Juan Cole’s Informed Comment blog, which is the world’s best English-language read on Iraq, is more user-friendly than ever. Now, he’s posting his items separately, and they have headlines. So you or I can seasily scan thru the voluminous amount of info he puts up each day to find the topic that really catches our eye, and then link to the exact item we want to send our readers to.
Like this one, today, on the time it’ll take to organize elections in Iraq just to write the drafters of the new Constitution… not to mention the time it’ll take ’em to write it, then organize an adoption process.
Trouble is, nearly everything Juan posts is really worth reading.
Still, thanks so much Juan, for the new user-friendliness!
(Talking of my linkees, anyone know what’s happened to Salam of Dear Raed fame? I guess I read somewhere that his house was “searched” by the ever-friendly US military. I hope he’s not sitting in some hell-hole of a stinky jail with a vomit-stained bag over his head… Come to think of it, I hope no Iraqis are in that situation, but I suspect that some hundreds of them probably are.)
Category: Linkees
Not irritating, not provincial
So I guess the word got out to Imshin of Not a Fish! that I had been describing her on the Main Page of JWN as a “sassy (if sometimes irritatingly provincial-Israeli) working mother”. She recently changed the title of her blog to Not a Fish (provincially speaking), indicating that she has a robust sense of humor.
Then, around the same time (this was last Sunday), she wrote a great and lengthy post that seemed quite clearly to deal with the charge that she was “irritatingly provincial.” I thought it was so articulate and expressed so much of what many of my Israeli friends seem to feel in one way or another that I urge you to go read it.
She wrote another one, a couple of days later, with her recollections of the inter-communal confrontations inside Israel in October 2000 that left 13 Israelis of Palestinian ethnicity (whom she calls “Israeli Arabs”) and at least one Jewish Israeli person dead. Again, written from the heart and expressing an important take on those events. Read that one, too.
Then yesterday, she had a great little post with a link to an amazing web-based resource called “Grow a Brain” that has onward links on many topics Israeli and Middle Eastern.
So darn it, now I have to go into my Main Index Template yet again and take out that “irritatingly provincial” bit about her.
Finally, on a lighter note, this from my son Tarek in Boston, which he sent hoping it would bring “a smile for your day.”
I was just on the phone with him. I told him it reminded me of the time about 12 years ago that I took him and the other two kids to Normandy. I took some great pix of them clambering around on top of some of the old tanks that are there as part of the memorial of the D-Day landings. One of these pics I sent to my Dad in England, with a caption of something like “the triumph of youth over militarism.”
Now, my Dad had actually been on the Normandy beaches– he went over on about D-plus-4, I think. He told me a little sternly, “My dear,” he said (rocking back and forth on his heels– or am I only imagining that? JM, I miss you!) “–My dear, if it hadn’t been for people fighting in tanks like that you probably wouldn’t even have been here.”
Food for thought, yes. My personal take is that it may have been the US Civil War that was the hardest one for Quakers to take a pacifist position on….
Riverbend arrives
Another great blog from a strong, authentic Iraqi voice. Riverbend describes herself as a 24-year-old Iraqi female who survived the war. She’s been writing for about a week and has a fresh and intelligent way of describing her life.
Thanks to Salam of “Where is Raed” for pointing me to her. I’ll get a link to Riverbend up on the main page here as soon as I can get into that template again.
She is especially good on A. Chalabi. See this post, and this one.
But she’s also good at just describing the ordinary, daily, and existentially scary things about being an Iraqi in Iraq these days.
Yvette, Iraniangirl, etc
I just wanted to draw people’s attention (again?) to the blogs I link to here. Which are not many. There’s a phenomenon called ‘Blogrolling’ which means, I think, something like “I’ll link to your blog if you link to mine.” Well, I don’t do that. I just link to a handful of blogs that I think are really interesting.
Anyway, Yvette, who writes “A Taste of Africa” is the most wonderful, talented, sensitive blogger anywhere. Plus, she seems to be doing this amazing community-building work in Somaliland, a country that isn’t even really recognized as a country–sort of like Kosovo or Iraqi Kurdistan, except that Somaliland gets almost zero international attention and almost zero international funding. Which I think makes her blogging even more valuable. Plus, she takes fabulous pictures and– here’s where I get jealous– knows how to get them up on her blog in enjoyable form.
(I’ll learn one day… )
So last month, Yvette’s mom died, and she had to go back home to the Philipines to deal with all that. Then her Movable Type blog machine crashed on her… But now she is up again, on Blogger– in a template that will be VERY familiar to longtime readers of JWN!
And with some great photos of celebrations of World Refugee Day, in Hargeisa, the campital of Somaliland (I think). Go see them!!
Okay, next up we have Iraniangirl, who’s living through some pretty interesting times and in response to them seems suddenly to have become incredibly thoughtful and dare I say it mature? I think this post, from yesterday, is really worth reading.