Here is a fascinating news story from the German Spiegel online on the slickness and effectiveness of Israel’s propaganda machine. Once again, Arabs don’t know how to win the PR war. (thx mj)

I read this post by Rayan earlier today, and it got me thinking: I still have two more years to go at KSU, and I can assure you that over the past four years I have had most of what he is talking about if not worse.

Just like him, I’m not the kind of guy who would suck up to anyone in order to get what he wants. After four years, I have learned that the grade you get is not necessarily associated with the effort you put: you can work as hard as you can for a whole semester and get a D, while your below-the-average classmate will get an A+ simply because he is a permanent guest in the teacher’s office. And no, he is not there to ask questions related to the curriculum, as he would shamelessly tell you later that he goes there solely to kiss the teacher’s ass.

Just like him, I went there to the wish of my father (rest his soul), but I don’t blame him. It is true he has put some pressure on me, but it was my decision after all even if it was highly influenced by him. I was young, I was stupid, and now I have to take the consequences of my decision. Now, all I want to do is to get my degree, and then go abroad to study something that I really want.

Following the western media over the past few years, I have come to the conclusion that something would be wrong if a month or two passed without finding a story on how boys in Saudi Arabia hook up with girls. So, reading this piece from the Washington Post was not surprising at all; it was yet another piece of the “oh my god, other people in other parts of the world have different culture and traditions from us, and they behave according to them” kind. What is unusual about this one is that our hero this time has no problem with publishing his photo with his full name, and I think this has much to do with the happy ending of this story.

I want my Arabic MTV. According to Asharq Al Awsat, MTV is looking forward to enter the Middle East market in the coming 24 months, but that “depends on finding the right local partner,” Dean Possenniskie, General Manager of Emerging Markets at MTV Networks Europe, told the newspaper. “When we enter the market, what we will offer will be entirely different from what other channels such as Meldoy and Rotana offer,” he added.

Al Eqtisadiah website has a long interview (Arabic) with Labor Minister Ghazi Al Gosaibi. “In this society, the healthy teenager needs a maid to bring him a glass of water that is exactly 10 meters away,” Reuters quoted him. He says a significant number of house workers are brought for social prestige, which is something I talked about around this time last year.

Although I keep the TV on most of the time recently to follow the latest updates on the war in Lebanon, I can’t say that I watch much TV because I usually prefer to spend my time doing other things. However, a few days ago I had the misfortune to watch a one-hour live talk show on a local station. The show discussed blogging, and the two guests were a newbie blogger who has been blogging for nearly four months, and another blogger who has been trying to make himself an official leader in a medium where people are more concerned to express their individuality and voice their opinions rather than being led.

The young host did not seem very tech-savvy, but he was smart enough to ask some good questions. One of these questions was asked to the self-proclaimed leader about the unrealistic idealism he is promoting and the many restrictions he is trying to enforce that might send his herd away from him. The answer to this question was mostly blah blah, and I could not stop myself from bitterly smiling when he said: differences between sects in Islam are a fact, and we have absolutely no problem with this at all. This can, and should, be true, except for that this very same person has no problem with calling other sects and their followers with derogatory names regularly on his blog.

The talk show was not a joy to watch by a blogger who has a high interest in the topic like me, let alone for non-bloggers, and even though they looked like they were begging for viewers to call by showing the phone number on the screen annoyingly every few seconds, no on called.

My favourite moment of the show came at the end of it, when the host asked the other guest with much anticipation and a genuine desire to learn, and the look of a puzzled boy on his face: “so, do you mean a blog is a website?” My immediate response was: duh! But then I painfully sighed to the realization that one hour of uninterrupted speeches was not enough for the glorious twosome to answer the most basic question: what is a blog? Because this one hour, which seemed much longer to those who had to endure it, was wasted on shameless self-promotion and useless factually flawed generalizations.

It is one thing to appear in our already corrupted unreliable mainstream media because you are connected enough to grant some time on the air to say whatever on your mind regardless of the absence of value introduced to the audience, and entirely another thing to make the media come after you because you have actually done something worth talking about.

Why America gives Israel its unconditional support? The Economist gives four reasons: 1) the Israeli lobby (AIPAC), 2) the religious right, 3) Americans see events in ME through the prism of 9/11, and 4) Americans see Israel as a democracy in a sea of autocracies. (via ff)