Michael J. Totten's Blog, page 60

Forecast for Tunisia

My latest piece appears in Tablet magazine.

It’s no longer news that the Arab Spring has become unseasonably chilly. The Syrian revolution began as a nonviolent protest movement but is rapidly degenerating into a civil war. Libya is cracking up into a fragmented state controlled by hostile militias. And Egypt is ruled by the same Nasserist military dictatorship that seized power in 1952. (If the army there does step aside, don’t get excited: In last year’s election, two-thirds of Egyptians vo...

The Levant is Going to Hell

I’ll be back with some full-length journalism tomorrow morning, and in the meantime, things are really going to hell in the Eastern Mediterranean. Syria’s civil war will not only suck in the neighbors, it is also, at the same time, reaching out to engulf the neighbors.

Walter Russell Mead:

Tripoli, on Lebanon’s northern coast, witnessed street battles between pro- and anti-Assad groups back in February. Violence erupted again over the weekend, and intermittent fighting continued for a third da...

Weekend Reading

FASCISM: Reactionary Islamist goons attacked Irshad Manji—a young reformist Muslim woman from Vancouver, British Columbia—with sticks and iron bars while she was promoting her new book in Indonesia. She’s okay, sort of, but her assistant was rushed to the hospital and two others are injured.

Here is Paul Berman’s take in The New Republic.

It is fashionable among the Western apologists for the Islamist movement to insist that genuine reformists and liberals have no audience in the Muslim world....

Linkage

The following was posted at Instapundit on Thursday.

UGH: Timbuktu falls to radical Islamists.

HUGE EXPLOSIONS IN DAMASCUS: Syrian state television reports two huge explosions in Damascus that killed 55 people and injured 372. The question is, were these attacks mounted by jihadists, which is entirely possible, or were they staged by the Syrian government itself like some in the past?

TO BAN OR NOT TO BAN? Germany considers banning Salafist groups (the ideological comrades of the bin Ladenists)...

Instapunditry

1967 REDUX? Israeli historian Benny Morris argues in Tablet that the Middle East could be on the verge of another conflict a la 1967.

Mofaz will join Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak in a three-man kitchen Cabinet or the fuller eight-man “Inner Cabinet,” where the call of whether or not to launch a military strike against Iran will be decided. Both Netanyahu and Barak are on record as pessimists when it comes to the possibility that sanctions or diplomacy will stop Tehran’s march towa...

Around the World in Nine Posts

I posted the following at Instapundit on Monday.

OH, PLEASE: The Syrian government says it’s counting ballots.

SOUTH SUDAN'S disastrous first year.

U.S. BOMB EXPERTS are trying to figure out if Al Qaeda’s upgraded and recently seized underwear bomb would have slipped through security if it had gotten that far. There’s no metal in it, so the body scanners would need to catch it. And maybe they wouldn’t. The TSA needs to spend more time looking for terrorists and less time looking for objects. A t...

Link Roundup

I’m filling in for Glenn Reyolds at Instapundit this week, though of course I’m hardly taking on the whole job myself.

Here are some links, then, cross-posted from the good professor’s blog.

YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME: Not only has Iran’s state-run media used Photoshop to make another fake missile launch photo, this time the Mehrs News Agency included Jar Jar Binks in the picture.

MICHAEL MOYNIHAN on Holocaust agitprop in Berlin: “[T]he most controversial work of the show is ‘Berek,’ a short fi...

Guest-Blogging at Instapundit

I’ll be guest-blogging over at Instapundit this week with the usual crew while the professor is away on vacation. At the end of each day I’ll round up my (short) posts over there and re-publish them here.

Russia Threatens NATO?

This can’t be serious:

Russia’s top military officer warned Thursday that Moscow would strike NATO missile-defense sites in Eastern Europe before they are ready for action, if the U.S. pushes ahead with deployment.

“A decision to use destructive force pre-emptively will be taken if the situation worsens,” Russian Chief of General Staff Nikolai Makarov said at an international missile-defense conference in Moscow attended by senior U.S. and NATO officials.

Barry Blechman at the Stimson Center thi...

Israel Builds a Wall in the North

Israel just began construction of a high cement wall on its northern border between the Israeli town of Metulla and the Lebanese town of Kfar Kila. The wall will only be a kilometer long, so it’s clearly not being placed there to prevent anyone from crossing the border per se. It’s being placed there to prevent anyone from crossing the border—or shooting across the border—at that specific location.

In 2005, I drove down there from Beirut with a Lebanese woman who grew up in the area. I was thu...