IRAN: How I learned to stop worrying and love Ahmadinejad

As a reporter covering Iran, former president Mohammad Khatami drove me nuts. He frequently improvised his speeches and strayed far from his prepared remarks, often adjusting them to the audience he was addressing.

At the holy shrine of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, for example, he played up his Islamic credentials and devotion to the 1979 revolution that brought clerical rule to Iran. To students at Tehran University, he presented himself as a strident freedom fighter and advocate of individual and social liberty.

He was often totally misunderstood or misquoted because reporters didn’t know what to expect from him, and often, what he was talking about. You had to arrive on time for every speech and not miss a word. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, however, causes me no such worries.

“The utopia of mankind is a city where justice, affection, love, self-esteem, dignity, liberty, science, knowledge and wisdom rule,” he told students in the Armenian capital of Yerevan this week, before returning home to Tehran.

GAZA: Plenty of blame for both sides

Hamas and Fatah each have abused Palestinians’ rights since facing off in a mini civil war in the Gaza Strip this summer.

So says Amnesty International, which today accused the rival Palestinian factions of what it called “flagrant disregard for the human rights of the civilian population already worn down by decades of Israeli occupation, military campaigns and blockades.”

LEBANON: Facebook for president!

Lebanese politics are notoriously cumbersome and  convoluted. Today, squabbling politicians yet again delayed a decision on choosing a new president, this time putting it off until Nov. 12. The deadline before the country is hurtled into a constitutional crisis is Nov. 24.

But while they've been slow to pick a president, they've been super quick to take on new fads, especially Facebook, the social networking website which has rapidly taken on a life of its own among the outgoing and chatty Lebanese.

Lebanese have headed to Facebook with an enthusiasm bordering on the extreme. The website's Lebanon network has 125,000 members, about one for every 32 residents of Lebanon. By comparison, Israel has about 90,000 Facebookers, or one for every 67 residents, while gigantic Egypt has 180,000 or one for every 444 residents.

ISRAEL: PR offensive for an assassin

This week, Israel marks the 12th anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin with a series of ceremonies and school programs. But his killer is the one dominating headlines.

Yigal Amir, a right-wing Jewish extremist serving a life sentence for the fatal shooting on Nov. 4, 1995, is the focus of an energetic campaign by supporters urging his early release. Well-known ultranationalists, calling themselves the “Committee for Democracy,” mailed out thousands of postcards saying Amir should be freed in the name of “peace” and “democracy.”

EGYPT: Love and rage amid the pyramids

Names of love were scrawled on the desert rock. Written in camp fire ash, some were new and black, others were fading. Most were English language names; kids from international schools scribbling teenage declarations in the wind and the heat. A few were ensconced in hearts. They scrolled up the wall like history.

Hannah Loves John.

Love is like that. Sure it is. Bruce Springsteen sang those words. But this is not The Boss' territory. This is bone-colored desert, where a voice can't even summon an echo, a place that eons ago a river ran. Time stole the water, leaving only a bed of rock and sand. Most people come here now to go four-wheeling or to escape the crush and madness of Cairo. In the minutes before dusk, they seem a scattering of modern nomads, climbing the ridges and outcroppings, grilling hot dogs and settling in for sunset. From up here, the ragged city unfolds. And beyond that, gauzed in dust and amber haze, rise the Pyramids of Giza. They look like eye slits on the horizon. But their geometric perfection wasn't enough to put them on a new list of the Seven Wonders of the World that included the Colosseum in Italy and the Great Wall of China. The pyramids had to settle for an "honorary" status in a global Internet vote concocted by a Swiss adventurer. 

Egyptians were furious. Some sensed a conspiracy. Architectural genius, they argued, should not be subjected to commercial whims and popularity contests. They have a point. It seems apparent that whoever voted in the ranking didn't sit here at dusk, didn't imagine all that came before him, didn't revel in mysteries still unknown, didn't gaze across an ancient plain where stone and young love endure against the elements.

— Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo

MIDDLE EAST: Where East doesn't meet West

The massive concrete barrier snaking through the West Bank may get most of the attention, but  an equally formidable wall exists in the minds of the residents of Jerusalem.

Last week, I attempted to set up an interview with representatives from the international aid organization Save The Children. The simple act of agreeing where to meet was a sobering lesson in the invisible barriers that have become a part of daily life here.

“I’m new in town,” I told their spokesman over the phone. “But just give me the address and I should be able to find your office.”

“Well, we’re in East Jerusalem and the streets here don’t really have names or signs,” he said.

“Umm ... OK. Well, is there a nearby landmark so I can tell the cabdriver?”

He almost laughed; the request was so naïve. “You’re coming from West Jerusalem, right? Most taxi drivers from the west won’t come to East Jerusalem.”

Friends tell me of leftist, peacenik Israeli friends -- strong supporters of Palestinian rights -- who nonetheless speak of Arab East Jerusalem as an impossibly exotic and dangerous place. It’s not prejudice, they say, as much as an unspoken taboo combined with (perhaps justified) fear of a hostile reception. 

One journalist here once tried to meet an Israeli source who absolutely refused to go to East Jerusalem. So he instead arranged to meet in the lobby of a five-star hotel, at which point he told the source: “By the way, you know you’re in East Jerusalem now, right?”

— Ashraf Khalil in Jerusalem

IRAN: Law and order, just a warm-up act

Before a turbaned cleric led Friday prayers in Tehran, Iran's head of law enforcement took the stage, delivering a blistering condemnation of America, which recently played host to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and promising another wave of pressure on Iranians who adhere to Western cultural ways.

"In the so-called cradle of the free and open society -- the U.S. and Columbia University -- they asked our respectable president, 'Why aren't boozing, homosexuality and debauchery allowed in your country?'" law enforcement chief Esmail Ahmadi-Moghadam told those gathered for Friday prayers and politics at Tehran University.

He said that a "collapse of ethics" in the West had led to a disintegration of the family. He praised the Iranian government's crackdown on "thugs and gangs" over the last six months.

"Thanks to enforcing law and order, we are witnessing a dramatic reduction in homicides," he said. "Despite the nagging of the West-toxified critics  who want Iranians to abandon their Islamic and national values and embrace rotten Western values, the wrongdoing of the thugs has decreased."

He also told Iranians to expect even more law and order on the streets.

IRAQ: Celebratory shooters come under fire

Celebratory gunfire is a time-honored — and occasionally deadly — tradition in Iraq. No wedding or soccer victory is complete without it.

But in the southern city of Samawah, patience appears to be wearing thin with the practice. When revelers began firing rounds into the air over the three-day Eid al-Fitr celebrations that mark the end of Ramadan, the police media department issued this curt statement:

"Three newlywed grooms were arrested by the police during the Eid days because of the random celebratory shooting by their families during the wedding celebrations, which resulted in annoying the civilians. We need to end this phenomenon."

— Alexandra Zavis in Baghdad

LEBANON: Where there's smoke, there's fire

The banner headline across Thursday's edition of the pro-Hezbollah Lebanese paper al-Safir was strident: "Washington officially requests turning Lebanon into an allied military base."

Citing what it said were excerpts from official minutes of meetings between U.S. and Lebanese officials, the paper reported that the U.S. proposed an official agreement increasing American aid for Lebanon's military, including training centers in Sunni-dominated northern Lebanon, in exchange for bringing Lebanon closer into the American sphere of influence.

IRAQ: The unfiltered view

It seems like every other day another blogger joins the exodus from Iraq, but there are still many out there providing an unfiltered view of life in a war zone. Here are a just a few:

• Last of Iraqis
• Neurotic Iraqi Wife
• Healing Iraq/
• 24 Steps to Liberty
• Days of My Life

— Alexandra Zavis in Baghdad