JORDAN: Queen Rania receives YouTube award

She may be queen of an ancient land. But this week word emerged that Queen Rania of Jordan was winner of a distinctively 21st century honor. She has been given YouTube's first-ever Visionary Award for launching an interactive online channel to combat stereotypes and misconceptions associated with Arabs and Muslims, Jordan's Petra news agency reported.

The news was announced Thursday by YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley:

Queen Rania sets the standard for breaking down stereotypes and her YouTube videos are nothing short of inspirational. It is both a pleasure and an honor to present her with this much-deserved tribute.

The Visionary Award celebrates active and motivated users of YouTube whose aim is to utilize the service as an open platform to foster dialogue, highlight social and cultural issues and work for positive change in their communities and around the world.

JORDAN: Poet arrested for insulting Islam

A Jordanian poet who published a collection of his works has found himself in hot water. He's been accused of apostasy, a crime that could carry the death penalty in some parts of the Islamic world.

Islam Samhan, 27, was arrested by authorities today. He could be sentenced to up to three years in prison. The specific charge?  Harming Islam by incorporating Koranic imagery into his love poems.

According to The National, the Abu Dhabi daily, Samhan's work, "Slim Shadows," caught the attention of Jordanian clerics, including Jordan's Grand Mufti Noah Alqdah Samas, who called him an enemy of religion for comparing his loneliness to that of the prophet Youssef in the Koran.

Suddenly, Samhan's nightmare began. His book was banned and he began receiving death threats.

SYRIA: Questions linger in case of American journos Chmela and Luck

In conversation after conversation, in cocktail parties and sheesha cafes from Lebanon to Syria to Jordan, one question continues to pop up over and over again:

What was up with the two Americans who illegally crossed the Lebanese border into Syria and found themselves suddenly locked up by Syrian authorities?

The two journalists, Holli Chmela, 27, and Taylor Luck, 23, were writing for the Amman-based English-language Jordan Times. They went missing Oct. 1 during a holiday in Lebanon. They showed up a week later, safe and sound, locked up in a Syrian prison. They were released to American officials in Damascus, and went back to Amman.

But the real story of what happened remains murky.

Were they plucky journalists trying to get a scoop, as the Syrians say?

Or were they a couple of hapless kids suckered into intrigue, as they contended in a lengthy article for their newspaper?

Or were they up to something more nefarious, as some have whispered?

Readers in the U.S. and abroad have been generous with their insights and queries.

IRAQ: For some Iraqis, it's first-class flights home

As Americans complain about rising air travel costs, cramped planes and miserably long check-in lines at airports, some Iraqis are enjoying free travel in the prime minister's jet, all part of the Iraqi government's drive to bring people back to their war-torn homeland.

The first of what the Iraqi government says will be regular flights bringing refugees back on the A300 normally used by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki arrived Monday afternoon in Baghdad. The first sign that this was no regular flight was the stairway wheeled out to the airplane door. It had a red carpet.

Returning Iraqis, many clutching bundles of belongings and small children, walked gingerly down the steps, slowed by the large Iraqi flags that they were given that flapped across their faces in the stiff wind.

Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta Mousawi, an Iraqi government and security spokesman, said Maliki had arranged for such flights to take place each week. Flights will come from Syria and Jordan in addition to Egypt. The three countries host the largest numbers of Iraqis who have fled since the U.S. invasion of 2003.

Each trip will carry about 250 people. Government officials are hoping that by offering an easy way home, more Iraqis will be willing to return and help the country recover from five years of war. So far, most have seemed resistant to the idea, not convinced that the relative calm in most of the country will hold.

International organizations say about 2.5 million Iraqis have fled the country since 2003. Only a relative handful have returned. A recent report by the International Organization for Migration said about 16% of the 16,848 families that have returned home had come from outside Iraq. The rest were internally displaced.

The United Nations, IOM and similar organizations have warned against bringing people back too soon, before communities are able to receive them. Some of the problems confronting returnees, including those coming home from having fled to other places inside Iraq, include lack of access to basic services, returning to badly damaged homes and finding other people living in their houses.

And though the government insists that most people who return home do so because they feel safe, some returnees say they come back because they have to. It's expensive to live elsewhere, and many are finding it impossible to find jobs or to put their children in school.

"If I had more money, I would have stayed and never gone back," Abu Hussein, a 32-year-old Shiite merchant, told the Associated Press while waiting to board Monday's flight at Cairo's airport. "We hear from other returnees that they had regret going back because there is still bombing, kidnapping and killing."

--Tina Susman in Baghdad

 

JORDAN: As hunger increases, so does anger

Hunger ate away at his pride and honor.

Abdullah Eid Hadid, 74, has found that his retirement salary isn't nearly enough to make ends meet in these hard times, especially not in Jordan, where prices are skyrocketing.

"In 2007, we suffered," he said, the creases of age surrounding his eyes like cracks in the desert. "But 2008 is breaking our back. This country is becoming like an ocean. The big fish are eating the little fish."

The anger was palpable among all those interviewed for today's front-page article about how food prices were fueling resentment and extremism in the Middle East as well as undermining U.S. goals for the region. But Hadid's story was perhaps the saddest. He'd given his life and youth to protect Jordan as a policeman and a soldier, first donning a military uniform at age 14. He defended his country during its wars of the past decades.

JORDAN: Country for sale?

 

Some Jordanians are steaming mad over plans to sell off huge swaths of the country to private investors abroad.

On Sunday the Jordanian government announced plans to sell its Red Sea port of Aqaba to a group of United Arab Emirates investors for $5 billion. The government is also selling the King Hussein Hospital and its surrounding properties for $2 billion to the Emirates. The capital of Amman also plans to sell a large piece of property in the heart of the city to a Lebanese bigwig for $1.5 billion.

The government says it's trimming down in an era of smaller government. But critics say these deals lack transparency and that the government is raking in dough it will never share with ordinary Jordanians, who are feeling the crush of rising fuel and food costs.

Making matters worse, the property sell-offs are to foreigners (albeit fellow Arabs). 

Zaki Bani Rsheid, the outspoken leader of the opposition Islamic Action Front, said an earful about the situation to AFP:

These projects are not designed to benefit the poor, but only wealthy and influential Jordanians, People's patience has limits, and I think that in the coming days there will be an explosion, a very big explosion, and nobody can predict its repercussions and/or results.

— Borzou Daragahi in Beirut

Photo: The Jordanian Red Sea port of Aqaba. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

JORDAN: Queen Rania on YouTube quest

Queen Rania, the glamorous monarch of Jordan, is trying to become the queen of YouTube.

She’s using the video website to reach out people around the world. Last week, she launched a black and white video on YouTube asking young people to join in a global dialogue to dismantle misconceptions about Muslims and the Arab world.

"In a world where it's so easy to connect to one another, we still remain very much disconnected. There's a whole world of wonder out there that we cannot appreciate with stereotypes," the queen says in the video, below.

In the video, Rania urges the viewers to send her their opinions and the stereotypes they hold about Arabs and Muslims. She said she wants people "to know the real Arab world unedited, unscripted and unfiltered."

JORDAN: Guns galore at Middle East weapons fair

The specter of conflicts in the Middle East intensifying and widening worries many countries in the region. But some Arab nations are showing a growing interest in acquiring or selling sophisticated weapons as suggested by the wide participation in an international exhibition for military hardware, held in Jordan over the last few days.

The event, Special Operations Forces Exhibition and Conference (SOFEX) 2008 was a muscular display of tanks, armored vehicles, high-tech surveillance equipment, gunboats, machine guns, etc.

Check out the first minute or two of the promotional video for the event and you'll get the idea.

MIDDLE EAST: McCain stumbles in Amman

Sen. John McCain has long presented himself as a seasoned statesman and foreign policy expert, someone with the wisdom and experience to guide the U.S. through troubled times.

That's why the media and his rivals pounced on him when he got a fundamental question regarding the violence in Iraq wrong.

McCain, standing before the Roman ruins in the Jordanian capital, said Iran was training and equipping Al Qaeda militants wreaking havoc in Iraq:

Well, it’s common knowledge and has been reported in the media that Al Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran. That’s well known. And it’s unfortunate.

The U.S. military accuses Iran, a country of Shiite Persians, of supporting fellow Shiite groups in Iraq. Sunni Arab Al Qaeda fighters mostly come from U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, underscoring the complex overlays of violence and politics that bedevil an easy solution to the Iraq conflict. After Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman whispered in his ear, McCain corrected himself.

SYRIA: Avoiding an Arab League fiasco

Once again, Syria is proving to be the "black sheep" of the Arab world.

After years of waiting, it's finally Damascus' turn to shine as host of the annual Arab League Summit. But now come worries that Saudi Arabia, along with Egypt and Jordan, might ruin the party.

The so-called "moderate Arab states," backed by the U.S., want to punish Syria for trying to regain control over its smaller neighbor, Lebanon. For the past three months, Saudis have blamed Syrians for repeatedly blocking the election of a Lebanese president.