Throwaway lines

The International Herald Tribune was jointly owned and published by the New York Times and the Washington Post., filling its pages with articles from the two newspapers. Since the NYT took over sole ownership of the IHT, the Washington Post has been trying to find other international outlets. Here in Europe, it has teamed up with the Wall Street Journal Europe, which has led to more general-news articles appearing in that paper. It has also led to the WSJE op-ed pages being injected with some columns from the Washington Post; the two styles can be very different at times. Reading the WSJE's op-ed page a few days ago, I came across this column by David Ignatius on the Middle East, and his meeting with King Abdullah in Jordan. It is actually a reasonably upbeat piece on the aftershocks the Iraq war is having in the Middle East.

And at the Dead Sea this weekend, Abdullah is hosting a gathering of the world's great and good, known as the World Economic Forum and devoted to the idea of reconciliation in the Middle East post-Saddam Hussein. The watchword for this session is that democratic change is inevitable -- meaning that either countries such as Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia get their acts together or their rulers will end up like Saddam.

You can see the lights of Jerusalem twinkling across the water in the evening. And Israeli guests wander among Arabs, chatting about the region's future.

This pretty much sets the tone for the whole column, but what raised my eyebrows was the paragraph about what could go wrong:

What's wrong with this happy picture? Well, nearly every element of it could go wrong, for starters. America could be up the creek in Iraq, the new "road map" could crumble in the face of Hamas/Likud rejectionism, and Saudi and Egyptian leaders could keep talking democracy even as they fire newspaper editors and professors who practice it.

Eh, "Likud/Hamas rejectionism"? This is an offhand juxtaposition of a democratic party in Israel and a terrorist organization whose avowed aim it is to murder as many Israelis as possible, indeed to eradicate the very state of Israel. The charitable explanation is that Ignatius was just sloppy and let a latent anti-Likud bias creep into the writing, or that he cut a few too many corners in the pressure to reduce word count. The less charitable explanation is that he really thinks that Likud is somehow the Israeli analog of Hamas. Either way, it's not the kind of thing I would have expected to see on the op-ed pages of the WSJ of any region. I am not familiar with Ignatius' writings to know where he usually stands on these things, so I guess I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and go with one of the more charitable explanations.

Nomen est omen

Might as well start off with a small item: the most popular boys' name in Amsterdam last year was Mohammed. In the first quarter of this year, Mohammed fell back to 6th place, although the second quarter saw a return to the top spot.

There's an Muslim saying that if you have a hundred sons, name them all Mohammed. Apparently that's what they're doing over here.

Sorry about that...

My apologies to all for my protracted absence. There's no one major thing that's keeping me from blogging, but rather the confluence of a great many small things, interspersed with more travel and occasional peaks in workload. There's also the matter of getting back into the blogging habit. But this time around I am determined to return. Thank you for your patience.

I'm back

I have returned. Regular blogging will resume very soon.