SYRIA: Iraqi refugee woes

In the bustling streets of Damascus, Syrians have something new to grumble about — the increasing frequency in which they say they hear the Iraqi accents of their neighbors who have fled the war and come to Syria.

Best estimates put the Iraqi refugee population in Syria (population 18.5 million) at anywhere from 1.5 million to 2 million, an influx that clearly has been felt by all segments of Syrian society.

For the poor, there is competition for entry-level jobs such as janitors, waiters and laborers, with Iraqis willing to flout the law and their refugee status to earn a living. This, however, pushes Syrians out of this kind of work. And the situation has been made worse because the influx of Iraqis is driving up the prices for apartments and  other rentals.

EGYPT: Women need not apply

By recently calling for a ban on non-Muslims and women from running for the Egyptian presidency, the Muslim Brotherhood has reignited a debate over how genuine their espousal of democratic values is.

The 79-year-old Egyptian organization has been striving to project a democratic image for years. Yet, this new platform, circulated among intellectuals for the last few months, has shattered this image by arguing that women and Coptic Christians and other non-Muslims are incapable of meeting the religious requirements that would qualify them to assume Egypt's highest political office.

Besides the stir this ban has caused, the platform has exposed the internal rift between the doves and hawks in the nation's largest Islamic group. The former have expressed their endorsement of women's and Copts' full political rights on several occasions. However, the platform is a blow to their moderate discourse showing that hard-liners have a strong grip over the group.

— Noha El-Hennawy in Cairo

SAUDI ARABIA: Banished from the kingdoms

Director Peter Berg's "The Kingdom," a star-studded Hollywood blockbuster set in Saudi Arabia, has been banned from the screens of at least three Persian Gulf kingdoms.

Puritanical Saudi Arabia, where most of the film's story unfolds, doesn't allow any movie theaters. But other Gulf states have given the film a big thumbs-down. News agencies report that Kuwaiti censors have banished the film from the nation's screens. Even libertine Bahrain's Ministry of Information has barred the action-packed thriller.

ISRAEL: Shifting rules to live by

The change was so gradual, I can’t recall exactly when the buses stopped giving me the willies.

I moved to Jerusalem with my wife and our 10-month-old daughter in late 2003, a time when Palestinian suicide bombers were regularly blowing themselves up in restaurants, markets and aboard public buses packed with Israelis. Some friends back home were appalled we would take such a risk. “Have you taken leave of your senses?” a former college roommate chided in an e-mail before our departure.

I assured everyone we’d be careful — or as careful as you can be when violence is random and regular at the same time. We adopted some ironclad rules: Never ride the buses; stay out of crowded markets, choose restaurants with security guards and sit as far from the front door as possible.

Still, during our first three months in Jerusalem, I covered two gruesome bus bombings within a few blocks from our apartment. I began to view the green-and-white city buses as rolling time bombs, and got a shiver every time I was stuck in traffic next to one.

No more. The last time a bus blew up in Jerusalem was in February 2004.

MIDDLE EAST: Pop stars and soda pop

When Lebanese mega pop star Nancy Ajram signed a six-figure endorsement deal with Coca-Cola in 2005, Pepsi took the challenge, and very seriously.

Not content with signing one rival singer, Pepsi assembled a whole team of Arab world pop stars and cast them in a full-length musical, a totally unprecedented move by a multinational in the Middle East.

The two giant beverage companies have been gearing up vehemently to claim the soft-drink allegiance among Arab youth. This comes as no surprise in a region with a burgeoning population of Muslim youths often socially or legally forbidden from drinking alcohol.

A night in Tunisia

The fish restaurant glowed in the alley. The door opened, a man slipped through hanging beads. Calamari sizzled, plates clattered. A lute player sat like a relic against the whitewashed wall, singing of love and country and God hovering somewhere beyond the coast. The waiter, a corkscrew dangling from his pocket, was sweaty and quick. A boy rushed in with a bag of what appeared to money, but turned out to be baguettes. Old men sat cross-legged. Tablecloths were dotted with cigarette burns; they looked like tiny islands on a white sea. The men whispered and laughed, they sipped rose, they breathed in the fish, the grit and the smoke, happy to be out for another evening in their worn blazers, a trickle of cash in their pockets. They clapped for the lute player.

A few streets over, above a market closed for the night, a blogger known as Mr. Yahyawi sat in the gray light of a computer, evading government censors. He typed with abandon, his hair as kinetic as the circuitry he navigated to escape the firewalls and break out into the ether with messages of torture and political repression, and all those things not discussed in fish restaurants. He hop-scotched through cyberspace, taping into proxy servers, disguising his electronic footprint. Sometimes the government, often cited by international agencies for human rights abuses, tracks him and fries his computer with a virus. He writes in French and Arabic. His motto is: We live under a kingdom, not in a democracy. About 800 people visit his site each day. That's not many, but he's too obsessed to ponder numbers. He will be posting long after the lute has fallen silent and the waiter has showered and gone to sleep.

"The gateway to progress," he said, "is when people start expressing themselves."

— Jeffrey Fleishman in Tunis

ISRAEL: The accidental terrorist

An innocent trip to the grocery store Monday night almost developed into an international incident — and a sobering glance at the very real fears lurking just below the surface of daily life in Jerusalem.

I was ravenous and a little light-headed from a hard-fought squash match, so I parked my car on the sidewalk (Israeli style) on Emek Rafaim Street — a strip of stores, restaurants and fast food joints. When I returned to the car, laden with grocery bags, a middle-aged Israeli-American woman started yelling at me for almost giving her a heart attack. She was on the phone to the police and in the process of reporting a suspicious vehicle — mine.

At first it seemed ridiculous, but after hearing her reasoning, I started to feel really embarrassed and clueless. I had left the car unlocked with the windows open and my gym bag sitting on the front seat, across the street from a crowded street cafe.

Even worse, the trunk of my rental car — as I’ve discovered — is apparently prone to popping open.
The open trunk was the last little suspicious detail that seemed to push her over the edge and onto the phone with the police. I don’t like to think how the rest of the night would have gone if I'd stayed another 10 minutes in that store.

The irony of all this: I truly believe the woman's suspicions had nothing to do with me being Arab-American.

So was she paranoid? Or am I clueless, careless and completely out of step with the psychology of this country? Been pondering this one for three days now, and I think I’m siding with her.

— Ashraf Khalil in Jerusalem

Israel confronts the A-word

Israelis howled in protest against Jimmy Carter’s recent book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," and its critique of discriminatory Israeli policies. But Carter wasn’t the first to make the analogy with the racial separation policies once practiced in South Africa. A few Israeli leftists have long used the A-word to draw critical attention to their country’s treatment of Palestinians.

Today the word popped up on signs brandished by demonstrators who blocked Israel’s Highway 443 during the morning rush, before police cleared them away and made three arrests. "Caution: Apartheid Road," one sign read. The grievance: Israel bans Palestinian vehicles from the highway, which cuts through the West Bank to connect Jerusalem with the Israeli town of Lod.

The protesters, numbering several dozen, are with a coalition of Jewish and Arab organizations that favor Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. One Jewish activist, Hadar Grievsky, told Israel’s Army Radio: "There is a policy here of apartheid. Highways are built on roads that were seized from Palestinians and are accessible only to Jewish drivers."

Army Radio’s audience no doubt cringed. Most Israelis, including many on the left, argue that Israel’s separation policies are based not on racism but on a need for protection against suicide bombers. The Israeli military says the prohibition of Palestinian traffic on the road is temporary and subject to security considerations.

The protesters suspect that the ban has a hidden purpose — to pave the way to Israel’s annexation of more West Bank land. If the state were interested only in protecting Israeli lives, they say, it could limit the travel of Israelis on roads cutting through the West Bank and build roads inside Israeli territory instead. In making this argument, the protesters use the term apartheid to mean "acts that are used as a means for establishing and maintaining domination of one racial group over another."

Thursday’s highway blockade drew an acid comment from Otniel Schneller, a right-wing member of Parliament, who dismissed its anti-apartheid theme as the work of outside agitators. "A lot of anarchists come from overseas, funded by terror, and do whatever they want," he told Israel Radio. "We must demand that the police not let these anarchists into Israel to light fires and to ruin the atmosphere we are trying to create."

— Richard Boudreaux in Jerusalem

IRAN: Surf's up, in Tehran

On a recent visit to Iran, I was shocked to discover that one of my favorite blogs — the Huffington Post — was blocked by my Internet service provider.

"The requested page is Forbidden," it said when I tried to log on.

Dejected, I tried to visit another website on the opposite side of the political spectrum, the Drudge Report, only to find that it too was blocked out. My favorite trashy gossip site, TMZ, blocked! Even Wonkette, blocked!

The warning pages include a space where you can submit the names of websites that might have been blocked in error. I've submitted countless websites countless times. But they've never reversed a decision. My favorite sites always remain blocked.

Now, it's easy to understand why the Islamic Republic of Iran wants to filter out pornography websites. Iran, is after all, run by conservative clerics. You can also relate to why they would block the sites of dissident bloggers who wield the Internet as a weapon against the system. The Iranian government, in turn, demands that all Internet service providers filter out a list of websites with adult or anti-establishment content.

But come on! Do they really need to block MySpace? The Seattle Times? The Arizona Republic?

Using one Internet service provider, I found even the Boston Globe's website was blocked . Are the Red Sox really a threat to anyone except the New York Yankees?

I got curious. I started looking for which sites were blocked and which weren't. I found out that it was very arbitrary. Oanda, the website I use for converting currency rates, was blocked while Regime Change Iran, was not.

Creative Iranians find their way around everything. Thanks to a couple friends, I discovered a whole subculture devoted to circumventing the filters. Friends e-mail each other ever-changing proxy addresses that let them access whatever site they want.

The Iranian government filters out the proxies as soon as they find them, but new ones constantly pop up. The demand is just too great, and people are willing to go to great lengths to read and see what they want when they want.

Once in Tehran, I got a phone call from a new Internet service provider. It was a telemarketer. She was offering dial-up Internet rates at a decent price. I was polite, but non-committal. She read my mind, moved in for the kill.

"For a small added fee," she said, "we can get you unfiltered Internet."

— Borzou Daragahi in Beirut

Photo: The Internet can be an exercise in frustration in Iran, especially when your favorite sites for killing time are filtered out. Credit: Borzou Daragahi

PAKISTAN: A little kindness amid chaos

On the night Benazir Bhutto’s convoy was attacked on the outskirts of Karachi, I hurried out of my hotel to get to the scene. For the last mile or two, I had to travel by motorbike — one ridden by a young follower of Bhutto’s Pakistan People's Party, flagged down by my desperate driver when he realized he wouldn’t be able to get close enough.

As we approached the chaotic scene, I felt my dupatta — the shawl-like scarf worn by Pakistani women and adopted by foreigners like me — fly off my shoulders. As I jumped off the bike, I looked around. I spotted it, but it had already been trampled, perhaps run over by another motorbike. The ground was sticky with blood and pebbled with broken glass.