Y’all know I write periodic columns for al-Hayat. I frequently don’t see them when they come out in Arabic, because I make a bee-line for the news pages and find them hard enough to get through that I have little energy left for the opinion pages…
Hayat has, I have to say, a truly terrible English-language website. (Guys, you want to hire me as a consultant to help bring it into the 21st century??) Including, it has no news at all. Only some very sporadically presented pieces of opinion.
I just found three of my own pieces on there, in two different places on the site (?), in the original English. Here they are:
- * Iraq between Germany and South Africa — published 12 September 2005
* Iran, the Bush administration, and the Middle East — 6 October 2005
* Avoiding Regional Wars in the Gulf and Mashreq — 21 November 2005
I can’t find one that I sent them on December 12, titled “Iraq changes America.” But given the chaotic state of their site, that doesn’t mean it’s not there.
If any kind reader could send me the URLs for any of my other 2005 pieces, in English or especially Arabic, I would be really grateful.
They are not that bad: http://tinyurl.com/bft2a
And thanks a lot for the reference to Westphalian system – as well as other important pieces 🙂
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Westphalia
http://inplainview.us.tt/hist
Oh my! How on earth did you know how to do that, Henry? Do you give lessons?
(We still don’t have the Arabic versions… )
Your artcle: Iraq between Germany and South Africa
Dear Helena, you made one big mistake: after a short period 45/46 the USA abandoned the policy of Denazification. After that, they employed them again, because they needed them against the USSR. Tree examples: Heinrich Lübke, German President for 8 years in the 60: KZ architect; Georg Kiesinger, chancelor 66-69: old Goebbels flak, former member of Ministerium für Propaganda, Franz Josef Strauss, bavarian prime minister, NS propaganda officer. The examples are numberless. Purged were the first and the last line of NAZIS, but not the many beetween, they were direly needed. Until the end of the 70 westgerman parliaments and ministries were full of ex-nazis. South Africa is the hard way, Germany was the soft way.
The difference between germany and iraq is that after 45 the USA realized that they needed the former NAZIS, and the economic forces behind them, against the USSR; in iraq they don’t need them.
by Peter Hofmann,
in iraq they don’t need them.
Peter, how you reach to this conclusion? And why?
If we take in account that Iran is one of Axis of Evil as GWB said then there is a definite need to Iraqis against Iranian!!!!
In my mind Iran will never be threatens the west (this is may be make you said “they don’t need them”.
What we see of flared speeches/ words, this is just for domestic regime use. In fact those Mullahs well skilled in the talking they knew many tricks to survive in their political life more than normal politicians…
Mullah’s skill they are talkative and used their skills to make peoples believes in all the lies they had.
This is online Arabic keyboard http://www.zeitun-eg.org/keyb.htm It can be useful for Arabic searches – including Daralhayat site and Google.
هيلينا كوبان
OK, I managed to hunt and peck on the keyboard there and type out my name… copied and pasted it in here… So then how do I search the whole Daralhayat site in Arabic for that? I do remember my son told me how to do this once… but he’s gone off snowboarding… Again.
Meanwhile, back to Peter Hofmann… Peter, thanks for your comment. It’s true that many US decisions re Germany from late 1946 on were informed explicitly by the desire to strengthen Germany quickly as a bulwark against feared Soviet expansion. And that involved co-opting many strands of the previous Nazi command structure. In South Africa, the co-optation of previous miscreants was even more pronounced. The former pdesigners and perpetrators of apartheid (a crime against humanity) were let off scot-free, provided they complied with the terms of the TRC. All previous government employees got to keep their jobs and their full pension rights, and came to form the backbone of the post-1994 government bureaucracy, as well. And beyond that, the White farmers and business owners who had made huge super-profits from their expropriation of indigenous natural resources and their naked exploitation of non-White labor got to keep all those ill-gotten gains, too.
In both those cases, the co-optation and “letting them off relatively lightly” approaches were seen as politically expedient. In the South African case, the ANC considered that preferable to a prolongation of the struggle, and I believe they were right.
In Iraq’s case, there are two (or more) reasons of political expediency for not seeking full-blooded vengeance against the Saddam-era perpatrators. One, as Salah has mentioned, is the need to strengthen Iraq against encroachment from Iran. (Mind you, I think much of that encroachment has already happened.) Another reason would be to find a negotiated exit from the terrible violence plaguing the country. This is very similar to the kind of violence the Afrikaaner rightwingers were threatening in SA in 1994. I strongly feel that finding a political way to defuse that violence is a good way to go. Iraq’s Arab Sunnis are anyway going to have to face a diminishment of the political privilege that many (not all) of them previously enjoyed. But it is really idiotic to try to rub their noses in humiliation. The Allies tried to do that to the Germans after 1919…. and see what it brought to the world…
Here is what Google search does: http://tinyurl.com/cle2z It finds something in daralhayat, in some Kurdish place and in wajhat.com. Hopefully, it will help 🙂
This is how it works:
— Arabic search arguments are prepared in this keyboard – instead of direct typing in English.
— Cut and paste the search arguments to the proper search field. This can be either Google or site search form.
— The search engine returns the results as well as search URL.
— I used http://tinyurl.com to abbreviate this returned URL. But, usually, this step is not needed.
Please, let me know how it works 🙂
H’mm, it was mainly the tinyurl thing that I didn’t understand, I think. Doing a regular Google search is no prob but I think the problem may be in doing it in English Google with an Arabic-script search term? I haven’t really investigated this, but I imagine the findings would be at best very spotty?
Anyway thanks for finding that nifty Arabic-language keyboard for me and getting me to understand tinyurl’s.
My understanding is, in general, non-English search is not a really big thing. I found something by your name on Daralhayat and elsewhere, but without knowing a word of Arabic, I can’t say how useful it is. With this keyboard, you can try more 🙂
http://tinyurl.com and its relative http://snipurl.com are nice, they make short URLs and with snipurl one can even change the long URL without changing the short one.
The idea is to let people know the short URL without getting messed with huge long strings. But with blogs, it does not really matter: all info is organized in a blog, so all people need to know is how to get around the blog.