There are foolish people. There are those looking for a “black” light. There are wise people who do not keep back ignorant ones. There is a silence on the “madness” of rioters and extremists. There are those issuing fatwas [religious rulings] without any awareness and there are those receiving them without any awareness. There are those who write without any awareness and those who read without any awareness. There are those who turn words into “bullet-like” terms.

For two weeks I have been drowning in sex scandals, which, thank God, are not mine, but those of others. I am too cowardly to do anything that would make me into a news item, or bring my end, instead of my remaining someone who relays the news and analyzes it.

The Arab cable TV involved the region’s inhabitants in the Iraqi elections. They followed them, predicted, wagered, and learned. These elections seemed like a training session in a region that cannot be accused of its passion for or practice of democracy.

The blame for the Greek financial crisis cannot be assigned to the mismanagement of the country’s economy alone; rather, this crisis, given the accumulation of financial deficits, is to a large extent similar to the crises that beleaguered the major financial and insurance groups. These had financial deficits that exceeded those of the Hellenic nation, prior to their collapse. Moreover, the course that the accumulation of deficit took in Athens is the same as that witnessed by the major financial institutions, which then lost its financial balance and buckled.

Egyptians refer to the Al-Azhar Sheikh as the “Grand Imam”, and with the presidential decision to appoint a new Sheikh to his position merely being issued begins the debate over the standing of the man, who comes appointed to the post and cannot be removed from it, while the men of Al-Azhar themselves have often put forth opinions in which they have voiced their preference for the Sheikh being elected from among candidates who would be members of the Islamic Research Council.

Prior to the war on Iraq, then afterwards and until this very day, I have been writing time and again, and then a thousand times after that, that the American press has failed in uncovering the deliberate lies, exaggerations and falsification that took place in preparation for the war. The reason behind this was that the target was an Arab and Muslim country.

The preoccupation with the Sahara question is coming relatively late. The issue is not crucial enough to attract a wide-scale interest, nor is it raging to the extent that it risks erupting major threats. Nonetheless, the concerned parties are portraying it as though it is an apocalypse. For this reason, the visit of United Nations envoy Christopher Ross to the region appears to be proportional to these facts, as it neither heralds good news nor does it warn of dire consequences.

This week, OPEC celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, having been founded in Baghdad in 1960. In truth, there is a huge difference between its priorities and interests at present and what they were like in its early days.

How can we explain that both the advocates of Israel and its opponents are converging on attacking the same newspaper, which is now being accused of two contradictory charges?

In fact, a Likudnik website published an article entitled ‘Anti-Semitism and Israel-Hatred" on the Huffington Post’, which was preceded a few days earlier by an article published by an antiwar website entitled ‘The Huffington Post: Israeli-Occupied Territory’

The enthusiasm of Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon was not sufficient to bring the Israeli government to provide the conditions of peace with the Palestinians and the establishment of their independent viable state on the territories occupied in 1967.