Egypt

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremyhunt-scatastrophicmistake/media.mp3″ title=”Douglas Murray discusses what Isis might do next” startat=1814] Listen [/audioplayer]When the creation of a new caliphate was announced last year, who but the small band of his followers took seriously its leader’s prediction of imminent regional and eventual global dominance? It straddled the northern parts of Syria and Iraq, two countries already torn apart by civil war and sectarian hatreds. So the self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared to be just another thug and opportunist ruling over a blighted no-man’s land, little known and still less revered in the wider Islamic world. He was surrounded by a rag-tag army of jihadis, whose imperial hubris seemed to reflect

‘I want a woman to be President,’ declared one of the ambulance drivers interviewed by Sherief Elkatsha for his film Cairo Drive. I don’t think he was joking. He was fed up with the struggle to do his job in the chaos of the Egyptian capital’s streets clogged by 14 million vehicles. Elkatsha’s feature documentary took five years to make and takes us from 2009 through the Tahrir Square uprising up to the most recent elections purely through looking at the traffic, the lifeblood of the city. He set out to give us voices, not tell a political story, and this lies behind many of the films shown in last

It now seems fairly likely that an explosion brought down the Russian passenger airline over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula over the weekend. One Metrojet official has already suggested that the ‘only explainable cause is physical impact on the aircraft’ and they have ruled out technical failure or human error. If the ongoing investigation proves that to be the case, it will obviously have an immediate and catastrophic impact on Egypt’s already decimated tourism industry. A jihadist would have been able to infiltrate one of the country’s supposedly most secure airports to plant a sizeable explosive device on a specific airline. PR disasters do not come much worse than that – and just one

Tunisia is preposterously touted as the one success story of the nightmarish revolutions, counter-revolutions, civil wars, jihadist invasions and Islamist terrorist atrocities in the name of an Arab Spring we are still told represents a thirst for Western-style freedom and plurality. The decision to award this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to the country’s National Dialogue Quartet, for apparently helping the country’s transition to democracy, dangerously perpetuates this myth. The Nobel Committee says that the National Dialogue Quartet was… …instrumental in enabling Tunisia, in the space of a few years, to establish a constitutional system of government guaranteeing fundamental rights for the entire population, irrespective of gender, political conviction or religious belief.

If reports that Pearson will soon sell their stake in the Economist magazine are to be believed, Mr S hopes that the publication’s latest ‘cover’ won’t dent the brand’s value. Steerpike understands that the usually independent-minded magazine has received a number of complaints from readers after they ran a cover on Egypt’s Suez Canal project with the title ‘Egypt’s gift to the world’: Cover of The Economist refers to the new #Suez Canal project as "#Egypt's gift to the World" pic.twitter.com/VCQIWtUV29 — Alwasat Libya (@alwasatengnews) August 6, 2015 This left some readers puzzled as to why the magazine had taken such an overwhelmingly positive stance on the government development, which has made the news

Conventional wisdom suggests that Islamic State and its affiliates have mastered social media. Yet the group’s real talent lies in dominating the traditional media cycle and using sensational violence to goad its enemies into overreactions. Hours after Isis released one of its more gruesome videos showing the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians on the shores of Sirte, Egyptian fighter jets pummelled several Isis targets in Derna. The Egyptians claim to be fighting the terrorists by propping up General Khalifa Haftar’s anti-Islamist Operation Dignity. However, if the Egyptians want a UN-resolution authorising international military intervention in Libya, this must be resisted. It will only polarise Libya’s political spectrum even further, creating a vacuum in which terrorism can

At this point in the war between the jihadist group known as the Islamic State and a US-led international coalition, many observers are wondering how Isis keeps winning. Isis is up against western air power and powerful regional opponents, and yet has apparently seized a territory larger than the United Kingdom, and is expanding into Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, and elsewhere. It seems incredible. But the truth is that it’s difficult to say Isis is winning by any objective measure. In Iraq, the group has been put on the defensive in the provinces of Nineveh, Salahaddin, and Diyala, and may soon face a major offensive on its stronghold of Mosul.

Christians and Muslims in Egypt are joining forces to address the challenge of atheism, according to this news report. (It reminds me of the old headline from Northern Ireland: ‘Catholics and Protestants unite to fight ecumenism’.) Christian churches in Egypt say they are joining forces with Egypt’s Al-Azhar, a prominent centre of Sunni Muslim learning, to fight the spread of atheism in the country. ‘The Church and the Al-Azhar are drafting a constructive mechanism to address atheism,’ Poules Halim, a spokesman for Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church, told Anadolu Agency. His statements came following a two-day conference, organised jointly between the Al-Azhar and the church, aimed at forging a ‘scholarly response’