By Arab Media Watch intern Kakande Yasin

31 October 2006

The Dubai Ports World controversy was a high-profile dispute in February-March 2006 between the US and one of its Middle East allies, the United Arab Emirates.

By Arab Media Watch chairman Sharif Hikmat Nashashibi

28 October 2006

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) published its 2006 Press Freedom Index on 24 October.

http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=19388

Of the 22 members of the Arab League, those with the most press freedom are Kuwait (as with 2005), Mauritania and the United Arab Emirates, while those with the least are Syria, Iraq (as with last year) and Saudi Arabia (as with last year). Thirteen Arab countries improved their rankings from 2005.

By Ali Abunimah, co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of "One Country - A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse".

24 October 2006

In a frightening but long expected move, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has brought the Yisrael Beitenu party into his coalition government. The party's leader, Avigdor Lieberman, is to be vice prime minister and, as "Minister for Strategic Threats," a key member of Israel's "security cabinet" in charge of the Iran portfolio.

Yisrael Beitenu is a dangerous extremist party with fascist tendencies that has openly advocated the "transfer" of Palestinians, including the transfer of Arab towns within Israel to a Bantustan-like future Palestinian entity. It has made clear that a Jewish supremacist state is more important than a democratic one.

By Dr Saul David, author of 'Military Blunders'

22 October 2006
Independent on Sunday 

President George W Bush's acknowledgement that the current fighting in Iraq is comparable to the 1968 Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War is an extraordinary admission. "There's certainly a stepped-up level of violence," he told ABC News, "and we're heading into an election." It was, after all, the Tet Offensive that helped to turn US public opinion against a war which still exerts a powerful hold on American consciousness. Bush, moreover, has for the first time conceded that the Iraq war has a historical context. And he's absolutely right. The refusal by the President and Tony Blair to admit the failure of their Iraq policy by ordering a speedy withdrawal is entirely consistent with the history of similar foreign interventions.

By Arab Media Watch intern Peter Rice

By Dr Curren Warf, MD, associate professor of clinical pediatrics at the Keck-USC School of Medicine, who sits on the National Board of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

18 October 2006

Last week the medical journal The Lancet released an epidemiological study concluding that 655,000 Iraqis died from war-related injury and disease from March 2003 to July 2006. This shockingly high figure has drawn attacks from the Bush administration and right-wing pundits.

Speaking as a medical doctor, I wish to set the record straight. The Lancet study is superb science. The study followed a strict, widely accepted methodology to arrive at its sobering conclusion. The study is being attacked not on scientific grounds, but for ideological reasons.

By Simon Tisdall
17 October 2006
The Guardian

In its external aspects, Iraq remains a live, occasionally explosive issue in the US and Britain, as last week's row over General Sir Richard Dannatt's thoughts on a British withdrawal showed. But the deepening chaos inside the country attracts less and less attention. Like sailors long missing at sea, the fate of ordinary Iraqis three years after the country was driven on to the rocks grows increasingly remote from those who precipitated the disaster.