Qifa Nabki | A Lebanese Political Blog

The news out of Gaza is being covered by plenty of other able bloggers and analysts (like Steve Walt, Issandr El Amrani, Gideon Levy, and my buddy Sean over at the Human Province), so I won’t rehash what everyone’s already said except to make this very cynical point: high-visibility non-violent protests pack a disproportionately heavy punch in this age of 24 hour news, Twitter feeds, and live-streaming video.

Oops, Helena Cobban already said that. But no matter. The point is that this tragic incident is doing more to put the plight of ordinary Gazans back on the front page than any kind of military operation undertaken by Hamas. And speaking of Hamas, they’ve chosen the right moment to show their cuddly side. Khaled Meshaal recently told Charlie Rose (again) that his organization would end its resistance towards Israel if a two-state solution were adopted on the basis of the 1967 borders. Two days later, the IDF killed a bunch of humanitarian workers.

What’s the next step? Syria has called for an emergency meeting of the Arab League, and both Bashar al-Assad and Saad al-Hariri have warned that the flotilla killings could lead to a regional war. Maybe this is a naive reading, but it strikes me that beating the war drums is the wrong move. Instead of threatening to launch another intifada, why not actually launch an aid flotilla that is ten times the size of the one that was assaulted? The humanitarian non-violent strategy has clearly proved to be the winning one, so why not press it?

Your thoughts?

A reader of this blog asked me to advertise the following vacancy:

The Special Tribunal for Lebanon is looking to recruit Lebanese lawyers and jurists for its National Visiting Professionals program. The positions are relatively well paid at over 1000 euros per month and include travel costs to The Hague. This would be a great opportunity to gain exposure and training in an international court and to contribute knowledge and experience in Lebanese law at the same time.

Make sure to read the vacancy announcement on their website, and have a look at the other jobs advertised as well while you’re there.

While we’re on the subject of announcements, Nick Noe asked me to let you all know about a new program that Mideastwire is sponsoring:

Mideastwire.com, in partnership with The Syria Report, is pleased to announce that it is accepting applications for the first Damascus Exchange. The two-week program August 1-15 will engage students from around the world in a multifaceted discussion of some of the key issues facing Syria and the region.

The Damascus Exchange program rests on three tracks:

Academic – Participants will attend a series of seminars led by leading academics and public intellectuals in Syria. Topics will include: Economic reform challenges; The evolving relationship between Syria and Turkey; Syria’s role in the Middle East peace process; Arab nationalism; Hydro-politics in the Levant; and, Doing business in Syria: Barriers, opportunities and practices.

Language – Participants will have the option of attending 20 hours of Arabic language instruction. Modules will be available at different levels.

Dialogue with Leaders – Participants will have the opportunity to meet, listen and engage political, economic and religious leaders in Syria.

For more information, check out the website.

If any other readers out there want to place a Lebanon-related classified ad on this blog (goats for sale, olive oil soap, etc.), well, you can’t. Not even if you send me the text for the ad and $350 to Qifa Nabki Worldwide Headquarters, Carrel #566, Widener Library 5th Floor, Cambridge MA 02138.

A friend forwarded me the below excerpt with the subject heading: “Reza Aslan is insulting YOU!”

I won’t lie to you: until I got to the third or fourth line and realized that he wasn’t actually talking about me (but rather, my carrelmate) I couldn’t help but wonder: “What have I done to offend Reza Aslan?” Judge for yourselves:

Q: How do you think scholars can learn to take part in broader conversations?

Aslan: It’s often a total waste of time. You can’t be trained to speak to the media in a weekend seminar before going on Anderson Cooper. You have to be immersed in the kind of world in which there is no division between the academic and the popular. I honestly think that the best hope that we have is to foster a new kind of student, one who doesn’t spend eight years in the basement of Widener Library at Harvard poring over a thirteenth-century manuscript and writing a dissertation on the changes in the vowel markings of a sentence. That kind of scholarship has a very small role in the world we live in now. We need scholars who understand that there is no division between the world of academia and the popular world. Trying to take staid academics and teach them to use words with fewer syllables is not the way to break that wall down. (Keep reading)

I’m not sure I remember the last time I saw Anderson Cooper interview someone who even knew what an Arabic vowel marking was, let alone one who’d written a dissertation on the subject. And is Aslan seriously arguing that the current commentariat of “experts” on the Muslim world is overly dominated by linguistically-savvy philologists and historians of Islam who have the ability to study medieval manuscripts?

If you ask me, it’s the factually-stunted but media-friendly types who seem to be in such ready supply these days.

But these are surely just the grumblings of a sun-starved stacks rat who is heartbroken that he will never get the chance to meet Anderson Cooper.

There’s a new blog on the block, published by Mideastwire, the company that provides a daily digest of translated articles from the Middle Eastern press and runs the Beirut Exchange. I would highly recommend checking it out and subscribing to its RSS feed.

Nick Noe (the co-founder of Mideastwire) has assured me that they will be putting up material and translated articles on a regular basis, so it’s an easy way to get access to a great resource.  (See, for example, the translation of the Assafir interview with Bashar al-Assad, which we discussed a couple of days ago.)

Also, do check out the latest briefing on the Lebanese municipal elections, put out by IFES, which is invaluable as usual. You can download it here.

Finally, a Syrian online newsletter (tabloid?) All4Syria is claiming that the Syrian Ambassador to Canada has been summoned back to Damascus because of the launch of OneMideast, which sounds like a ludicrous claim to me (and to Josh Landis as well). Be sure to read the comment section as well, but here’s the report itself:

بعد قصة المدونين : مرسوم بعودة السفير السوري من كندا

طباعة أرسل لصديق

مراسل المحليات – كلنا شركاء

20/ 05/ 2010

صدر مرسوم بعودة السفير السوري المعتمد في اوتاوا السيد جميل صقر وذلك بعد ان انهى خدمة خمس سنوات …….وتزامن صدور المرسوم مع الضجة التي حصلت بنفس اليوم واثارتها المقالة البريطانية التي كشفت عن لقاءات وحوارات بين مدونين وشخصيات سياسية وديبلوماسية واكاديمية سورية مع نظرائهم الاسرائيليين والتي كانت مستمرة منذ اكثر من سنة حيث يقوم بتنسيقها وادارتها الشاب كميل قطرنجي المقيم في كندا .

وقد ربط البعض بين صدور قرار اعادة السفير في كندا وعدم التمديد له لمدة عام اضافي وبين هذه القضية , وقد منح السفير صقر مدة شهرين لانهاء التزاماته والعودة لدمشق

As it turns out, the Ambassador was due back in Damascus anyway because his five-year term was up, but the website’s editors were only to happy to suggest that far more nefarious forces were at work.

I’m pleased to announce the launch of OneMideast.org, a website that has been in development for about a year now. Here’s the skinny on it:

OneMideast.org is an online discussion arena intended for raising and debating ideas central to the Arab-Israeli peace process.

The project, which represents the first joint Syrian-Israeli online dialogue of its kind, was formed through the efforts of private individuals from both countries — bloggers, academics, political analysts, journalists, and businesspeople — who set out to produce an extensive list of objections to peace commonly encountered in both Syrian and Israeli societies.

Through a voting process, the group collectively settled upon two “Top Twenty Lists” of objections to peace (one Syrian, one Israeli), and then set about attempting to produce the most effective counter-arguments to each objection.

The results of the project are available for download (text and podcast) on the OneMideast.org website. During its next phase, OneMideast.org will invite experts and opinion leaders from both countries to discuss the challenges associated with the Syrian-Israeli peace process, and to submit constructive feedback for publication on the site.

Credit for the lion’s share of the thought and work behind this project must go to my friend Camille Otrakji, who is a true dynamo. Other folks involved include Joshua Landis of Syria Comment, Yo’av Stern of Ha’aretz and the Peres Center for Peace, and many other folks who regularly read this blog.

The site has already been profiled in The Christian Science Monitor, The Guardian and The Huffington Post, and will also be covered by a few other news outlets in the coming days. I’ll have more to say about the project as well, but for now please feel free to check it out, and come back here to comment (as I don’t think that we’ve enabled commenting yet on the actual site).