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“The heart of the uprising,” “The symbol of a divided nation,” “the neo-cons’ worst nightmare”… These are just a few of several descriptions from over the last few weeks that have been used to frame Tahrir Square. Alongside the hundreds of media reporters and news correspondents, culture writers also jumped on the coverage bandwagon and began to ponder the role that the events would play in shaping the practices of Egypt’s contemporary artists. With a self-proclaimed expertise on all things Egyptian that would make the likes of New York Times’s Thomas Friedman seem humble, these cultural pundits sounded more like political analysts than art critics as they clashed and concurred on the state and fate of the arts in

It was June of 1967, a few hours before the outbreak of the Six-Day War, when my father sent us to Jericho away from the battlefront to stay with my grandmother. Back then, we did not have a television, and I remember huddling in the “radio room,” as my grandmother called it; I would later refer to it as the “war room.”
This was where we’d spend most of our time during the war, away from the broken glass caused by Israeli fighter-jets racing through the sound barrier listening to the Egyptian broadcast “Sawt El Arab” or “Voice of the Arabs.”
“Report number 42,” the announcer would say, and through the crackling sound of my grandmother’s ancient shortwave radio, we would all strain to hear the war updates.
“The Egyptian forces have repelled the Zionist army… the Jordanian army advanced to Jabel el Mukaber.”
I believe that it was on the second or third day of the Six Day War, as we were listening to these victorious reports, that we felt a rumbling throughout the

Like alot of news junkies, my laptop is about to explode because of all the open windows streaming live. From Wisconsin to Libya, Egypt and Japan, the world has truly crashed through our front door this month. What are we supposed to do with ourselves in all of this mayhem?
First, we need to get more comfortable with uncertainty because this is what the future looks like. Second, we need to believe that the United States has a unique and important role to play as we move

Women stand at the center of every type of dramatic change occurring in the world today: whether it’s coordinating and offering relief to earthquake victims in Japan and Haiti, consolidating democracy in Egypt or running Facebook. In 2009, President Obama appointed the first-ever ambassador-at-large for Global Women’s Issues, Melanne Verveer. In this historic role, Ambassador Verveer is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s go-to person, coordinating foreign policy issues and activities relating to the political, economic and social advancement of women around the world.
Ambassador Verveer is a force of nature in her own right. When I met her between sessions at the recent Women in the World Summit in New York City, she was swapping stories with a young American writer and a doctor (and grandmother) from

After receiving some beautifully creative submissions for the Fight On video competition I’m happy to announce we have a winner! I returned from a week-long trip to the Middle East to see the final votes that had been submitted by our wonderful panel of judges with experience ranging from independent filmmaking to social entrepreneurship. The judges were:
Sophia Chang has spent over 20 years in the music business, working with Paul Simon, Atlantic Records, Jive Records, and the Wu-Tang Clan and has expertise in many areas including management, marketing, publicity, talent scouting. Most recently, she managed Ol’ Dirty Bastard (RIP), the RZA, and Raphael Saadiq. She has coordinated fashion shows for designer Vivienne Tam, was an account executive at digital advertising agency, Sarkissian Mason, and is writing a screenplay for HBO.
Cheryl Dorsey is President of Echoing Green, a pioneer in the social entrepreneurship

Memo to President Obama: before your administration finally untangles itself from the Gordian knot of its contradictory Libya policy, I am rooting for the French Foreign Legion to be on the outskirts of Tripoli laying siege to Gadaffi and Sons, Inc. with France’s adventurous President Nicolas Sarkozy earning the credit.
After all, isn’t it in America’s strategic interest to accommodate French designs in Libya?
Ever since Libyan revolted against Gaddafi’s rule, Sarkozy has relentlessly cajoled the Obama Administration to deploy massive American military force to take the battle to Tripoli despite Washington’s prudent reservations not to go full throttle.
Sarkozy, if anything, has been consistent in his approach, with altruistic goals coupled to political designs. He has relentlessly favored a full fledged invasion of Libya to overthrow Gadaffi and prevent a humanitarian catastrophe in North

After a 2010 Congressional election completely absent foreign policy debates, the irony is lost on no one that events around the world now completely dominate recent headlines. At first glance, it would be easy to see the Republican Party as divided from within as it tries to figure out how America should engage the world. On the one hand, the Tea Party is looking to slash America’s foreign policy budget down to the bone. One the other hand, we have Republican presidential hopefuls calling on the

Divorced parents, more than anyone, can feel extremely vulnerable during disasters, especially if you are counting on investments to help you shore up the financial hardship that always comes when you have to support two households instead of just one. The last thing you need when a crisis occurs is to feel like the whole world is crashing in, including your emergency funds. Fortunately, with a little forethought and preparedness, you can have confidence that your assets are covered, even in uncertain times.
There are three critical aspects to protecting your assets for any emergency — preparing before disaster strikes, surviving the catastrophe and

For the longest time, Israeli governments have explained their resistance to Palestinian statehood by pointing to the Palestinians’ and the Arab world’s democracy deficit.
The dishonesty of that explanation has now been exposed to even the most credulous by the reaction of Israel’s government to the democratic revolutions sweeping the region. We are now told by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government that the overthrow of Tunisia’s and Egypt’s rulers and the challenges to other regional autocrats, whose regimes provided Israel with a certain stability by repressing forcefully popular Arab anger over Israel’s occupation policies, no longer allows Israel to accede to risky “concessions” that a peace accord entails.
So that while until now it was the region’s democratic deficit that supposedly prevented Israel from ending its occupation, now it is the region’s surfeit of democracy that stands in its

DOHA — My conversation with two North African friends ranged widely, from the role of satellite television in the Arab world to the prospects for electoral reform in the region. Then we came to how other nations would deal with the new dynamics of Arab politics. One of my friends said, “In the past, diplomacy has been with the leaders, but now it must be with the people.”
In other words, public diplomacy will now be of unprecedented importance for governments, such as that of the United States, that want to develop constructive relationships with what are in many ways new nations. Not since the crumbling of European communism in 1989 have we seen such a significant transformation of the character of so many states.
The development of new politics in the Arab world requires an equally sweeping redesign of

Barack Obama has suddenly sidled his way into a third war in the Muslim world, his first on his own. How has he gone about it? Why Libya and not somewhere else? And how does it end?
How has Obama gone about it? In a remarkably diffident manner. Never before has an American president embarked on a war with such reserve. And I can’t recall one who went to war while on tour in an entirely different part of the world.
Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s regime announced Friday that it accepted an immediate ceasefire following Thursday’s dramatic UN Security Council move to impose a no-fly zone and to take all steps necessary short of inserting ground troops to protect civilians.
Obama announced the start of

The no-fly zone is denying the Libyan people their right to self determination. That may seem like the oddest statement, but watching the grass roots, home cooked and home grown revolutions over the past weeks and months, it has become obvious that now is the time for the Arab Spring.
Throughout the Mid East people have shown extraordinary courage and determination to be part of a movement that has exploded spontaneously (in some cases) and after years of suppressed opposition and bloody tyranny. This is a moment. This is their moment.
It’s surprising then that so many who decried the Iraqi war and other Western interventions have supported the Libyan no-fly

All too frequently these days, I am asked whether our past polling at Zogby International gave us any advance clues to the uprisings that have occurred in several Arab countries. The answer, of course, is no. We were surprised, as, I believe, were the demonstrators themselves by the outpouring of support and the rapid growth of their movements in Tunisia, Egypt and beyond.
But while our polling couldn’t predict the uprisings, it nevertheless has been helpful in contributing to our understanding of the issues and concerns that define the political landscape in countries across the region.
In preparing for a talk on Bahrain earlier this week, I took a look at a survey of the “middle class” in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain we conducted a few years ago for McKinsey and Company. It was most

Egyptian media are having a field day ripping into ousted president Hosni Mubarak, his family and cronies, with state-run news organizations doing an about-face from traditional kowtowing to authority.
Coverage has ranged from serious to ludicrous, and, given Egyptians’ noted sense of humor, downright hilarious.
Yosri Fouda, a former investigative journalist with Qatar’s Aljazeera and host of a show on Egypt’s On TV, aired a picture of Mubarak wearing a pinstripe suit with his name sewn into the stripes.
Hosni Mubarak’s suit (Abu-Fadil)
Fouda, whose show is entitled “Akher Kalam” (The Last Word) brought an expert into the studio to analyze Mubarak’s state of mind.
The camera zeroed in on the garment to show vertical letters.
Hosni Mubarak’s suit with his name woven into the pinstripes (Abu-Fadil)
“The stripes in the suit have the name Hosni Mubarak woven in English and repeated throughout,” Fouda said, adding that he had noticed it when the photo was enlarged.
The demonstration would have been unthinkable when Mubarak was in power.
Yosri Fouda discusses Mubarak’s pinstripe suit (Abu-Fadil)
Asked for his opinion, the guest said Mubarak’s expression and the suit he wore reflected an attitude of dismissiveness, superiority and narcissism.
“A person who writes his name on his suit indicates self-importance, and that only comes when he feels he’s got absolute power and represents Egypt — there’s no Egypt, I’m Egypt,” the expert said.
It also signified that person had been in power too long and was one with his chair, the expert explained.
Interestingly, On TV is privately owned by Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris, who benefited under the Mubarak regime and whose businesses have cashed in on deals in North Korea.
When the Egyptian revolution first broke out, the opposition paper Al Wafd reported a number of rich Egyptians had prepared their private jets for a hasty exit and that Sawiris had fled to Dubai, but he denied it and subsequently made several media appearances from Cairo.
Sawiris told an interviewer defensively last month: “Not all businessmen are crooks.”
Meanwhile, state-run newspapers like Al Ahram have also jumped on the bandwagon of dissecting the Mubarak regime’s misdeeds.
This week’s youth supplement published an article entitled “Al Fasad Fi Hemayat El Hanem,” (corruption under her ladyship’s protection), in reference to former first lady Suzanne Mubarak (ne Thabet) who was known derisively as Marie Antoinette or Lady Macbeth.
Suzanne Mubarak’s family corruption uncovered by Al Ahram
The piece said Egypt’s January 25 revolution had terminated the empire of her first cousin and Consultative Council member Mustafa Thabet from the Upper Egypt Menia district town of Matay, where demonstrators had apparently set his fancy villa on fire.
The townspeople considered Thabet a tyrant who had terrorized them for years to the point they feared retribution and a return of the old regime if they spoke ill of him, the paper said.
Thabet’s council seat had been a family monopoly — his father had held it before him — and trouble began in Matay when Bahaa Mohamad Ismail of Egypt’s Channel 7 considered running for the same seat last year.
At first Ismail hesitated, given Thabet’s bad reputation, but the former decided to forge ahead, only to begin encountering obstacles such as being forced to pay 1,800 Egyptian Pounds ($330) promotional insurance to the district when the real fee was 1,000 Pounds ($181) — a burden in a relatively poor region.
Further pressures and threats against Ismail and his family, as well as harassment of other candidates “who dared run against ‘the lady’s cousin’, convinced him to withdraw from the race,” the report said.
The Consultative Council was for years the fiefdom of Mubarak loyalist Safwat Al Sherif, who headed the body that rubber-stamped executive decisions.
Safwat Al Sherif (Abu-Fadil)
The octogenarian Al Sherif had served as information minister under Mubarak and was a holdover from the days of predecessors Anwar Sadat and Gamal Abdel Nasser.
The new head of the (discredited and former ruling) National Democratic Party ousted former information minister Anas Al Fiqi (another Mubarak partisan), and accepted Al Sharif’s resignation from the ranks, according to Al Ahram.
The paper’s post-revolution coverage has been a far cry from its historical role as chief cheerleader for the regime and the ruling party.
In January Al Ahram’s journalists issued a statement calling for the resignation or removal of Mubarak from power and disavowed their executives’ decisions to besmirch the demonstrators and write falsehoods about the revolt.
So beholden to the regime were the publisher and top editors that in October 2010, the paper photoshopped a picture of Mubarak to show him walking ahead of President Barack Obama at the White

A revolution in Egypt: 18 days of tumultuous freedom fighting and a dictator is shamefully evicted. Seems straightforward, doesn’t it? It’s not. Egyptians have been working toward this outcome for years, yet the manner in which they achieved their revolution is clear-cut. Risking everything, far too often by dying, Egyptians pushed against the regime to gain the freedom to define democracy for

Reading the Washington Post’s coverage of the upheaval in the Arab world one day this week, I did a little “thought experiment.”
Looking at pages A10 and A11, I read the following headlines:
Mob Assaults Women at Rights March in Cairo
Police Fire on Demonstrators in Yemen
My thought experiment, scarcely at Einstein’s level, consisted simply of substituting the scene of each of these stories to Israel and trying to imagine the result.
Mob Assaults Palestinian Women at Rights March in Jerusalem
Police Fire of Palestinian Demonstrators in Israel
Judging by the international outrage last June when nine protesters were killed aboard a Turkish ship trying to break an Israeli blockade of Gaza, the response would have electric. No doubt there would have been an urgent meeting of the United Nations Security Council. The U.N.’s Human Rights Council, on which Libya proudly sat as a member until a couple of weeks ago, would have immediately launched an international investigation which would have stretched on for several months, maybe even years, keeping the issue alive. (Syria is now actively lobbying for the Syrian seat just to make sure that the voice of human rights violators is not weakened on the council.)
NGOs around the world would have issued angry

Before the protests at Tahrir Square that toppled the Mubarak regime last month, many Egyptian activists were convinced that violence was the only strategy that would work against such a ruthless dictator. They also thought that only their Islamic faith and determination could motivate the brave revolutionaries to dare to fight against him. They imagined that their acts of terrorism — against the regime and against the “far enemy” of America that they assumed was propping up the Mubarak system — would eventually lead to a massive revolt that would bring the dictatorship to an end.
That did not happen. They certainly tried, carrying out their terrorist acts with a bloody

Throughout the 18 days of protests, which began on January 25, Egyptians demanded the “fall of the regime.” And while February 11 was celebrated like any major feat, most realize that the end of a regime is not simply the fall of its patriarch, but rather the dismantling of the structure that anchored him. For this reason, one of the earliest demands of the revolutionaries was the amendment of the constitution to guarantee Egyptians equal opportunities for political participation. Many months before the revolution, the National Association for Change (NAC) initiated a campaign to collect 1 million signatures demanding constitutional amendments that would reverse the numerous prohibitive clauses which made democracy impossible and concentrated power in the hands of the formerly ruling National Democratic Party (NDP).
Shortly after president Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, in a step to address the revolution’s demands, the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces appointed a committee led by Chancellor Tareq Bishri to review the constitution and draft amendments to open up parliamentary and presidential election

My friend Anne-Marie Slaughter, former Director of Policy Planning at the State Department and now back teaching at Princeton University, has written a compelling, passionate call for the US to immediately push for a UN Resolution to impose a no-fly zone over Libya. She outlines the reasons some are reticent about a no-fly zone, but in her response to critics, she doesn’t solve the core problem that a no-fly zone doesn’t help the Libyan opposition prevail.
While Slaughter doesn’t refer to me specifically, her arguments tick through many of the issues I raised in this video commentary as well as from my essay on the BBC’s site. Here too is a clip outlining some of these thoughts on Al Jazeera. I think she did a good job of listing the points that the no-fly zone opponents have been making.
Let me go quickly through and respond point by

Charlie Sheen has called those in line for the iPad 2 “trolls” – setting off a wave of queues for the iPad 3. The iPad 3 is not due out until November, but that is not stopping these hearty souls with tiger blood running through their veins.
“Why would I want a half-baked product that Apple withheld key features from?” asked Jermaine Korla, a college student who has the 214th place in the iPad 3 line on 5th Avenue and 59th Street. Korla and the others are hoping to pressure Apple to release the iPad 3 ahead of schedule and are threatening to borrow tactics from protesters in Egypt and other countries.
Many have called for a “Release the 3″ Day at 1 infinite loop at Apple Headquarters in Silicon

I recorded a few minutes of comments outlining my concerns over the Libya No-Fly Zone debate.
In short, a no-fly zone is a high cost, low return strategy that doesn’t necessarily create a military tipping point in favor of the Libyan opposition. Gaddafi is at war with his own people, and it’s natural and important to try and protect and help unarmed protesters and innocent victims — but a no-fly zone may harm the situation more than help.
If the US and NATO impose a no-fly zone, it gives Gaddafi a frame he thrives in: Libya against what he calls the imperialistic and neo-colonial interventions of evil America and the West. Last week at the TED 2011 meeting in Long Beach, Al Jazeera Director General Wadah Khanfar underscored the significance that the protests shaking the entire Middle East were occurring without the clutter and distraction and potential delegitimization of foreign intervention.
This is important. A no-fly zone changes what appears on TV and changes the entire

There is a lot of unrest in the world right now, and it seems there are forces that may be pushing some long-established dictatorships toward change. Therefore, it could perhaps be helpful to provide some sort of barometer for those who might, in the future, be experiencing democracy for the first time. A handy guidebook, if you will, to some of the more common characteristics of the democratic society; so that the transitional period from one form of government to the other can be more effectively finessed for the average citizen. It is in this spirit that the following list is offered.
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Your Leaders Become Much More Creative Liars
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First Slide
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Once it’s clear that nobody is going to stand for the my-way-or-the-highway tactics of an autocrat, you will notice that the top dogs in a democracy come out with some mind-bending insults to your intelligence that nobody but you seems to

Thanks to my friends at the Gallup Organization, our partner around the new Gallup-Operation HOPE Financial Literacy Index, I now have the data-backed evidence to “make the case” for the power of innovation and ideas in the success of nations; here in America and around the world.
Based on verifiable data, from 1963 through 2009, there were 4.5 million total patents granted globally, with more than 2.6 million of those patents originating here in the United States, or almost 2/3rd’s of all world patents. News flash: The U.S. also happens to be the largest economy in the world. Now stay with me here.
Within the United States, California has more than 450,000 total patents, or 20% of all

How cheered Libya’s reeling opposition must feel now that they know that the White House is dispatching Secretary of State Clinton to meet with them during her trip to Tunisia and Egypt to have a post-revolutionary exchange of views.
As they lose ground and are surely being overrun, the freedom fighters must also be overwhelmed with gratitude that NATO’s Action Committee is meeting to exhaust as much time as may be needed to render a “no fly zone” an exercise in futility.
And as Colonel Gaddafi’s forces continue to hammer them, his opponents must be toasting to the generous statements of concern emanating from the White House asserting that all options are on the table to come to their rescue.
After all, we really do care that Gaddafi is killing his people with the aid of other megalomaniac