The results have been overwhelmingly in favour of Barak Obama - 60% of those polled said that they would prefer an Obama/Biden ticket. McCain/Palin only mustered a measly 10% of the vote, while 121 people (30%) voiced the fact that they “didn't care”. I guess the US Election process is a tiring affair…

I decided it would be interesting to see if the mood had changed since we last did a poll for Super Tuesday in February. Here are the results:

It seems the elections are the Democrats to lose (if the folks of Qatar Living have anything to say about it!

Al Jazeera had its crew at a small town in Ohio and here are some reactions:

Palestinian/Jordanian Hala, writing on Soul Blossom, reacts to this video as follows:

Other than WOW, I have nothing to say. I am almost sure Obama will get assassinated if he becomes president. What gets to me is that what people think is simply untrue. Oh Gosh. Stupid
people, at least know what you are talking about; he is not Muslim neither Arab. Also, being black does not mean he will oppress whites. Even though it is sarcastic to think that many years ago, whites had the right to discriminate against blacks
openly … So there you have it, the most powerful nation in the world is still full of hatred, injustice, and racism. It was
hidden, but now it slowly is coming out. Scary.

Writing at No Longer at Ease, in Doha, Qatar, Abdurahman sheds more light on the video:

A report on the role of race (and racism) in the US election by Al Jazeera English's Casey Kaufman received more than a million views, and was written about in Washington post. Casey speaks to people attending a Sarah Palin rally and most of them have clearly racist feelings Obama, here is some of what they've said:

From an older white woman: “I'm afraid if he wins, the black [sic] will take over. He's not a Christian. This is a Christian nation! What is our country gonna end up like?”

An older white man: “When you got a Negro running for president, you need a first-stringer. He's definitely a second-stringer.”

A young white man holding a child: “He seems like a sheep — or a wolf in sheep's clothing to be honest with you. And I believe Palin — she's filled with the Holy Spirit, and I believe she's gonna bring honesty and integrity to the White House.”

An older white man: “He's related to a known terrorist, for one.”

An older white man: “He is friends with a terrorist of this country!”

An older white man: “He must support terrorists! You know, uh, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. And that to me is Obama.”

A young white woman: “Just the whole, Muslim thing, and everything, and everybody's still kinda — a lot of people have forgotten about 9/11, but . . . I dunno, it's just kinda . . . a little unnerving.”

A white woman: “Obama and his wife, I'm concerned that they could be anti-white. That he might hide that.”

An older white woman: “I don't like the fact that he thinks us white people are trash . . . because we're not!”

A Political Glimpse from Ireland, meanwhile, posts this shocking video showing supporters at a Sarah Palin rally in Johnstown, PA:

Tune in to listen to people calling Obama a Muslim, terrorist and a baby killer, among other descriptive cliches. Did I hear someone yell ‘Barak Mohammed Obama?'

On racism in the campaign, Malcolm Clark from the UK, who blogs at SixFifty notes after watching the final presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain:

Firstly, was McCain failing to directly and unequivocally “repudiate” (that his word for what he wanted Obama to do on several other matters) the worst excesses of the racism and threats of violence made by Republican supporters at some rallies.  Instead, McCain was happy to “say, categorically, I’m proud of the people that come to our rallies.”   McCain should rightly take a lot of stick on that.  And it is why the perversion of the McCain campaign slogan is so apt: The Hate Talk Express.

In conclusion, Eatbees from Morocco says:

Obama is pretty well immunized by now against attacks on his character, because the American people have seen him respond calmly under pressure, while McCain is the one who seems erratic and radical; and most Americans are sick of manipulation based on fear, having seen where it leads, to war and economic collapse, so they are eager to reject it on election day. It didn’t work in 2006 against Congressional Democrats, and it won’t work against Obama unless he does something completely out of character between now and November 4 to destroy people’s trust.
If that is all McCain has to hope for, he has lost the election.

When it came to news coverage of the US presidential conventions, my favorite channel was Al Jazeera. I loved not only how much attention it devoted to each convention and the electoral process, but also how it incorporated Arab-American delegates and party activists as commentators. Al Jazeera covered the conventions extensively during Arab World primetime hours - I watched an online stream at work one afternoon, transfixed by the top-of-the-hour live report and the detailed explanation of everything minutely related to the election, from swing states to House and Senate majorities.

Al Jazeera’s tag lines were just as dramatic as CNN’s, and perhaps for me more fun because they looked fresher in Arabic. The Democratic Convention offered: “Obama and the Democrats: Eyes on the Presidency” (3oyoun 3ala al-ri2asa); “Before the Decision” (qabl al-7asm); “seesaw states” (wilayat al-taraju7); and of course, the great electoral tradition of “Mutual Exchange of Revelation of Political Defects” (tabadul kashf 3awrat siyasiya”.

And the Republican Convention, of course, had Sarah Palin. Al Jazeera, like the US news channels, took her very seriously, and spent considerable time and effort introducing her to its viewers:

Here’s what the text above says:

Sara Palin

Republican candidate for the position of vice president in the American presidential election

Elected in 2006 as the youngest and first woman to the office of governor of Alaska

First woman to be a candidate on the Republicans’ ticket for the American presidential elections

Opposes the right of abortion

Delineated authority of the large oil companies in their attempts to try to develop [oil] wells to capacity

(I may have elided the details of the last point, but that’s the gist of it. If anyone feels strongly that nufudh and ta7adat should be treated differently, I am more than open to another translation.)

To me, this list is very interesting, because it shows Al Jazeera’s view that these are the four most salient pieces of information for Arabic-speaking viewers looking to know more about Governor Palin. (I have more to say about the Arabic words for terms like “vice president”, but I will save those comments for tomorrow’s post.) I’m not surprised that abortion plays such a large role here - I suspect that her firm anti-abortion stance would make her popular with devout and/or conservative viewers, Christian and Muslim. And I guess I’m not surprised about the other points: she is the first woman to govern Alasak and to serve on the GOP presidential ticket, and oil and energy issues generally are certainly playing a major role in this campaign. But I’m having a hard time seeing this as sufficient. I keep imagining someone in the Hawran or Khartoum or the Metn saying to him/herself the next time he/she hears Palin’s name: oh yes, she’s the anti-abortion one who is the first conservative woman candidate for vice-president - and she’s young. On the other hand, I suppose its better than she’s the one with the pregnant teen-ager, which story hadn’t broken at the time I took this photograph, but which certainly dominated the US news.

But all these tags and bullet points, interesting though they were to me, were mere background to the main component of Al Jazeera’s convention coverage: live reporting from the convention hall, with an on-the-scene anchor, instant translation of the major speeches and commentators giving their analysis from a set of “directors’ chairs” positioned in front of the convention floor.

The anchor was a regular Al Jazeera correspondent, whose name I unfortunately do not remember. And the commentators were Arab-Americans who were at the convention either as delegates or party activists.

Here’s one of the Democrats, Saba Shami:

I confess that I hadn’t heard of him before Al Jazeera, but he is evidently a Palestinian-American who emigrated to the US in the 1970s and who has been very active in Virginia politics, and in encouraging Arab-Americans to take part in the political process. (You can read a 2004 interview that the BBC conducted with him here.)

And here is one of the Republicans, David Ramadan:

I hadn’t heard of Ramadan either, but he is a Lebanese-American who emigrated in the mid-1980s and is also very active in Virginia politics. (You can read a recent interview that Al Jazeera English conducted with him here.)

Here they are together, offering a very clear example of the channel’s commitment to broadcasting “the opinion … and the other opinion”. I took four pictures of them debating, and all look much like this one: intense exchange of opinions with many hand gestures:

I love this. I love that Al Jazeera, with its massive viewership, dedicated so much time to broadcasting the US political process in action: the pageantry of it, the goofiness of it, the tedium of it - not to mention the nitty-gritty of showing what states might vote which way, and what that will mean for the future president’s ability to work with Congress to pass good laws.

And I love even more that the channel found these and other active Arab-American citizens to explain, comment on, and argue over the process and the candidates. I do have my own personal feelings about who I will vote for in November, but I think that in this election we have two very good, intelligent, sincere, un-corrupt candidates. And what I believe most of all is that our country gets stronger whenever more citizens engage with the political process. I hope that Al Jazeera’s coverage gives viewers outside the US a sense of what our political process really looks like:no “99% of the vote” victories, on the one hand; and no Jewish cabals, on the other (and on my secret third hand: the acknowledgement that yes, both parties’ conventions could stand a little less spectacle and a little more grassroots groundedness).

And I hope that viewers inside the US, or coming to the US, see Shami, Ramadan, and the channel’s other commentators as men who they might emulate. Arab-Americans have been largely invisible as a political constituency, which means that politicians and political parties have done little to address their particular needs, whether these be an end to racial profiling or incentives to public schools that include Arabic in their roster of foreign languages - or whether these be changes to current immigration laws or to foreign aid allocations in the Middle East.

Joining a political party, going to community board meetings and political meetings, hosting fundraisers, door-knocking for candidates - all these are signs of active citizenship. And all these are ways to raise the profile of Arab-Americans with both parties, as a constituency whose votes and whose support are an important segment of the larger US community.

Just look at this report on the Qatari newspaper Al-Watan which explains that The U.S. is reviewing its plan and policies against Syria saying:

The U.S. policy of blockade, punishments and isolation of Syria brought negative results and were counterproductive, American policy advisors think that it is the time to negotiate with Syria…

I just read on an Arabic forum that Hezbollah is right now interested to find a solution for the Lebanses crisis than ever, to block the Saudi prince Bandar [head of the Saudi national security and Bush's close friend] attempts to wage a sectarian tension between Lebanese factions.

Egyptian No1 writer Fahmi Hawaidi wrote a good article today called “An attempt to understand what happened in Lebanon“, with an excellent start:

What happened in Lebanon is bad, but the worst is how the Arabs approached the crisis on the both fronts; politically and the media….with the pro-government teams suddenly brought the question of Hezbollah communication network that exists for 20 year..and suspicious Americans military movement at the Lebanese shores .. [These reasons] pushed Hezbollah to engage in a preemptive attack…

Also in his weekly program on Aljazeera [part-1, part-2], Mohamed Hassanein Heikal revealed few secrets about the assassinated Lebanese PM Rafik Hariri [in part-2] saying:

Hariri was a Saudi nationality and never had a Lebanese nationality because the Saudi law prevents the citizens from obtaining double nationality…. I met him in house in Paris and he told me that being the Lebanese prime Minister cost me 1 milliard dollar.

As for Azzaman report, quoting Syrian sources that Arab nationality arrested in Syria with connection to Mughniyah’s assassination, I said that before, he is a Saudi nationality.

He asked me who do I support, Obama? Clinton? McCain? I looked at him puzzlingly. I don’t give a damn I said.

…was Iraqi blogger Neurotic Iraqi Wife's response to a question from an American colleague in the protected Green Zone. After quizzing him about Iraq and the affiliation of its Prime Minister, Neurotic Iraqi Wife notes:

If YOU don’t know about MY country’s politics, why SHOULD I, be interested in yours? I only said that to get on his nerves and make him regret talking to me in the first place. Well, no, no, you should care, he said. I shook my head, look, be it Obama, McCain, or Clinton, they are ALL the same for me. Be it a black man, a white woman, or a yellow transvestite, I don’t care. I honestly don’t cuz at the end of the day, none of them can fix whats broken. And Iraq IS broken. If they pull the troops, we are doomed, if they keep the troops we are doomed. Solution is not in their hands anymore. It used to be one day, but they missed that train. They either missed the train, or they skipped the train, Im still debating that with myself.

The solution is with none other than the Iraqis themselves. Surge or no surge, it stopped making a difference. Kinda like making chocolate mouse. Key ingredient is using COLD CREAM. If you use room temperature cream instead, no matter how much you beat it, it will never end up as fluffy as the cold cream, hence you end up with something other than mousse, more like a pudding. So no, Im not gonna lose any sleep over the elections.

And that isn't her opinion alone. She explains:

Ask any “ordinary” Iraqi working with me about the US elections, they will simply tell you they don’t really care. All they want is for their Iraq to become whole again. Bush Senior, messed us up. Bill Clinton, messed us up. Bush Junior F’ed us up. I wander whose turn is it next. Eenee Meenee Mynee Mo…

Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi who immigrated to the US in 2005, says the 2008 presidential elections will not bring anything new to US foreign or domestic policy.

He further adds, and with more optimism:

We will see a continuation of the old strategies, with some minor differences in marketing them.

Someone like me who was in Baghdad while the first Bush, then Clinton, then the second Bush dropped bombs on our neighborhoods realises that there is not a “dime's worth of difference” between the two ruling parties and their one foreign policy.

But in the middle of my frustration, the last few weeks gave me hope that a better future is still possible - should a third party emerge.

The growing support for principled leaders such as Ron Paul and Ralph Nader is a great sign that non-interventionists from the “right” and “left” do exist, and a sign that changing the US regime through a strong third party is possible.

I see light at the end of the tunnel and I see an achievable goal of getting five per cent of the general vote that would qualify the third party for federally distributed public funds in the next general elections.

That way, a third party can have a foothold that might be the space for a political revolution to take place, one day in the future.

Meanwhile in Qatar, Iraq was off the radar at the Brookings Institution's annual US-Islamic World Forum, notes Abu Aardvark, who attended the event. He explains:

The US elections absolutely dominated the conversations, with Obama the runaway favorite. Most of the Arab participants I talked to seemed fascinated by Obama, and frightened by McCain (though one or two seemed worried about how Democrats would deal with Iran - a point to which I'll be returning soon). Clinton rarely came up at all, one way or the other. Contrary to the odd but predictable notion now making the rounds, of the forty-plus Arab participants, journalists and local Qataris who I asked, not a single one mentioned “Obama's really a Muslim” as the reason for their support. A lot of people expressed their doubts that Obama would really be “allowed” to win. The highlight for me came when I had the honor of introducing Obama adviser Susan Rice to the Egyptian human rights activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who had written a series of cautiously enthusiastic articles about Obama in a Qatari newspaper.

Israel:

From Israel, Aussie Dave finds the parallel ridiculous to say the least. He writes:

“Kosovo is not better than us. We deserve independence even before Kosovo, and we ask for the backing of the United States and the European Union for our independence.”

- Yasser Abed Rabbo, aide to PA leader Mahmoud Abbas

The sad thing is, he probably believes it.

I honestly can’t think of one reason why the so-called palestinians deserve independence. As I have argued time and time again, even if you acknowledged they were a distinct nation entitled to self-determination in the historical homeland of the Jews, they have forfeited any right to independence through their morally reprehensible behavior.

Yael, takes another stance, saying:

This little new country, like our own, is going to have rough going. I wish them the best and hope that they, as we have, will survive. I hope that both Kosovo and our own country in the future will have peace with our neighbours, even if it is a cold and not at all friendly peace, but a peace and cessation of violence nonetheless. Congratulations Kosovo. Welcome to the world of nations. Welcome, too, to the reality of that world that is not necessarily something to celebrate. I hope that you and your nation not only survive but find peace and prosperity sooner than our little nation which, after 60 years, is prospering but still attacked from nearly all sides. I do indeed wish you luck new little country and I think that you will need it.

Qatar:

Abdulrahman Warsame, who based in Qatar, also hopes the best for the people of Kosovo - but for different reasons. He explains:

The long wait is over. It's a great moment, how often do you see a new country born, and what if it's a predominantly Muslim country in the heart of Europe?

EU and US recognition is expected to come tomorrow, together with many Muslim countries. Russia and Serbia have made it clear that, though unable to stop Kosovo from becoming independent, they'll make it painful for the kosovars.

Looking at the bright side, ‘Aqoul comments on Qatar's Al Jazeera coverage, saying:

A brief note, the coverage today of the Kosovo declaration / celebrations on Al Jazeerah and on Al Jazeerah was quite interesting: the actual Sat broadcasts focused quite a lot on the Kosovo-American flag pairing and US … conditional support I suppose. Interesting imagery to be dominating the screen. The US could stand for this sort of positive imagery more often. One does not often get imagery on the Sats of hidjab wearing ladies leaning out of cars waving American flags wildly.

Saudi Arabia:

An even brighter outlook comes from Dotsson, from Saudi Arabia, who is really excited about Kosovo's declaration because of matters close to the heart. He announces:

I don't know much about Kosovo except that it recently declared independence from Serbia and a bunch of hot women came out on the streets to celebrate.

But not everyone is celebrating. Russia is upset because it regards the move as an infringement on Serbia’s territorial integrity. But **** Russia and Serbia and anyone else that has problem with Kosovo declaring independence. I don’t remember Russia protesting when Slobodan Milosevic was busy slaughtering ethnic Albanians.

In short, Dotsson supports an independent Kosovo and any cause where there are hot women on the streets. AND SO SHOULD YOU!

Egypt:

Zeinobia, from Egypt, wonders about where her country stands from the announcement. She writes:

Kosovo declared its independence and became a country the world is divided whether to recognize as independent state or not , even Europe is divided , I do not know on which team my country Egypt will be , but I think it will join the American team in the end and leave the Russian team , not because we are with the people of the Kosovo as a Muslim but because we are in the Same team of the American administration I am afraid.

And Tom Gara makes the following announcement:

I am offering a cash prize…

To the first rapper who uses the line “I'm independent like Kosovo.”

CNN.com sent us its Super Tuesday stats: 97 million page views, 11.9 million unique visits (both are new records since CNN.com relaunched on July 1st), 600,000 live streams and a total of 2.7 million video streams served. CNN.com’s blog Political Ticker generated just over 1 million page views. On air, CNN beat Fox News and MSNBC in both total viewers and the demo.

____

That is huge!