describes never really happened. Perhaps he is trying to out-Fisk Robert Fisk's very real, very harrowing escape from being beaten to death by a mob of refugess on the Afghanistan, Pakistan border)

Another thing that grabs editors is prattle about women's attire - of all types. This one fom a recent edition of Der Spiegle is an especially egregious and voyeuristic example of the genre. For God's sake "Damascene perversion"? and "Palestinian women have the wildest taste"?

But in a milder form, many engage in it.

Juan Cole: Many Shiite young women are every bit as chic and oriented toward Paris fashion as their Maronite Catholic peers

Hitchens: Women with head covering were few; women with face covering were nowhere to be seen. Designer jeans were the predominant fashion theme.

Miller: Beirut is at least two cities—the modern capital with its chic designer shops, expensive bars, raucous nightclubs, and billboards advertizing [sic] breast augmentations and tattoo removals, and...Hezbollah’s southern suburbs...patrolled by the Party of God’s own traffic police and security forces. No breasts or even hairdos are on display here.

First of all, Miller is plain wrong about her last little comment. Maybe she didn't see any such things on her whirlwind tour of the axis of evil, but were she to go on a more-or-less regular basis, she would notice that one thing that does not characterize the Hizbullah neighborhoods is a preoccupation with women's dress. There are plenty of women to be seen on the streets wearing all sorts of Beirut styles, of every type. True, the muhaggabat are greater in number than they are on Hitchen's Hamra, but the fashonistas are also out in great number. And I for one have seen lower décolletage in the attire of a young woman right out in front of Fadlallah's mosque riding behind her beau on one of the ubiquitous motorscooters than I have anywhere else on the streets. In the southern neighborhoods of Beirut, women's clothing is just not a huge issue. Nor, for that matter, is it in mine, which is Amal and not Hizbullah. It seems it is western journalists - and probably their editors - who are absoutely obsessed with it, but not the residents of these neighborhoods. Or maybe Ms Miller had just forgotten to take off her ideological goggles.

Two other matters of obsession: bars, and elections. In all of this, the talk of those bearded men, and those scantily clad women, as well as the preoccupation with the amount of alcohol consumed in the Arab world (a new addition to the genre here about a return to the drinking and whoring ways of the days of Saddam), seems framed in such a way as to offer the hope to consumers of the major Western news outlets that those people over there are not so bad, even if they are somewhat quaintly odd, so long as they seem willing to adopt some of our ways. Never mind that those ways when placed into a Western context are condemned. The piece about drinking and other vices practiced in Baghdad discusses men gathering round a cockfighting pit and speaks with apparent approval of a relative renaissance of the oldest trade. And of course your reporter cannot pass up the opportunity to describe the clothing:

She dresses in a head-to-toe, skin-tight black chador, and she is adorned with several pounds of solid gold bracelets, pendants, necklaces, earrings and rings, her response to the financial crisis.The female workers in the nightclub wore rather less clothing, but nothing that would be considered risqué on a street in Europe

(I am not an expert in Iraqi vernaculars, but is the woman's outer garment in Iraq called a chador? That is the Persian name for it. Could be a linguistic borrowing, but I suspect it is the writer's ignorance on display). Be that as it may, are these really issues? Women's breasts? Form-fitting garments? Cock-fighting, drinking, and gambling?

Reporters for the major outlets find hope in the carousing and drinking of a few very unrepresentative members of society; or to the contrary, they lament the decline in the opportunities for such behavior. Look for a discussion of that here. These reporters are ignoring the real story. For instance, when celebrating the return of some of the good old days before the war, your reporter in remarking upon some of those values he would apparently like to see return says:

perhaps [this is going] part way back to the old Baghdad. The Baathists who ruled here from the 1960s until the American invasion in 2003 were secular, and more than a little sinful. Baghdad under Sadam Hussein was a pretty lively place, with street cafes open until 2 or 3 a.m., and prostitutes plying their trade even in the bowling alley of Al Rashid Hotel.

He fails to point out that pre-war Iraq was a prosperous society with a large affluent, educated middle class, now destroyed, not to return soon. Yet he sees progress in a few members of society return to drink. Of course alcohol is available in the Arab world, it is just not as large part of life as it is in the West. And why should it be?

An annoying thing about this type of debate, and unfortunately it occurs even at the level of some scholarly discourse, is that it takes Western mores and life-ways to be the norm, when in terms of historical patterns of human social organization western society is aberrant. Even in terms of the modern age, it is; with fewer than one fifth of the world population living anything like a modern consumerist lifestyle, the West is not the standard of normality. Consider this little-reported discussion of the economic miracle in India and extrapolate.

It seems that this modernising narrative is particularly concerned with the Arab and Islamic world (with the Arabs first, and then they are often conflated with all of Islam - and of course the Iranians are confused with the Arabs), and not with other equally as exotic locales. Or is it just that I am more alert to the discourse about the Arab world? But check out this discussion of a recent law promulgated by China’s State Administration of Religious Affairs and then consider the yawn (or as author Slavoj Zizek says, a laugh) it evoked in the press; then imagine the uproar that might have ensued had something similar been adopted by an Arab Ministry of Awqaf or proposed by the Saudi ulema.

And speaking of wishful thinking about the Arab world adopting western ways, and how that is all threatened by recrudescent Islam, look at this. But don't leave it there; read Davidiovich's stinging rebuke of the reporter, Robert Worth, who has been criticized in this blog too. I was finally propelled to return to blogging when choking over the sheer irresponsibility of the piece, not to mention the usual pornographic aspects of it. What got me was this, and I'm glad Davidiovitch left at least this much for me:

The result is a race that is widely seen as the freest and most competitive to be held here in decades, with a record number of candidates taking part. But it may also be the most corrupt [again my emphasis].

Wha'?? I think the Times has finally lost its mind. And with this bit of nonsense, we can now safely ignore its pronouncements about anything. How can an election be free and corrupt at the same time? Unless, and this is a real possibility, the idiot reporter and his editor and his readers think that the sole measure of an election is in the absolute numbers of candidates running and the percentage of the population voting. No matter how they got as far as the polls or who pays for them (unless it is the Muslim bugbear, then it matters a lot). That certainly seems to be the American vision of democracy for the Arab world.

If you want comprehensive coverage of the Lebanese elections and comment as well, follow the qifa nabki blog.

Update:

Another discussion of Robert Worth's latest NYT piece on a blog following the Lebanese elections. This post takes him to task for never uttering a peep about the sectarian nature of Lebanese politics, which is the real story, even of the corruption that Worth is talking about.

Slackman scores, but why the trash?

Michael Slackman's handlers are finally getting round to allowing a discussion of the term "terrorism". With his reins loosened, he does a very creditable job in his approach to the issue. I was just reading Naomi Sakr's "Approaches to Exploring Media-Politics Connections in the Arab World" in the volume she edited Arab Media and Political Renewal: Community, legitimacy and public life. Quoting another researcher, she observes:

the media as institutions...reflect the prevailing pattern of political debate: when consensus strong, they tend to stay within the limits of the political discussion it defines; when it begins to break down, coverage becomes increasingly critical and diverse

It looks like that is what is happening here. And not just here; see here and here for more examples of a related discourse. So Mr Slackman is now opening subjects that could not have been aired stateside in polite society as late as last December.

But why, oh why, does he still feel obliged to mention the trash in the streets of Cairo?

In Cairo, Wafaa Younis was seated on a curb, selling bread and green onions and mint leaves, as goats ate trash strewn across the street.

This little bit of voyeurism is a blot on an otherwise good piece of journalism.

Arab Media Shack is asking if Mr Slackman reads that blog; he must not read this one!

Change - Yes we can

Now here's something you don't find every day in the mainstream US media:

[President Obama] must redirect U.S. policy toward Israel-Palestine to make Hamas-Fatah reconciliation a core American objective, recognize that the “terrorist” label is an inadequate description of the broad movements that are Hamas and Hezbollah and end the Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy that sabotages a two-state solution.

Giving credit where credit is due, Michael Slackman also has a good piece of straight reportage about the sudden and inexplicable release of Egyptian opposition figure Ayman Nour's release from jail yesterday.

The truthiness of martyrdom

I usually ignore Thomas Friedman. Well, that's not exactly true. Instead, I pretend to ignore him while peeking at him through interlaced fingers. Have you ever tried interlacing your fingers in front of your eyes while holding your nose at the same time?

What makes Mr Friedman so insufferable is his constant preachifying at the Arabs. If you want a good example of that, read yesterday's column. His writing is a fine example of what Slate journalist Farhad Manjoo has called "truthiness". See some of his blogging about it here, here, and here. Well, he actually takes the concept from Stephen Colbert (whom I had never watched until the run-up to the latest presidential elections, after I got Orbit, one of the satellite TV services in the Middle East - For years I have had a very limited Showtime bouquet, which was purposeful because I wanted access to Arab satellite news channels without having to run the risk of even surfing by CNN. Turns out CNN International is a lot more intelligent than its sister channel (or is it parent?) in the States - but that is a different story). Back to Mr Friedman. His latest column is full of truthiness. That is, stuff that sounds plausible enough when an authoritative voice relates it and is for that reason taken as being true. (You can just imagine how this could get traction on the Colbert Report). Mr Manjoo contends that news reporting in the US is replete with it.

Let's take the core contention of Mr Friedman's latest screed as an example:

Sunni Muslim suicide murderers...have been treated by mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera, or by extremist Islamist spiritual leaders and Web sites, as “martyrs” whose actions deserve praise.

Sounds true enough. This is the contention that flits about the opinion columns, and I daresay straight news reporting, when the subject comes up. So it must be true, right? Wrong. Arab mainstream media and certainly not al-Jazeera, the most mainstream of them all, in fact, don't refer to suicide bombers as martyrs. Some outlets do refer to Palestinian civilians killed in Israeli military actions as martyrs. But that is a different discourse. Egyptians debate about whether to refer to people killed in ferry-boat and train accidents as martyrs. In fact, Al Jazeera's rival channel al-Arabiyya, also in the mainstream of Arab media, does not use the term at all. I can't speak for the extremist websites; I have, of course, seen such things, but I am not terribly interested in their rants. But notice the juxtaposition of mainstream media outlets with extremism. To the unwary, this will appear that the Arab mainstream media are extremist, and by extension, then, all Arabs must be extremists.

Mr Friedman's latest piece is full of other questionable assertions. Take this one, for example, "Religion and culture are the most important sources of restraint in a society." Does this mean anything at all? In the first place, religion is part of culture, not something separable from it. And in the second place, if cultural norms were effective means of regulating criminal behaviour, then we are safe in abandoning the thought of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and in embracing the theories of anarchists like Mikhael Bakunin. The latter asserted that in an open, anarchistic society, there was no need for sanctioning criminals, as they would be rehabilitated by the acceptance of their compatriots into the utopian, small-scale community. This dreamy theorizing finds an echo in Mr Friedman's claim:

The only effective way to stop this trend is for “the village” — the Muslim community itself — to say “no more.” When a culture and a faith community delegitimizes this kind of behavior, openly, loudly and consistently, it is more important than metal detectors or extra police.

Realistic authorities seem to agree that the most effective way of combating terrorism is through thorough police work. So it seems that this feel-good approach advocated by Mr Friedman might not work. In any case, Mr Friedman is engaging in his usual practice of asserting the truthiness of dubious claims.

Somehow it seems that he cannot close his piece without a justification of his ongoing support for the disastrous war in Iraq. Here too his assertions are either contradicted by the facts, or entirely unsubstantiated; truthy but not truthful.

few, if any, Indian Muslims are known to have joined Al Qaeda.

And it is why, as outrageously expensive and as uncertain the outcome, trying to build decent, pluralistic societies in places like Iraq is not as crazy as it seems. It takes a village, and without Arab-Muslim societies where the villagers feel ownership over their lives and empowered to take on their own extremists — militarily and ideologically — this trend will not go away.

Do I need to point out how those last two assertions flatly contradict each other?

USAID English

Michael Slackman is at it again. This latest piece of his is not as maddening as some - perhaps because it is not as long as some, so he doesn't have enough space in which to offend. He even manages to touch upon some of the underlying issues in his topic. Even so, his piece is drenched in the narrative in which he consistently positions himself: converting the Arab Other to our way of life. In a sense, he is facing his responsibility as a journalist by reporting on a government spending program. One of the larger ones in the foreign-aid budget. But he is so lost in his urge to spin the battle for hearts and minds that he almost misses real story. He keeps stepping around it without ever developing it. Let's look:

The USAID Access program (giving after-school English language lessons):

* is a low profile, delayed-impact program
* has enrolled 374 students in its four years of operation
* may not be funded beyond the current year

See anything wrong here? If the program is to have a delayed impact, there must be follow-up. But there will not be...or at least probably not. To my way of thinking, this is the real story. There has been a lot of money spent in Egypt trying to bring English to the masses. The programs used to cost several millions of dollars a year, but they addressed many more students, so the cost per student was lower. But that seemed too expensive to the administrators and proposal evaluators, so in an effort to trim the costs they started looking at smaller programs operated by smaller institutions (USAID money to Egypt is being gradually trimmed year by year anyway). So, by the measure imposed by USAID bean counters, the Access program may be considered a success.

This is typical of USAID programs in Egypt (and I would guess elsewhere as well): big, ambitious programs, housed in flashy, purpose-built facilities that are abandoned after a few years, once a funding cycle or two have expired. (Mind you, the budget for this part of the Access program is relatively small - about $ 3/4 million it seems). Some of them produce real white elephants, like huge modernistic hospitals or educational institutions, which work while the funding is available, but are then shuttered when the funds dry up. Why? Because the funding provided for all-US made equipment (inherent contradiction: it works on 110 voltage while Egypt - like most of the rest of the world - works on 220) and American technicians to operate said equipment and a herd of American consultants (or as we used to call them "conslutants"), who parachute in while the money is good, deliver their "deliverables", and then evacuate to other contracts in other countries - or other provinces in country - once the funding moves on. Some of these people are real creeps, but most very charming, well-intentioned Americans who are almost completely clueless about other lifeways. To them it doesn't matter, because to most of them the American way is the right way, the normal way; so there is no real need to learn, just to instruct.

But where is the impact? Will the lives of the few students involved even be changed significantly over the long run? That is hardly likely, as your intrepid reporter implies, but never seems to notice. Instead, he is so impressed by the self-reports of a few of the kids at a graduation party in Beni Suef that he seems to think that tomorrow democracy will break out all over Egypt.

Oh yeah, democracy. Now, when you acquire a language, you do acquire some of the culture of the language, and by the comments of some of the Access participants duly noted by our reporter, the lesson seems to have been learned. This is where the underlying arrogance of his position, not in any way unique to this reporter, shines through:

“The most important idea I learned is to respect differences,” said [a student from Asyut], expressing an idea considered rebellious in a society that prizes and encourages conformity

Our reporter informs us that Asyut is "one of the most conservative, tradition-bound cities in this country, once an incubator for Islamic extremism." He doesn't say that Asyut is also the largest city of Upper Egypt home to a very large Christian population. Some estimates are that they constitute about half the population of the city.

Now the Access students are learning "to embrace diversity, tolerance and compromise, the building blocks of a democratic, pluralistic society."

Well, well. And of course, they hadn't ever heard of tolerance and diversity before being instructed in such refined arts by USAID. Not in a multi-faith city and a society where the largest religious minority makes up about 10-15% of the population, a country where the slogan still cited is "Religion is for God but the Country is for its Citizens."

I'm not saying that there is no friction between religious groups in Egypt; there is. That is the nature of minority relations in almost any society. Unfortunate but true. But when reports of inter-faith incidents constitute most of the reporting of outlets like the NYT, this does nothing more than reinforce prejudices. As do hopeful but shallow sloganeering about the advancement of modernity, motherhood, apple pie and the American way. Such sloganeering may be and is matched by other slogans.

And look at the ignorance and misperceptions that such reportage produces:

"Thanksgiving is my favorite American holiday," said [another student, with a clearly Muslim name], 16. The idea of having your whole family come around and eat once a year is great, especially because it’s not religious. It’s not for one group or another. It’s for everyone.

Right. Egyptians gather to share a huge meal with their families every week. And they make a big show of meeting with each other on religious holidays, Christians with Muslims, Muslims with Christians. But you would not guess that from reading this student's comments. It is perhaps the reporter's duty to mention it. But it doesn't fit his narrative.

And he just can't seem to get away from the voyeurism:

[The graduation was held in Beni Suef] a poor, dry region of Egypt, south of Cairo, where people often share their homes with farm animals.

Beni Suef is a city. And it is right on the Nile, so it is no drier than any other Nilotic city in Egypt. And, being a city, its citizens don't usually keep livestock in their houses - for one thing, there is not enough room (although some people keep pigeons on their balconies and some people raise chickens on the roof - or at least they did until the government made such practices illegal as a prophylactic measure against bird flu.) For another thing, it is regarded as uncouth, countrified.

Ok, you do see livestock in the streets, even in Cairo (but not inside the houses). And the more urbane in the population find this shocking. But there is also a large amount of migration from the countryside to the cities and the new arrivals sometimes take a bit of time to adapt. There is a lot that could be said about this, but it needs space. And a blog is not the place for an academic treatise. The point is that our reporter (and his ilk) are engaging in a type of lascivious rubbernecking at the lifeways of others without really providing too much useful news or background to the news.

In one of the comments to one of my rants about another NYT piece, a commenter asked me if I would prefer that no one write about Egypt. Not at all. I am all for fostering intercultural cultural understanding, even of the sort to be found in the well intentioned but perhaps misguided Access program. But that is just it; this kind of voyeurism doesn't promote understanding.

I don't know Michael Slackman and Samantha Shapiro of the Times, but I would guess that they are probably stringers and not full-time beat reporters with the time and the resources to develop the real expertise and familiarity of their subjects brought about by long experience in the field. This is the outsourcing, budget-cutting style of news outlets in the States. What is worse is that even amongst such a badly exploited class of reporters, there are those who do take the time to gain some real insights into their subject; but their voices are not heard in the mainstream. This is irresponsible and objectionable.

For more comment on USAID English programs in Egypt look here and on voyeuristic journalism here.