Neil Young, Meet the Middle East

I stumbled across this fantastic Egyptian protest song over at 3arabawy. He has been blogging a lot about the recent labor unrest in Mahalla, which is also interesting (yes, he has quite the leftist bent).

Anyway, the title of the song, which is in Egyptian Coloquial Arabic, is "Build Your Palaces." I'll work on a translation when I have some time. For now enjoy.

Learning From the Best?

I was perusing Abu Aardvark's recent post about Egypt's crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood ahead of municipal elections (a crackdown that has been going on pretty much since the MB won 88 seats (roughly 20%) in 2005. I'm a little embarrassed to admit this but this is the first time I have heard about Ikhwanweb, the official English-language site of the Egyptian MB.

The site is interesting enough, but by far the most striking thing about is that they appear to have lifted the entire site design directly from the old BBC:





I'll try to have something a little more meaningful soon.

Partying Like It's 2002!

Tonight, as I was practicing my favorite pastime, procrastinating on the internet, something very odd happened.

As usual, I started at bbcnews.com, having read all the articles that looked interesting earlier today, I continued on to their Middle East section, which has apparently entered a time-warp to that glorious period in history known as BEFORE IRAQ (b.i. for short).

Thats right according to the BBC, the Middle East is only on July 8, 2002:


Hurry people there's still time! According to this article, even Louis Farakhan is in on the game:


I wonder how this is going to turn out...

Update 1:14am April 2: Oh, thats how it turns out: