Friday, December 22, 2006

Put the children to sleep, and return the pigs to the barn. Hassan Fattah is back, I am sorry to say. Guess who is back? Hassan Fattah. Here, we noticed that he was not permitted to cover Lebanon anymore for the New York Times. You may remember his celebratory articles on Lebanon during the Hummus Revolution when he officially declared that all Lebanese are now united behind the Hariri family--he declared all conflicts in Lebanon to have ended. And he anointed his friend Michael Husayn Young as the most popular leader among Lebanese Shi`ites. We remember his articles in which only his neo-conservative friends would be interviewed and quoted. Well, Fattah--my sources tell me--has now been officially hired by the Times. Well, he cut his teeth working for Martin Peretz, and he had established strong credentials as an anti-Palestinian writer. And his interview (with the foreign editor of the Times who asked a reporter whether he/she is a practicing Muslim) went very well. Fattah, my sources tell me, will start doing a stint as a Metro reporter. His first article will focus on the popularity of Rafiq Hariri in Brooklyn; his second article will declare Hummus and falafil as the best Israeli food in New York city. Look at this article from today in the New York Times (which has nothing new that you have not read already in local American newspapers): "“The possibility of having conflict is very high,” said Abdelrahman Rashid, managing director of the satellite news channel Al Arabiya and a respected Saudi columnist." Now, I know that he is friends with Rashid (all these Arab neo-conservatives are close--it sound conspiratorial but is really true), but he is "respected" by whom? I mean, he is respected by the House of Saud, but is he respected by Arab readers? If he thinks that he is, what is the evidence for that? On Arab websites, he and other Saudi propagandists are regulalry mocked, ridiculed, and vilified.