While I am sympathetic to "Souria," making it a political project requires being an asshole -- telling everyone they must possess a different identity than what they currently have.

I vote kunafe, done right.

Good question raised above: there's a KF Festival?

There should be one, ha ha.

The point is obvious -- the media make such a big deal out of Arab-Jewish friendships when they are simply NOT newsworthy. Only the ignorant think they are novel. The reality is that Palestinians do not overly-personalize the political to the extent that they would never refuse to befriend a Jew -- a hardcore Zionist is a different story. This is only newsworthy if you have little knowledge of this reality. Very simple point that cuts against the dominant thinking.

Your real angle here is you hate the politics so you attack the writing, which is why your critique that there is no point is so obviously inaccurate.

We know you did, and we do accept it. I did laugh at the list, though (if you dish, you should take). Thanks for the kind apology.

Can we block your IP too?

That's actually super funny Yasser. ha ha. I am half #2 (but older) and half #5.

Corrected (the grammatical error that is). Thanks!

Get on your knees boy and beg for a state... BEG!

Thought-provoking post, but at the base of the Bahrain issue, for me, lies the facts of essentially minority rule, a monarchy, and violence used against civilian protesters. It's hard not to see that at the core. And if Saudi backs your regime, you're automatically hard to trust.

The regime clearly needs deep reform to become a government for all Bahrainis and increased protections for foreign workers.

http://links.visibli.com/share/41ccdc

US never tried to capture bin Laden. They were ordered to kill. So, yeah, it was an assassination, probably to avoid the crazy show trial that would lead to.

And so much for belief in the ability of harsh interrogation tactics to secure valuable information. Or does the US see OBL was spent and marginalized within a dying network?

OBL's death is like Elvis's. He was a has-been when he went. The difference was that Elvis could still fill a stadium with fans.

Arab politics took a new exciting spin that has no room for the brand of bin Laden's murderous militancy. His far jihad doctrine was refused by the mainline Muslim parties and organizations. He was a failure in that sense.

Unintentionally, he may have led to the weakening of the US in the region. Like a madman, it invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, thereby alienating pretty much everyone. It took out Iran's closest enemies, boosted Iran's influence, which led to Turkey getting regional player status. It's failure to match deed with words against Israel had it looking like a dog with no teeth. And now there is the rise of Qatar, which the US seems to be making a pillar to replace Egypt in hope of boosting its leverage in the region.

OBL's workings may have shuffled things around a bit so that the US had some loss of standing, but the basic dynamics are unchanged overall. And all the changes OBL could take any credit for pretty much settled in his lifetime. So his death comes off as pretty inconsequential at the level of big politics.

Some Al Qaeda wannabe's and other leaders in that fragmented network of killers sharing the same organizational name and ideological underpinnings may try to carry the banner forward, and may even try to take vengeance in bin Laden's name, but his killing feels like the murder of a war on terror relic.

And importantly, the US will not cease its move towards a security state. It may try to generate some sort of vindication from this, but it's hard to see this -- even if we consider it "justice' for 9/11 -- as being worth the lives of tens of thousands of Afghans, Pakistanis and young Americans, not to mention the hundreds of billions of dollars that America could use right now.

I hear constantly that 9/11 changed everything in terms of the security-first mindset in America. Killing Osama bin Laden will change nothing in those regards. I would like to think Obama could use this as a pretense to leave Afghanistan, but that seems unlikely before the elections because of the risk posed by a Taliban resurgance.