From Dar al-Hayat’s English-language website

I’ve been trying to discuss reproduction rights issues with my editors at Al-Hayat for some time now. (No, that does not mean abortion issues. It means reproduction of the columns I send them.)
Hayat btw is probably the world’s leading Arabic-language daily. It’s published out of London and distributes worldwide. I’ve been contributing regular columns to them since 1993. “Dar” is Arabic for “house”, as in publishing house.
The rights discussions with the editors haven’t really gotten anywhere. But since they have a bunch of my columns up on their English-language website I figured why not link to some of them there?
I have to say their English-language site is (ahem) “not optimally organized”. But by finding the section of their Search capability that actually seemed to work, and by careful selection of the Search terms, I came out with the following list:

    America and the Iraqi Intifada
    2004/05/05
    Helena Cobban – Late March of 2004 will go down in history as the time the Americans made three key mistakes that sparked the Iraqi Intifada. They decided to escalate their challenge to Moqtada Al…
    Dark Horizons
    2004/03/17
    Helena Cobban – How tough is the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories? I was there for a rapid but intense visit in mid-February, and the situation seems to me to be marked by the fol…
    China, The United Nations And Palestine
    2004/01/05
    Helena Cobban – China is the home of one in every five of the people alive in the world today. What role will this massive, rapidly industrializing country play in the conduct of world affairs in …

    From Occupation To Democracy?
    2003/12/08
    Helena Cobban – Fine words came recently from President George W. Bush on the need for “democracy” in the countries of the Middle East. One may ask, of course, whether he is aware of the many disc…
    In Iraq And Elsewhere: Dealing With Legacies Of Atrocious Violence
    2003/10/26
    Helena Cobban – I have thought a lot about my friends in Iraq recently, and I have been very concerned that they find a way to escape from the rampant insecurity and uncertainty in which they find…
    Six Months After The Fall Of Baghdad
    2003/10/19
    Helena Cobban – When Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld persuaded the President to launch this kind of war, in this kind of way, they were evidently hoping that it wo…
    Surviving Voices Of Wisdom In Israel
    2003/09/28
    Helena Cobban – One of the things that happens when tensions rise high in any conflict is that the voices of reason, mutual respect, and constructive problem-solving that would normally be well he…
    Iraq as – Germany?
    2003/09/08
    Helena Cobban – There are two words the folks in the Bush administration can’t bear to hear used in relation to today’s Iraq, so I shan’t mention them openly here. Let’s just say that the “V-word”…
    One State Or Two Within Mandate Palestine?
    2003/07/13
    Helena Cobban – The Quartet’s Roadmap represents the “last gasp” of any hopes that a solution can be negotiated to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that involves the establishment of two independe…
    Ending Cycles Of Violence
    2003/06/25
    Helena Cobban – The present cycle of violence between Palestinians and Israelis has been going on for how long now? 110 years? 55 years? 30 months? Two weeks? You can pick your own favorite starti…

Well, that’s a start. What I’d really like to do–and I know Shirine once tried to tell me how to do this–is do a search in Arabic on the Arabic-language website. But Shirine, it sounds ways too complicated for my little brain.

19 thoughts on “From Dar al-Hayat’s English-language website”

  1. Helena, I would ask your opinion of Dar al Hayat, but that would be impolitic. So I will just ask whether the English language version is identical to the Arabic language version.

  2. No Pref– their Arabic site is certainly the worth the read (or would be if my Arabic reading skills were a little less rusty than today). Today, in the Opinion section there they have a number of good commentators including my dear old friends Saadeddine Ibrahim and Mamdouh Nawfal, both plucky liberals within their respective societies (Egypt, Palestine). And they have good news coverage.
    The English-language site? Fuggeddaboutit! It certainly looks as though nobody cares about it and Dar al-Hayat isn’t putting any resources at all into keeping it up-to-date. E.g., I just went over there and clicked on ‘Arab News’. Found one piece from Iraq dated 4/23, one about Syria dated 3/8, etc etc.
    It seems fairly clear that very little of their material gets both (a) translated into English and (b) put up onto the site. I actually file all my columns with them in English, so you’d imagine it would be easier?? Even with that, however, I’m not seeing up on the site more than about 60% of the coluymns I sent them in that period… Did all the columns get used in Arabic, I wonder? That, I’m still trying to find out.
    It does feel quite random to me. I wish they’d put more resources into doing a good English-langauge site!

  3. The general state of at least the English-language Arab press is very sad. I used to read Al-Ahram almost weekly, but I got depressed by its endless pulled punches and inability to criticize Mubarak.
    Once I complained to an Arab-American internet acquaintance that I lost heart at times because of all of the invidious Israel vs Arab comparisons. He said “What does the lack of free expression in Arab countries have to do with the fact that Israel is grinding the Palestinians into the dirt?”. That was a good point, and still germane.

  4. The general state of at least the English-language Arab press is very sad. I used to read Al-Ahram almost weekly, but I got depressed by its endless pulled punches and inability to criticize Mubarak.
    You have to know where to look – Gamal Essam El-Din’s articles, for instance, are often critical of the NDP. For a state-run paper, Al-Ahram contains a fair range of opinion (there have even been op-ed pieces advocating the legalization of the Brotherhood) and gives the opposition a good deal of play. It isn’t perfect – state-run papers never are – but it has some high-quality regional coverage. I’m still a reader.
    Once I complained to an Arab-American internet acquaintance that I lost heart at times because of all of the invidious Israel vs Arab comparisons.
    Is this a comment on the Arab press, the American press or the Israeli press? Invidious comparisons have appeared in all three, although the victim of the comparisons in the Arab press usually isn’t the same as in the other two.

  5. I agree with your faint praise of Al-Ahram, but it’s still depressing.
    The “invidious comparisons” were those made by pro-Israeli posters on internet forums implying that because Israel is a “democracy” it has a right to Palestinian land.

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