Yahoo purchased Maktoob.com today. Yahoo expects Maktoob, which began as the first Arabic-language email provider, to permit it access to the Arab market. It hasn’t had terribly good luck expanding into that sector thus far, and acquiring a locally developed business may be a more effective way to do so. Very exciting for Maktoob … check out Fadi Ghandour (@fadig) on Twitter for one example of the enthusiasm this merger has generated.

Leslie Gelb, former President of the Council on Foreign Relations, former New York Times correspondent and generally very accomplished man, wrote a media analysis piece for Democracy recently evaluating the elite media’s (and by the press, he means the following five publications Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal) critical writing in the period leading up to the Iraq war and shortly thereafter. His conclusion is that it was a mixed bag; not quite as bad as common knowledge might suggest, but not as good as it ought to have been if we’re going to continue to consider these 5 news outlets the centurions of our democracy. (His terminology, not mine).

More interesting is his analysis is, first, his diagnosis of the problem as structural. Newspapers are supposed to follow the news; that is what makes them good newspapers. For better or for worse, in our democracy, news is what important people do, and so when these important people have meetings where they tell journalists what is newsworthy, journalists typically publish it. This leads to a bias toward information from official sources and often devolves into what Gelb describes as he said/she said reporting. He asserts that this is fine - or at least functional - for day to day affairs, but in cases like the Iraq war is insufficient and constitutes an abdication of responsibility on the part of the fourth estate. Of course, one has to wonder when the administration’s agenda should not be subject to the highest level of scrutiny - is military conflict the only issue worthy of close attention by the press?

Second, he suggest a few different means of shifting newspaper culture to something a bit more conducive to good reporting, most significant among them (to me) the recommendation that journalists be encouragesd to be educated on the things on which they are reporting. Namely, that they should read books. The reason that news analysis reproduces political back-and-forth rhetoric is, in part, because journalists do not understand the policies that they are writing about. There is no doubt in my mind that this is the case. On the other hand, though, one has to wonder which Americans and consumers of these newspapers abroad are interested in reading detailed policy analysis. Just something to consider.

Casualties since the ground offensive are up to 765 Palestinians and 14 Israelis, so the UN has drafted a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, after intense lobbying by Arab states.

The Los Angeles Times has two articles, each carefully including one Jewish-sounding name and one Muslim-sounding name in the bylines, on the media coverage of the conflict in Arabic/Arab countries’ and Hebrew/Israeli media respectively. Marc Lynch, at his old blog Abu Aardvark, looked a bit closer at Arabic media framing of the issue last week, pointing out that one gets very different narratives depending on whether the issue is framed as an assault on Gaza or an assault on Hamas. (Abu Aardvark, for those who are interested, is now purely an archive site; read Lynch's new stuff at Foreign Policy's Marc Lynch blog). The LAT articles each seem to suggest that maybe, uh, the coverage isn't that neutral. The article on Israeli news, though, reads a little more like news than the one on Arab coverage, which is more column asserting that Arabic media plays a role in consolidating the idea of Palestine as a symbol for Islam than reporting on the specific nature of the coverage. Of course, it's always a fine line on topics like this, and it isn't shocking to hear that the linguistic community representing the 14 casualties to date has maintained a more ‘objective’ stance than the linguistic community representing 765 casualties.

The Carnegie Endowment had an event last week (on New Year's Eve, actually - do you think they served champagne?) where Paul Salem, Marina Ottoway, Nathan Brown and Amr Hamzawy sounded off on the conflict. Here is the summary page for the event; link to PDF of the event transcript is at the bottom of the page. They predicted that Hamas would emerge from the conflict weaker, and that Lebanon/Hezbollah would avoid the conflict entirely. That was a week ago; they appear to have been somewhat correct regarding Hezbollah, at least so far. I am not sure what foreign policy professionals mean when they say that Hamas will not experience any enhancement in their influence as a result of this conflict. I find this assertion, frankly, very confusing. I understand the logic in Hamzawy's assertion on p. 4 of the event transcript (sorry, I can't c/p from the PDF - in sum, that Hamas’ military resistance to Israel seems to be pretty disastrous for Palestine and that disastrousness should nudge Palestinian public opinion toward supporting other avenues of action), but I think it assumes an eventual outcome that Palestinians would find somewhat upsetting. More specifically, to say that continuous failed military action against Israel on the part of any Palestinian group will discourage support for any military action among Palestinians as a collective implies that sustained, aggressive and decisive military action on the part of Israel will eventually yeild a nonviolent neighboring state in Palestine. This smacks of domination, for one, and doesn't seem to have worked so far. (Let's remember that this is 2009 and we are still discussing a return to 1967 borders). Of course, Anne Applebaum did advocate this week for simply calling a spade a spade and using plain old “war” instead of the euphemistic “peace process”; in that nomenclature, Hamzawy's argument makes a lot more sense.

In sum, the situation remains upsetting. Those with the financial means and the will to donate to UNRWA can do so at their website. We should all hope or pray or whatever spiritual initiative you think appropriate that the organization will be able to get their goods and supplies to the people of Gaza.

Several Egyptian bloggers traveled to the US to cover the American presidential election on their blogs; this story in the National asks them to share their reflections on the process with respect to Egyptian domestic politics. Excerpt:

For the most part, the bloggers are holding their breath, wondering how the new Obama administration will affect their world.

Some, like Mahmoud Saber, are optimistic‚ even if hesitantly so. On the day of the election, Saber, 21, wrote, "change is possible… yes… America chose the change." Maybe, he writes, an Obama administration will support dictatorial regimes. "But Obama elected…means change is possible…and now it's our time to do it in Egypt."

"I think the key difference that allows this to happen [in America] is the fact that people think things can change," Sultan says of the Obama victory. "In Egypt and the Middle East, people don't think that things can change. The reason things don't catch on as much is the fact that no one has faith in the future."

Back in Austin, Sandmonkey and Naje attend a pizza party hosted by local Democrats. As the room erupts with the announcements that Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida have gone to Obama, they walk around, unfazed. They return to their hotel to continue watching the returns, first in their room, then downstairs, at the hotel's bar and restaurant, where they watch Obama's speech at Grant Park. They roll their eyes and tell jokes in Arabic when Obama mentions the 106-year-old woman who lived through the civil rights movement and had the opportunity to vote for Obama , and at the puppy Obama promises his children. A man at the bar glares repeatedly in their direction before asking them to be quiet; they're not respecting the weight of this historic moment.

As the speech winds down and Sandmonkey and Naje walk outside to have a smoke. They understand the enormity of what has just happened , that the U.S. has elected its first black president. But, still, they're slightly cynical.

"It's not like things have changed for me," says Naje, taking a puff of his cigarette. "I still have Mubarak."

"And Gamal," he adds after a slight pause. "Nothing has changed for me."

Samar Fatany, a Saudi woman visiting America to witness this election as part of a State Department program to prepare Middle Eastern women to run for office in their home countries, writes home from the US:

In the Arab world, limited elections … hardly give one a taste of the incredible power of democracy as it is practiced in the United States.

The election day will find American men and women all across this sprawling nation exercising their votes in many political races, from deciding upon who shall hold city offices to who their state legislators shall be; who their senators, congressmen and women shall be as well as which presidential candidate will lead the free world for the next four years. Additionally, across the nation, many will express their wishes at the polling places on a variety of issues and referenda relating to laws and taxation. All these issues will be decided by an informed public representing a vast diversity of races, religions and political leanings.

Many of us back in the Middle East watch American news broadcasts with a certain fascination, but to meet the voters, the candidates and the campaign volunteers is marvelous by comparison.
I’ve never confused Barack Obama with Keanu Reeves’ Neo, but our election tonight was certainly exciting.

Facebook users in the UAE voice concern that Internet Service Providers in the Emirates will begin blocking Facebook in whole or in part.

The Los Angeles Times has a piece today on the conflict between the younger, more liberal generation and the older, more conservative generation in Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood. They interview bloggers Mustafa Naggar and Abd el-Monem Mahmoud, author of the blog “Ana Ikhwan“, both disaffected Brotherhood members disappointed by the religious rigidity of Egypt's main opposition organization. This article points out a trend that other observers of the Egyptian political scene have seen for a while; Marc Lynch's article “Young Brothers in Cyberspace” details the characteristics of different generations within the Brotherhood and the ways that the cyber-savvy and progressive fourth generation marks a departure from the more conservative third generation.

Lynch summarizes his analysis of this fourth generation as follows:

What do all the inter- and intra-generational fissures portend for the future of the Muslim Brothers? An older Muslim Brother blogger, Ahmad "Abd al-"Ati, came out in favor of the fourth generation's openness: "The blogs represent a sign of success despite the fears of others that they have crossed the line. Exchanging ideas is not a divide between generations and differences of opinion are not divisions." This is an opinion from which young bloggers … take heart. Yet Deputy Guide Muhammad Habib seems bent on squelching talk of "generations" or "trends" out of concern that it could be used to weaken the Brothers.

Mahmoud's quote in the LA Times piece underlines this latter concern:

“When the brotherhood feels threatened by the state, it rallies around the conservatives and that takes it further from the reformists,” said Mahmoud. “It is the state oppression that is actually empowering the conservatives. But our generation is different. We are calling for more reasoning, for more reinterpretation.”

The larger, and to me, more interesting question here is in what ways the Brotherhood movement is restricted by the overwhelming force and presence of the Egyptian state.  One of the reasons that the Brotherhood makes such good copy and is so interesting to follow is because it's narrative is an underdog narrative - The MB David takes on Mubarak's Goliath, over an extended period of time (the Brotherhood was initiated by Hassan al Banna in 1928). But in what ways is an opposition movement stunted in its development by constantly being, well, the opposition? It's interesting to think about what a Muslim Brotherhood government would look like, not just because it's fun to play with hypotheticals but because when policymakers project to post-authoritarian Egypt, the Brotherhood typically plays a large role, and the expectations we have of that outcome will influence the way policy is made. Do these bloggers represent the elements within the Brotherhood that would be at the forefront if the MB were to come into power in Egypt? What consequences does stifling these bloggers have for the future of the movement?