By Johnn Ballard
This morning as I enjoyed a series of Tweet links by Vali Nasr it occured to me that it was like snooping, looking over his shoulder, but with his permission.
I'm always interested to know what others are reading, expecially smart people I respect. In Dr. Nasr's case I became aware of him a few years ago by a book review that inspired me to order and read his book, The Shia Revival and have followed him ever since.
So here is something like Kat's Catches, except this time we cal call it Dr. Nasr's Catches.
BINYAMIN NETANYAHU has done more than anyone to make Israelis work. As finance minister in 2003-05, he drastically reduced child allowances, deliberately targeting the two groups with the most children: the ultra-Orthodox (or haredim) and Israel�s Arab citizens. Together, they account for almost one-third of Israel�s population. Underemployment among them, especially among haredi men and Arab women, was rampant and rising. Why work, they reasoned, if the state paid them generously to stay home and have babiesMr Netanyahu�s revolution�for it was nothing less�is succeeding. In the case of the haredim, the world economic crisis helped. Philanthropic funding for their yeshivas (seminars where their menfolk sit and study holy writings) has shrunk. Working for a living has become for a small but growing number an unavoidable if unpalatable option. Several colleges and big firms around the country are providing sex-segregated environments where haredim can train and work in the comfort of their own conventions.
Mr Netanyahu, now as prime minister, is fighting for haredi schools and yeshivas to teach the basics (English, maths and science) to equip their graduates for the job market. It is still a fight, every politically sensitive step of the way. The haredi rabbis and their political parties have waxed powerful as vital backers of ruling coalitions. They wrest cash from the state to fund the yeshivas. Mr Netanyahu needs their votes.
This week he tripped up. After his two haredi coalition partners, Shas and United Torah Judaism, threatened to vote against the budget, he agreed to slip a bill through to provide 1,100 shekels a month (just over $300) to yeshiva students over 24 years of age, with three children or more, a non-working wife, no home of their own and no car. The trouble was that this long-standing benefit had been struck down by the Supreme Court in June as discriminatory. The new bill was designed to sidestep the court�s ruling. It also blunted the thrust of Mr Netanyahu�s out-to-work revolution.
The other coalition parties and the opposition roared their disapproval....
?Bomb Plot: Chicago Synagogue Cites Web Visits From Egypt
A rabbi at one of the synagogues allegedly targeted by explosive-laden packages from Yemen said that the group's website was visited dozens of times recently by individuals located in Egypt.Rabbi Michael R. Zedek from Chicago's lakeside Emanuel Congregation also said that he was told by a source that there were actually four bombs targeting Chicago's synagogues instead of the two originally reported.
Emanuel Congregation was allegedly not the specific target of the bomb, but Congregation Or Chadash, a sister synagogue housed within Emanuel was thought to be a target, according to Zedek. Or Chadash is a gay-and-lesbian synagogue that shares space with Emanuel Congregation and the Chicago Jewish Day School for children.
Or Chadash Rabbi Larry Edwards said in an interview that he only learned yesterday through Rabbi Zedek that his congregation might have been a target. "We're rather puzzled at how a little congregation like ours would get on the radar as a target for somebody," said Rabbi Edwards. "I'm hoping for more information."
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...Zedek was immediately wary and questioned why anybody in Egypt would be interested in visiting Emanuel Congregation's site. "I think we're interesting, but not that interesting," he said.
Zedek has yet to notify law authorities about the web visits. "We are planning on sharing it with the authorities," Zedek said.
?Saudi Help in Package Plot Is Part of Security Shift
As new facts emerge about the terrorist plot to send explosives from Yemen to the United States by courier, one remarkable strand has stood out: the plot would likely not have been discovered if not for a tip by Saudi intelligence officials.�
...Western intelligence officials say the Saudis� own experience with jihadists has helped them develop powerful surveillance tools and a broad network of informers that has become increasingly important in the global battle against terrorism.
This month, Saudi intelligence warned of a possible terrorist attack in France by Al Qaeda�s branch in the Arabian Peninsula. The Saudis have brought similar intelligence reports about imminent threats to at least two other European countries in the past few years, and have played an important role in identifying terrorists in Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and Kuwait, according to Saudi and Western intelligence officials.
�This latest role is one in a series of Saudi intelligence contributions,� said Thomas Hegghammer, a research fellow at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment. �They can be helpful because so much is going on in their backyard, and because they have a limitless budget to develop their abilities.�
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Saudi Arabia�s counterterrorism program differs from its Western counterparts in striking ways. It includes a familiar �hard� element of commando teams that kill terrorists, along with vastly expanded surveillance. The streets of major Saudi cities are continuously watched by cameras, and most Internet traffic goes through a central point that facilitates monitoring.
But the program also has a softer side aimed at re-educating jihadists and weaving them back into Saudi society. The government runs a rehabilitation program for terrorists, including art therapy and efforts to find jobs and wives for the former convicts. The program suffered an embarrassment last year when two of its graduates, who had also been in Guant�mo, fled the country and became leading figures in Al Qaeda�s Arabian branch.
But Saudi officials defend their overall record, noting that the program now has 349 graduates, of whom fewer than 20 have returned to terrorism.
?The Muslim Brotherhood in the West Wolves or sheep?
Two book reviews without attribution in The Economist. The New Muslim Brotherhood in the West: by Lorenzo Vidino and The Muslim Brotherhood: The Burden of Tradition by Alison Pargeter.
WHICH Muslims should Western governments engage with, and which should they shun? Since the bombings in New York and Washington on September 11th 2001, and the later attacks in Madrid and London, few questions have been so urgent or have generated such fevered debate. Some experts and government officials�Lorenzo Vidino, in the first of these books, calls them the optimists�argue for dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement born in Egypt in the 1920s which now has a worldwide network of followers and institutions. A countervailing school�the pessimists, to whom Mr Vidino is closer�suggests that the Brothers are wolves in sheep�s clothing, sharing much of the militants� agenda but hiding behind a mask of doublespeak.�
As for his bolder claim�that the movement aims at nothing less than the spread of Islamic law through Europe and America�Alison Pargeter, a Cambridge scholar and author of the second of these books, considers this scaremongering. Her book is shorter and more measured than Mr Vidino�s, and she has a surer grasp of the political dynamics of the Middle East, the soil from which the Brotherhood sprang. As her subtitle suggests, she regards it as an essentially reactionary movement unable to break with its past. Its hallmarks are pragmatism, opportunism and an ambivalent attitude towards the uses of violence.
The difference in the two authors� approach is exemplified by their treatment of a document found by the Swiss authorities in 2001 at the home of a senior Brotherhood financier. The Arabic document, dated December 1982 and widely known as �The Project�, sets out what Mr Vidino regards as the movement�s strategy for global dominion. Ms Pargeter sees it as a �fairly mundane wish list�. The portrait of the Brotherhood that emerges from her book is scarcely attractive but it is a weaker, more fractured thing than the sleekly dangerous creature depicted by Mr Vidino.
Should the West engage with the Brothers? On this, perhaps surprisingly, the two authors agree. The Islamists have become �part of the furniture�, as Ms Pargeter puts it; besides, there are few credible alternatives. It is better to talk to them, carefully and without illusions.
?Lunch with the FT: Bill Gates
Recreational reading at its best. Nothing particularly new. Another snapshot of Gates in which he looks good. He knocks off this line about Microsoft: �Really, if you develop good software, the business isn�t that complicated ... The business side is pretty simple; you try and take in more than you spend.�
I am reminded of Spencer Tracey's remark that acting is not hard; you just remember your lines and don't bump into the furniture.
Gates may no longer be working like a fanatic, but he is clearly utterly gripped by the medical challenges that his foundation is taking on � in particular the effort to develop new vaccines for malaria and HIV and to eradicate polio through vaccination. The moments when he appears to be most enjoying himself are when he gets into the science, and as he talks, he folds his arms across his chest and rocks gently backwards and forwards. But his conversation is also punctuated by sudden bursts of laughter. He chuckles as he describes the British army officer in India, who first discovered that malaria was carried by mosquitoes � �You know, good old Major Ross was sitting out there in India, not really doing much, but he was part of the British military and he ... figured out, hey, this thing is not about the smell from the swamp, this is the mosquito biting them.�The passion for science and technology that drove Microsoft forward is now being channelled into the search for medical advances. I ask Gates whether he sees any parallels between the development of software and the development of vaccines. �Oh sure,� he replies, taking a sip of Coke. �It�s backing smart people to solve a problem you think is important.� The main difference, he says, is the patience required. �With software you know whether something is right or not in three or four years ... but a lot of the things we�re doing now are more in the five- to 10-year time frame, like this malaria vaccine work.�
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I get just a hint of his politics, however, when we discuss the speed and energy with which China is developing and I suggest that some might find it all a bit scary. The word sets Gates off: �If all you care about is the US or the UK�s relative strength in the world, then it�s particularly scary,� he says laughing sarcastically. �In the US case, 1945 was our relative peak.� Since then, as he points out, other countries from Europe to Asia have rebuilt and become more prosperous, but, says Gates, �I guess I�m just not enough of a nationalist to see it all in negative terms.� On the contrary, Gates is excited by the things that a richer China could bring to the world. �I think it�s good that Chinese scientists are working on cancer drugs, because if my kid got cancer, I wouldn�t look at the label that says �made in China�. And, hopefully, we�ll get them working on some of these vaccines and also on energy.�
?Ahmadinejad Aide Says Iran Not Ready to Talk Nuclear
Disappointing throw-away piece from NY Times. Rhetoric from Ahmadinezhad on Saturday reversing something said on Friday. I don't know why Dr. Nasr bothered to Tweet a link.
Relaying more than 500 channels, most of them free-to-air rather than fee-paying, Nilesat has helped spawn the revolution in Arab broadcasting that has seen dowdy old state monopolies swamped by a panoply of privately-produced fare. Qatari-owned Al Jazeera is the best known of the racier channels, but it is only one of a dozen 24-hour Arabic-language news providers. In recent years these in turn have lost out in popularity to an upsurge of privately financed religious and life-style channels, many promoting Salafism, the puritan form of Islam that is dominant in Saudi Arabia but which has long been disliked by most other Muslims as extreme.Many Arab governments, including Egypt�s, had come to regard Salafism, with its focus on Sunni orthodoxy and punctilious personal piety, as a useful foil to the more politically engaged pan-Islamism of groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. But sectarian tension has been rising across the region. The adoption by some Salafist broadcasters of a strident, aggressive tone against Shia and Christian minorities has alarmed authorities. In an unprecedented move, Egypt�s information ministry has suspended 17 channels since September, most of them religious in content, and warned 20 others. Broadcasters say they have been told to avoid politics or sectarian issues, to slash the airtime devoted to religion and, according to one popular television sheikh, to replace bearded preachers with announcers holding �professional media qualifications�.
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