I have enjoyed myself greatly while writing for True/Slant. The staff, including Lewis D’Vorkin, Coates Bateman, Michael Roston, Andrea Spiegel, and Steve McNally, have done a marvelous job in working with us writers and creating a truly unique platform for us to work in.

To be honest, I’ll miss True/Slant. The idea of matching experienced writers with a guaranteed network of advertisers and readers and a salary is a good one. After all, we’re writers and journalists. SEO and targeted marketing for our personal blogs can reap only so much dividends.

Writing about the Middle East is difficult, even if you know the region. People can become passionate about the most innocuous of topics; throw the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a mix that includes Yemen, Egypt, Iran and Iraq and you have a thankless task. I have received emails from supporters of the Israeli cause complaining I am overtly pro-Palestinian, while Palestinian sympathizers email me to complain I was too pro-Israeli. Both emails were over the same story.

However, here’s the thing. Many readers took time to write in and I’ve received active feedback all over the board. For a writer, there is no greater compliment.

So what now? In September, I hope to rejoin some former True/Slanters at a new — as of yet disclosed — project. Otherwise I’m busy working on a couple of magazine articles. I have an active Twitter account, please follow it.

Cheers.

Image via Wikipedia

Let us say it. Barring the unforeseen, there will be a major Middle East war in the next two years.

On one side will be Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and possibly Syria. On the other side will be Israel… and likely just Israel.

Furthermore, odds are that Israel will initiate the war.

But they will have Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United States quietly (and not so quietly) offering support. The United States, for reasons of its own related to both the continued Iraqi occupation and support of the Saudi and Israeli governments, may even enter the war. If the war goes especially bad, the Arab powers may even enter as separate combatants agaist Iran. Turkey, meanwhile, will say platitudes in support of Iran while profiting off of both sides.

Meanwhile, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is at death’s door. Whoever his successor is will face a lively Islamist opposition movement. Over in Saudi Arabia, the King is gravely ill. It’s a bad time in geopolitical terms.

As much as Israel is disliked in the Arab Middle East, Iranian hegemony is feared more by old-line powers such as Saudi Arabia and Mubarak’s Egypt. Syria is not necessarily opposed to it due to their own unique situation.

In the thinking of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Iran simply appears more dangerous than Israel. Their fear is that a nuclear-armed Iran will upend the regional balance of power and endanger their regimes. From the viewpoint of the rulers, it is a rational fear.

So in a word, the situation is a catastrophe. But how will this war play out?

The Los Angeles Times’s excellent “Babylon & Beyond” blog has a list of possible Iranian war scenarios with a wealth of links. The Los Angeles Times says the unsaid — that in an Iranian-Israeli war, Saudi Arabia will likely grant Israel rights to their airspace.

Israel and Iran share no land border and are on opposite ends of the Middle East.

The Atlantic’s equally invaluable “Atlantic Wire” blog has a list of reasons Israel has not bombed Iran yet that is a must-read.

Meanwhile, the American neoconservative-leaning journalist Michael J. Totten jokingly wrote on his blog that he was headed to the Middle East to bring his readers “pre-war coverage from Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.”

Unfortunately, Totten is right. He may be flip about it, but the coming war will be especially bad for the Middle East.

Israel will suffer greatly. Iran will suffer greatly. The Palestinians will suffer greatly. Lebanon will suffer greatly. At the end of the war, there will likely be no winners. There will still be no Palestinian state and the Islamic Republic of Iran will still be in power. Israel will likely incur the world’s wrath, given the state’s leadfooted inability to gain public sympathy. Odds are that the regional power balance will shift greatly. Odds are that Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranians will suffer mass civillian casualties. Whatever power shifts may happen in the region, millions will suffer. Greatly.

The only consolation is that the war will not occur in the coming months unless Israel decides to attempt a Ramadan attack before the rainy season kicks in. Odds are unlikely, but in the Middle East, nothing is impossible.

This war will be nothing to laugh about. Writing as an American, as a citizen of the one true global hegemon, I’m intensely worried about what the coming years will bring for us. How will America cope when the entire Middle East, from Cairo to Tehran, goes to war?

Image by law_keven via Flickr

Ever have a candy bar made of delicious camel milk chocolate? Or how about a glass of refreshing camel milk? Over in the United Arab Emirates, several firms — including a company owned by the Emir of Dubai — are betting gourmands will go crazy for them.

Al-Nassma, founded in 2008 by Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, has launched a campaign to sell European, North American and Chinese wholesalers on the virtues of camel milk chocolate. As with all things in Dubai, the company does not do novelty food marketing on a budget: the firm owns a farm of 3000 camels and is expecting to produce 100 tons of premium chocolate annually. Rather than producing budget Hershey’s or Cadbury’s-style bars, Al-Nassma is instead producing high-end bars with flavorings such as coriander and dates.

Meanwhile, two companies are applying for permission to export camel milk to the European Union.

If all goes well, Al Ain Dairy’s “Camelait” and the Emirates Industry for Camel Milk and Products’ “Camelicious” will be on European shelves in 2011. Camel milk is a popular drink in the United Arab Emirates and in some other parts of the Middle East: Camelicious produces 5000 liters a day.

Camel milk tastes largely similar to cow’s milk but has vastly more vitamin C and insulin.

A major selling point in efforts to market camel milk to Europe, China and North America is the beverage’s lack of lactose: Lactose intolerance-sufferers can drink camel milk with no problems at all.

This reporter has sampled camel milk before. While it does not taste unpleasant, it’s not going to go in his fridge anytime soon.

But the important question: How does camel milk chocolate taste?

The good people at Candyblog gave it a try:

The Whole Milk Camel Milk Bar is nicely molded and tempered. It’s quite a dark looking milk chocolate bar. It has a distinct, thick snap to it.

The flavor is immediately a bit salty to my tongue. The caramel flavors are noticeable as is the smooth texture but still on the rustic side. It’s not quite fudgy but also not completely slick or oily like some milk chocolates. It’s sweet but also well rounded with toasted notes and maybe a hint of malt and cheese. The ingredients on all bars list honey, though it’s far down on the list and I didn’t really get the honey notes here. The chocolate flavors are mild but more to the malt and woodsy side of things than raisins/berries or coffee.

But standing in the way of Al-Nassma’s cornering of the gourmet chocolate market is one thing: Dubai (and the Emirates) lack a processing facility for high-end chocolate. Al-Nassma sends shipments of camel milk to Vienna, where high-end manufacturer Manner processes the chocolate and sends the bars back to Dubai to have flavoring added.

Al-Nassma is opening retail outlets throughout the UAE and is beginning to sell their chocolates through retailers such as Harrods in London; Americans eager to give camel milk chocolate a shot can contact San Francisco store Chocolate Covered, who already stock them.

Sheikh al-Maktoum, Al-Nassma’s founder, is widely believed to have causd Dubai’s economic meltdown through his poor business decisions.

Image via Wikipedia

92,000 documents. This week, Wikileaks unloaded on the world the greatest leak since the Pentagon Papers. On one level, the five years of secret documents obtained by Wikileaks and released in conjunction with the New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel tell a harrowing tale of the Allied failure in Afghanistan. But they also represent a sea change in journalism.

I’ll leave the parsing of the documents — which tell of Pakistani treachery, government corruption and of everything from botched operations to pederasty — for another occasion. What really matters is the role of the internet in 2010.

I am 29 years old, a journalist and a native New Yorker. My CV includes work for Slate, Wired, Foreign Policy and some of the biggest dot-coms in the world. In career terms, that means I have been blessed. I am grateful.

Growing up, my family always had a newspaper in the house. These days, my parents — divorced now — both read the paper online rather than buying a paper copy. For lifestyle and sport stories, they often read the email forwards their friends send them or the content that pops up on their ISP’s homepage instead of reading newspaper content. They’re just two examples out of millions of Americans who no longer read the daily newspaper.

It’s no secret that the journalism business is a mess. Publications are folding, salaries are getting slashed, the old guard is regrouping in every possible permutation. But newspapers also sponsor incredible investigative journalism. The kind of stories that can’t be completed in a day or a week. The stories that citizens — taxpayers — have a right to know.

In this case, Wikileaks did the work. Wikileaks, unlike the Times or the Guardian, makes no pretense of objectivity. They are expressly partisan, expressly anti-war. Every time I read about Wikileaks, it seems like they stepped out of a 1990s Bruce Sterling story. In fact, hell, they are the dream of the old cyberpunk aesthetic writ large. They’re also saving investigative journalism.

I started my BA at the relatively late age of 20. I studied journalism at Temple University in Philadelphia — a school I enthusiastically recommend to anyone crazy enough to consider that career. The learning was vocation oriented — by the time I graduated, I knew LexisNexis and the arcana of Philadelphia’s City Hall inside out. My first major gig was writing over at Gawker Media’s Wonkette during the 2004 Presidential Election. Me and about a third of my classmates stumbled into digital journalism; most of the others fell into print. The print journalists seemed to denigrate the web journalists with the claim that “blogs weren’t journalism.” The only problem is that most of the web isn’t blogs… and that blogs are just a platform, rather than a genre. Thousands upon thousands of journalists research, source and verify stories that are published only on the web each day. I should know; I’m one of them.

The variety of original information and research posted to the web is staggering. Covering the Middle East here at True/Slant, for instance, I have become familiar with sites that collect and translate Jihadist literature, clearinghouses for translated articles for Arabic newspapers and offer first-hand reports from warzones. But so much information is only read by experts and enthusiasts — especially here in the United States where global ignorance is an art form.

No matter what, someone needs to keep serious enterprise journalism going. Newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post and The Guardian will keep on producing serious journalism even as they transition from “newspapers” to “brands.”

The switch from reading news on printed ink-stained paper to computer screens, iPads and smartphones is a strange one. In the past it was only the young and tech-savvy. Now it’s everyone. Just as the music industry suffered an upheaval in the wake of too much connectedness, so did journalism.

Nonetheless, a few operations are out there keeping the work of enterprise journalism alive. Wikileaks, ProPublica and the few dozen thinktanks that offer funding for investigative reporting, for instance. But we need more.

In the meantime, Wikileaks is fighting the good fight of allowing journalists to do what they do best — and we can only thank them for it.

Yemen: Beautiful country. Shame about the bloodthirsty insurgents. Image via Wikipedia

Heavy fighting has resumed in northern Yemen, threatening a fragile truce between the Yemeni government and Houthi separatists. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda is launching a fresh assault in… southern Yemen.

Reports of mass violence in the north are trickling up through the world press. Agence France-Presse reports the death of 20 tribal militiamen allied with the government and 10 Houthi separatists. The Tehran Times reports 49 total dead and al-Arabiyya has a separate death count.

Adding to the troubles, al-Qaeda has just claimed responsibility for a terrorist attack against Yemeni intelligence services:

The militant group’s regional wing, known as Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, said in an Internet statement Friday the attacks were in retaliation for the killing of at least one militant fighter in Yemen’s southern Abyan province.

On July 14, gunmen on motorcycles using mortars and rocket-propelled grenades opened fire on people inside the two buildings in the provincial capital, Zinjibar.

After the assault and subsequent clashes with police and guards, the attackers fled.

The al-Qaeda press release, which circulated through waves of jihadi forums, was simple and succinct:

“The two blessed raids resulted in the death and injury of dozens of officers and soldiers [...] one of our heroes was killed while the rest members returned unharmed.”

According to al-Qaeda, the attack was welcomed by the Yemeni people.

So, why should Westerners care, besides the fact that Yemen has turned into a safe harbor for jihadists from around the world?

It’s simple: The northern insurgency has existed for a while — Houthi separatists professing a local variant of Shiite Islam are rebelling against the central government, which has a Shiite leader but is mostly Sunni. The separatists are widely believed to be backed by Iran and the government is receiving military aid from Saudi Arabia. In other words, it’s a proxy war.

But what is new is the southern insurgency. Northern and southern Yemen were embroiled in a violent civil war for years that is now — as the al-Qaeda attack is proving — flaring up again. Southern Yemeni insurgents are claiming that they are fighting for economic justice against a corrupt government, but al-Qaeda’s local affiliates — who are carrying out attacks on their behalfs — are not necessarily so interested in “economic justice.”

The Yemeni government, facing two separate insurgencies, risks becoming a failed state. The worst case scenario is simple: Somalia lies right across the water.

Image via Wikipedia

In Israel, lying in order to get your way into bed may be punishable with a jail sentence. A Palestinian who pretended to be Jewish in order to have casual sex with a woman was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Deliveryman Sabbar Kashur, 30, met an unnamed woman by chance in predominantly Jewish Western Jerusalem sometime in 2008. He told the woman that his name was “Daniel” and that he was “single and looking for a long-term relationship.”

Less than two hours later, the couple was sneaking into a nearby building for casual sex. According to media reports, Kashur left the building without waiting for the woman to get dressed.

Sometime afterwards, the woman found out that “Daniel” was really Sabbar. She went to the police shortly afterwards, falsely claiming that Kashur had violently raped her. Court proceedings went forward.

Eventually, even after the truth (so as it may) of the event transpired, Kashur accepted a plea bargain of 18 months in prison for “rape by deception” rather than risking a longer sentence:

Prosecutors acknowledged that the sex was consensual, but accused him of misrepresenting himself.

The court agreed, sentencing Kashur despite acknowledging that his case was not “a classical rape by force”.

“If she hadn’t thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have co-operated,” the judges said in their ruling.

“The court must protect the public interest against sophisticated criminals with a smooth tongue and sweet talking, who can lead astray innocent victims.”

Thoughts:

1. It’s nice to know that “serious romantic relationships” can include having sex in an office building two hours after you meet. Just like in America!
2. If lying in order to get laid was a crime, half the men in America (and Israel) would be in prison right now.
3. Maybe the solution to the whole Palestinian-Israeli conflict is for the two sides to get together and have lots of Isratinian babies.

As for Kashur, his case is provoking a legal furor and will likely be taken to the Supreme Court.

Kurdish supporters of the PKK march. Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife

Syrian security forces have begun a major crackdown against Kurdish separatists affiliated with the Turkish-based Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

The PKK is considered to be a terrorist organization by the United States, UN, NATO and the European Union due to their frequent attacks on civillian targets.

On July 1, 400 PKK members were arrested in a sudden raid by the Syrian secret police under charges of “membership in a terrorist organization, extraction of money by extortion and attempting to separate Kurds of the country along ethnic and religious lines.” Following the arrests, undisclosed punitive measures were taken against non-PKK affiliated Syrian Kurds in the city of Haseke.

Syria’s security apparatus appears to have arrested PKK members operating out of Haseke, Aleppo, Kamishli, Afrin and Rakka.

This follows the killing of 11 PKK terrorists by the Syrian military in June.

According to the Israeli DEBKAfile website, Turkey sold Israeli-made unmanned drones to Syria and over 300 Syrian Kurds are dead and 1000 injured in fighting with the Syrian military — most of them civillians.

Alhough DEBKAfile often prints rumors and unverified stories, television network al-Arabiyya confirms that Syria is using Israeli-operated aircraft and that hundreds of Kurds are dead.

The PKK also has bases in Iran and Iraq and, just today, blew up a major natural gas pipeline connecting Turkey and Iran.

Meanwhile, Damascus is involved in some strange diplomacy for the region: Turkey’s foreign minister and Hamas head Khlad Meshaal just had a Syrian-sponsored sitdown. According to Hamas, the talks discussed “ways of breaking the (Israeli) embargo.” This was followed by a Syrian-sponsored Allawi-al-Sadr summit. Al-Assad is keeping busy, eh?

A shot down RQ-1 Predator in Serbia's Museum of Aviation. Image via Wikipedia

In the boring-but-important department, the US government has approved export of a modified version of the unmanned Predator drone to the Middle East and South Asia. First on the list of potential buyers? Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Prior to this, sale of Predators was approved only to the NATO bloc, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

According to Bloomberg’s Gopal Ratnam, interest is high:

“There’s interest from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates,” Frank Pace, president of the Poway, California-based company, said in an interview at the Farnborough Air Show near London today. The U.S. recently approved the company’s request for an unarmed version of the Predator drone for export to countries beyond the NATO block, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, Pace said.

The company may sell as many as 100 of the so-called Predator XP models that is approved for export, Pace said. General Atomics has sold about 435 Predator series of drones. The average price of the plane ranges from about $4 million for the basic model to about $15 million for the latest Avenger version, according to spokeswoman Kimberly Kasitz.

“Saudi Arabia is a huge country and if they want to cover the country well they alone could get 50 aircraft,” Pace said.

(Emphasis ours).

The non-NATO Predators will differ from the full-functionality versions in several significant ways. Most importantly, they will lack the ability to carry missiles and will be crippled to perform surveillance and reconnaissance missions only.

Pakistan is currently embroiled in an ongoing insurgency against local Islamists while Saudi Arabia is widely suspected of involvement in the ongoing Zaidi insurgency in Yemen.

Drone aircrafts are in wide use throughout the Middle East, with both home-grown and foreign-purchased systems a common feature of all the region’s air forces. Turkey unveiled one of their own just last week, intended for use in the Kurdish insurgency.

Even non-government militias are armed with drones in the Middle East — Hezbollah purchases aerial drones from Iran.

However, Predators are considered among the best; General Atomics’ newest unmanned vehicles are almost undetectable by radar.

More importantly, the propaganda value in being armed with Predators — even crippled ones — is invaluable: Their missile systems are known for their accuracy.

Image via CrunchBase

New York-based Twitter darlings bit.ly may become part of Yahoo.

The URL-shortening service, which is widely used on Twitter and in the larger Web 2.0 world, is reported by GigaOm to be in talks with Yahoo. Here is Om Malik’s take on the acquisition rumors:

Yahoo and some of the other web giants have been kicking the tires on New York-based URL shortening service Bit.ly, according to a few people in the know. The interest in the company has increased over the past 60 days or so. Conversations are said it to be in early stages, and the company raised about $3.5 million ($2 million in venture capital and $1.5 million in debt) in March 2009 from Ron Conway and other super angel investors. Bit.ly declined to comment for the story.

So talks are still in an early stage, if Malik is correct. Fair enough — it’s easy to imagine Yahoo testing every aspect of the service before going ahead. The whole purchase sounds set to be one of 2010’s larger acquisitions.

If Yahoo purchases bit.ly, their newest service will have ties to… Libya. .ly is Libya’s top-level domain and bit.ly pays a token annual fee to a Libyan registrar for use of a .ly web address. According to Rex Dixon of bit.ly, Libya was chosen for the attractiveness of the to-level domain:

We picked the name bitly because it’s short and it is evocative of small bits, loosely coupled, a theme at betaworks. Bit.ly is a shorter url than bitly.com, which we also use, and echoes the name of several micro-blogging services like present.ly, song.ly and near.ly.

To purchase the domain, we paid $75 to an online registrar accredited by ICANN, the international nonprofit that governs internet domains and naming, which is headquartered in Marina del Rey, California, here in the US of A.

ICANN signed an accountability framework with Libya Telecom and Technology in March 2007, which sets out the telephone company’s (LTT’s) obligations as a registrar for the .ly domain and provides an internationally-accepted mechanism for dispute resolution.

However, this also subjects bit.ly to Libyan law and Libya Telecom and Technology’s web regulations. LT&T’s regulations could not be found online, but the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya’s domain name registration regulations specifically denotes that “domain names must not contain obscene, scandalous, indecent, or contrary to Libyan law or Islamic morality words, phrases nor abbreviations.”

Luckily for bit.ly, the regulations do not apply to content: bit.ly is a repository for thousands of both pornographic and anti-links. Bit.ly also operates another service, J.mp, which does not rely on a Libyan URL.

Gamal "Jimmy" Mubarak: Heir to the throne? Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife

Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s long-serving president, has been in bad health for quite some time. The country’s censorship laws make prison a likely possibility for anyone discussing his health in print. Even bloggers and Twitter users who discuss Mubarak’s health too loudly risk imprisonment. As a result, a cottage industry has been built up around Mubarak health rumors in Egypt.

In ealy 2010, German and Russian television erroneously reported that Mubarak died after he disappeared for six weeks.

Mubarak made a public appearance some day after the television reports to dispel rumors, but his schedule has been erratic ever since.

According to the Washington Times, US intelligence believes Mubarak has terminal cancer of the stomach and pancreas. Despite the paper’s sometimes ideologically-motivated leanings, the story appears solid. The reporter who got the scoop, Eli Lake, has a solid record on national security and intelligence stories.

The 82-year-old President is one of the Middle East’s longest-serving leaders; Mubarak has been in office since 1981.

So what happens when Mubarak dies?

We don’t know.

First of all, there’s no guarantee Mubarak may be going anytime soon. Fidel Castro has held onto nominal power for years despite obvious infirmities and history is full of seriously ill leaders serving as figureheads while their advisors “keep the boat rowing.”

According to Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow and Egypt specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, an entire floor of the military hospital in Cairo’s Mahdi neighborhood “was prepared to treat him” and that “I heard that they pump him up with something that makes him able to function, so he can do these meetings and go to these public events.”

Mubarak’s hand-picked successor is son Gamal, a technocrat with support among Egypt’s upper classes. However, Gamal is widely percieved as inexperienced and a bit of a dilletante. When the senior Mubarak dies, Gamal Mubarak — nicknamed “Jimmy” — will be competing with Egyptian intelligence chief General Omar Suleiman and former International Atomic Energy Head Mohammed el-Baradei for control of the nation. Suleiman enjoys widespread military support but is viewed as somewhat hesitant to assume power. El-Baradei has widespread support among the masses, but has limited support within Egypt’s ruling National Democratic Party.

Most importantly, Egyptian law bans el-Baradei, the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize Winner, from running for president in the next year.

Egypt’s largest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood is officially banned but nonetheless retains several seats in parliament. While they undoubtedly would like to assume power, they lack support within the country’s military, upper class and middle class.

Given Mubarak’s precarious health, a betting man would put the odds on the President passing sooner rather than later. When he passes, there will be change. But what kind of change, exactly — a continuation of National Democratic Party rule or a change in governmental structure — is open to debate.

But some things won’t change. For instance, Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel or the $1.5 billion in foreign aid Egypt recieves from the US annually.

While anti-Israel sentiment permeates every sector of Egyptian society, the two countries share a quiet-yet-substantial working relationship based on common enemies (read: Iran, political Islamists). More importantly, the National Democratic Party views the Islamist Hamas government in the Gaza Strip as an enemy; they have often gone out of their way to work with Israel to make life difficult for Hamas.

While anything is possible, the Muslim Brotherhood only have an outside chance to assume power — barring unforeseen circumstances, either Suleiman, el-Baradei or the younger Mubarak will inherit control of Egypt.

Meanwhile, the Christian Science Monitor is anticipating Egypt’s “possible regime change” while bloggers at The Guardian are encouraging Egyptian activists to emulate American hippies. Yes, hippies.

Meanwhile, popular discontent in Egypt is expoding over government corruption while Egypt’s middle and upper classes continue to experience enviable economic growth.

In other words: The next year will be interesting for Egyptians — and the world.