Arab World since the Feb 11 Departure of Mubarak

Good stuff about the Arab Spring:

• The Guardian 5/21/11, Ahdaf Soueif, "Our Revolt is not Obama's: Barack Obama says he wants change in the Arab world yet insults us with the same old bad policies". A short piece, yet surpassingly powerful, about Obama's subversion of the Arab world's quest for economic opportunity even as he professes support for it. U.S. It has wonderful paragraphs like this one:   

The blame is not all with America. We had a regime that was susceptible, that became actively complicit; assiduously finding ways to serve US and Israeli interests – and ruin us. But: we got rid of it. Peaceably, with grace and within the law. We Got Rid of It.

Ahdaf Soueif (pictured right) is an Egyptian short story writer, novelist and political and cultural commentator. More Soueif pieces at the Guardian.

Ride the Youth Unemployment Highway from Cairo to Wall Street and Chicago.

[Note: This long, meandering post, last updated 9/7/11, is a running history of historic events that began in December 2010 in the Middle East - in Tunisia - and are spreading to Europe and the United States. The author teaches writing courses at a community college in the north suburbs of Chicago. This post takes the form of a letter to two students of his who last spring wrote papers about Egypt's Arab Spring. One of them, Ossama, is Egyptian, but, like the author of this piece, he knew next to nothing about the extraordinarily powerful youth-centered forces that appear to have transformed the Middle East and are now impacting the rest of the world.]

Hi Taniya and Ossama,

I just stumbled on a trove of information about Egypt that I want to share with you. My discoveries began with this story in today's New York Times about ousted Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak's wealth. It's interesting: Swiss banks have frozen Mubarak's accounts. But I wanted to know more about the youth organizers of the Egyptian revolution. Midway through the Times story I saw this link to the National Association for Change in Egypt at the Carnegie Guide to Egypt's elections. Here I found this fascinating 15 minute interview with youth activist Ahmed Maher, a civil engineer and co-founder of the April 6 movement. I had struck gold.