Faisal's Tobril

Yesterday, I came across a video on youtube entitled “يعني أيه التيار الرئيسي المصري؟؟”. When I first saw the title, I imagined it would be something produced and executed by anti-protesters who would spin the economy and security yarns. This wasn’t because I thought that these were the views of the “Egyptian mainstream” but because [...]

A friend on facebook recently posted a link to this article (Note: Article is in Arabic and thus my response will be longer than if it had been in English since I will have to translate/para-translate certain passages that I wish to criticize) which I thought was one of the stupidest things I have ever [...]

So Hassan Nasrallah comes out on television and says that he did not expect the magnitude of Israel’s response and that if he knew that so much destruction would ensue, he would not have kidnapped the two soldiers. Okay. Does that make the Israeli attacks, in terms of size and magnitude, and the destruction they [...]

Hussam El-Hamalawy, a friend and a “The Arabist” Contributor, has this link to a video on “street activism“. I hadn’t seen it before and found it quite interesting. What interested me most was the bit near the end. The group of young people that the Journalist/Reporter talked to were, as far as I could tell, [...]

So today in the morning, and while I was ironing a shirt, I heard something quite interesting on television. It was actually my grandmother (I’m staying with my grandparents these days – long story), who wakes up quite early, watching an Egyptian soap. Since she’s a bit hard-of-hearing, old age and such, the volume was [...]

Disclaimer: Proposed, sometimes detailed, solutions to Egypt’s problems coming your way. “Were I President of the Arab Republic of Egypt, things would be very different.” It makes me smile; the number of times I have heard the previous statement… both from myself and others. And so, in the spirit of wasting my time and working [...]

This may seem like a weird post as you, if you, read along so let me just warn you that all that follows is merely my twisted view of things I see. Whilst I would have normally placed this post on my “Too-sensitive-for-everyone-to-read-blog-which-I-post-on-and-is-different-from-this-blog” I’ve decided I didn’t care enough if people get annoyed or pissed [...]

I logged on to my account at wordpress this morning with a plan to write something about Egyptian politics and what I’d do were I president or in some way in charge of this country. Of course, I don’t start writing the moment I hit the PC, so I went over to Manal and Alaa’s [...]

So while doing my thing, surfing the Internet today, I came across this title to a blog post that I had subscribed to: “Egyptian Blogger Asks the Real Questions“. I thought to myself: cool. Clicked on the title, was taken to the blog’s address, started reading the story and discovered that the Egyptian blogger in [...]

Bolivia's President-elect Evo Morales declared yesterday, on International Workers' Day, that Bolivia would nationalize Bolivia's Oil & Gas companies if foreign firms do not "agree to give Bolivia's state oil company oversight of production and a majority of their revenue generated in Bolivia". Morales gave those companies six months to make their choice. Already soldiers [...]