A Different Drummer

Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas - a guy who has real, actual courage, in a world where the word is too often applied to describe movie stars who take risky roles or CEO's who make bold decisions - had a sharp, well written editorial in yesterdays Washington Post. He calls out the Egyptian government for its fairly well known shortcomings, and US taxpayers for passively funding one of the nastiest police regimes going round.

Abbas is one of the truly fearless group of Egyptians who have the passion - and the guts - to speak up about what is going on here. He has so much to lose - and his compensation for taking such a risk is tiny - but in the long run, the Egypt of the future will look back on people like him as real heroes.

Another, other, other, depressing slide downward in the Middle East:

"Hamas declared open war on Israel yesterday, pledging to renew suicide bombings after Israeli leaders vowed to kill senior politicians from the militant movement, including Ismail Haniya, the Palestinian Prime Minister" (The Times)

Is it just me, or wouldn't a more accurate opening paragraph be "Hamas declared open war on Israel yesterday, after Israel declared open war on Hamas"?

Is there a way you can vow to kill another country's recently elected prime minister and not declare open war on it? Either way, bad news for everyone. It feels like no-one is even trying anymore.

"I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this [September 11] happen.'"

Jerry Falwell has gone back to hell....

UPDATE - Yikes. Christopher Hitchens really one-upped me on this one: "...I think it's a pity there isn't a hell for him to go to". And that's just the start. Watch the video, it just gets better and better...

Tim Blair invented "Blair's Law" - which he describes as "the ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force." An example of this is the sub-culture of hardcore feminists who are pro-Burqa.

If Blair's Law identifies how idiots across the political spectrum can come together in a big happy clusterfuck of convenient friendships, then let me introduce my own new law. Gara's Law states that:
This law, like Blair's, brings together everybody from hardcore neoconservatives like Donald Rumsfeld, all the way through to regions big time dictators, as shown yesterday with the great Islamic Revolutionary Government of Iran.

Do you need a 100% solid acid test for whether somebody has truly good intentions for the people of the Middle East? Ask them how they feel about Al-Jazeera. Their answer will actually explain how they feel about democracy and free speech in the Arab world....

Australia is in the money, big time. The Aussie economy has kicked ass for as long as I have been aware of what an economy is, and shows no signs of crashing. Most amazingly, from the Telegraph article linked, is that:

"Until three years ago, company tax revenue for a full year totalled only $30billion. It should reach almost double that figure this year, with $15.5 billion pouring into the Reserve Bank in the two weeks to Friday."

My knowledge on this stuff isn't world-beating, but isn't that a phenomenal growth in tax revenue?

It will be tough for the Labour party to win an election this year when the current Liberal government have presided over such incredible economic growth - especially with the Liberal's throwing money around left right and centre in this year's budget, giving huge tax breaks, payouts and bonuses to, among others, parents, low-income workers, solar energy purchasers, technical education and anybody else who has a passport and votes.

I anxiously await the launch of the young-aspiring-writers-living-in-Egypt rebate plan...

Because I know you all can't get enough of it.

In this month's Egypt Today, I look at the Australia - Egypt relationship, which turned out to be more interesting than expected thanks to a great ambassador and some interesting ideas about aid and development. I also review the new MINI - and in the space of a 800 word car review, I managed to mention the 1956 Suez Crisis, quote Bob Dylan, and diss the lame 2003 remake of The Italian Job. It's what they pay me for!

I don't think much about France these days, so the French election was only really a passing thing - I don't know enough about the candidates and the history of their parties to really understand what is going on....but....

Sarkozy is being celebrated by conservatives as a sign that France is moving to the right, and villified by progressives as a xenophobe and an authoritarian. Maybe all these things are true. It was quite weird for me to read that in his victory speech, he promised to "restore the status of work, authority, standards, respect, merit". In that order. Work first, authority second, followed by standards and respect? All valuable characteristics or things, but as a shopping list of your priorities, it seems a bit unbalanced toward the boot stamping on a human face forever side of things.

But - and there is a huge, 'ohmygod thank God for this but' sized but - he also said some pretty awesome things in his victory speech - things that show the difference between France and most other countries.

Biggest and coolest of them all, he proposed the establishment of a Mediterranean Union, bringing together Southern Europe, North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean.

"...the time has come to build together a Mediterranean union that will form a link between Europe and Africa.

What was done for the union of Europe 60 years ago, we are going to do today for the union of the Mediterranean"

One of the biggest things I have learned since leaving Australia and traveling around - especially in this part of the world - is that the Mediterranean is much more of a natural region or even "continent" in a certain sense than most regions.

Italians have far more in common with Egyptians than they do with Norwegians. Watch some street life in Casablanca, Athens, Tel Aviv and Malta - you will see far more common bonds than you would doing the same in London, Berlin and Bucharest. The people surrounding the Mediterranean have been trading, eating, shagging and hanging out together for thousands of years, meaning that the ties between these countries - food, culture, music, borders, ethnicity, history etc. - are much larger than most people think.

The perception that Europe is one distinct place and Africa another place, an island separated by ocean and distance and vastly different cultures and societies, is just factually incorrect. I (and I think most Australians, and maybe most westerners) came out of school picturing Africa as being in complete physical and cultural seperation from Europe. Nothing could be further from the truth. The borders are incredibly blurred - the continents are physically and culturally connected.

I like to call it the "people who live in beautiful sunny temperate places with epic histories, hot tempers, gorgeous beaches, public emotions and awesome food" region of the world.

The Mediterranean Union would kick ass when it comes to free trade. The agricultural and manufacturing potential of places like Egypt, Libya and Algeria is enormous. And the people of North Africa would benefit hugely from duty free imports of the various wonderful things that are produced by the people of Southern Europe. This isn't even factoring in the movement of people and workforce.

The best bit? Such a deal would be essentially impossible for North African governments to refuse (their citizens would be loving the idea of visa/work permit free entry to Italy, France, Spain etc) - meaning that Arab world countries like Egypt and Morocco would be brought into much closer contact with Israel. And Med countries like France and Spain already have a pretty good "honest broker" reputation in the region (certainly in Egypt) - definitely more so than the UK, US, Russia etc.

Maltese could become the Norwegians of the Med - I'm pretty sure no-one in the Israeli-Arab conflict would mind if negotiations were mediated by classy Med people with the world's most beautiful accents.

I've already written too much, but it is also worth mentioning what he said re: climate change:

"I want to issue an appeal to our American friends, to tell them that they can count on our friendship, which has been forged in the tragedies of history which we have faced together.

I want to tell them that France will always be by their side when they need it, but I also want to tell them that friendship means accepting that your friends may think differently and that a great nation such as the United States has a duty not to put obstacles in the way of the fight against global warming, but on the contrary to take the lead in this fight, because what is at stake is the fate of humanity as a whole. France will make this battle its primary battle."

This, plus his incredibly cluey Mediterranean Union proposal, means that for now, I am all about Sarkozy. Maybe he will just become an evil anti-Arab, anti-migrant weirdo, but if he follows through on these two issues - bringing together Europe and North Africa, and dealing with climate change - then he is two massive steps ahead of any other world leader of his stature.

And they're like, its better than yours.....



I bought this tea out in Siwa - partly because the Siwan tea we were drinking in the desert was so incredibly delicious, and partly because of the hypnotically beautiful box. Seriously, we just don't make things as pretty as this anymore. Whats going on? Companies with marketing budgets in the tens of millions couldn't design a label as awesome as this even if they tried.

The tea rocks, by the way. As you can see from both sides of the box, it is made for sale in China and the Arab world - places where they know their tea....