David Kenner's blog

Georgetown University's Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, like any good institution, knows that the way to steer publicity toward their work is to make a list. This is the only possible explanation I can conjure up for their report on the world's top 500 most influential Muslims.

Somewhere, Prince Al-Waleed must be pleased that he's getting his money's worth from the $20 million donation he made to establish the Center. Headlining the list is his uncle, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. One can, of course, legitimately argue that Abdullah is the world's most influential Muslim -- he is the custodian of Mecca and Medina and Saudi Arabia has done more to spread its version of Islam than any other state. However, it's hard to read the description of King Abdullah's reforms as anything other than a press release. The report lauds Abdullah for "his ability to enact multiple landmark reforms to fight corruption, balance the Saudi budget, tailor the education system, [and] address women's and minority rights." This, in a country where women cannot drive.

Looking at the list more broadly, there is also a clear bias towards the Middle East (using a broad definition including Iran and Turkey). The top 14 Muslims all hail from the Middle East, and only six out of the top 40 are from outside of the region. Perhaps only a third of the world's Muslims live in this area, giving them an outsized influence on what it means to be "Islamic" in today's world.

The list is also weighted very heavily toward invidividuals who represent more conservative forms of Islam. Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah clocks in at number 17 and Hamas's Khaled Mashaal is included at number 34, but PA President Mahmoud Abbas and IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei -- who no doubt consider themselves good Muslims -- are nowhere to be found in the top 50. Even Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, an adherent of the Alawi sect, is considered too heterodox for this list. That's without mentioning hugely influential figures outside politics such as Mohamed El-Erian, Fareed Zakaria, and Muhammad Yunus, who didn't make the cut.

To be fair, these figures are mentioned later in the report -- a list of 500 names gives room to cover all the bases. The report's title is something of a misnomer; it provides a ranking ofthe top 50 influential Muslims, and then organizes the remaining 450 by subject field without attempting to impose a hierarchy. Nevertheless, it is instructive that the individuals headlining the report are filled almost exclusively with rulers and conservative theologians from the Middle East. In the end, this report tells us very little about the world's most influential Muslims, and a great deal about what Georgetown's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding believes constitutes a good Muslim.

(Above: German free style motocross champion Hannes Ackermann performs in front of Istanbul's Blue Mosque in 2008)

MUSTAFA OZER/AFP/Getty Images

The Palestinian leadership seems caught in limbo these days, alternating between threats to tear down the Palestinian Authority and promises to build up the institutions of a nascent Palestinian state, which will then seek international recognition with or without Israeli consent. Prime Minister Fayyad and the chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat mentioned this possibility over the weekend, with Erekat suggesting that the Palestinian Authority is building a case for recognition of Palestinian statehood before the United Nations Security Council.

If the PA goes through with this plan, it will be the second time a Palestinian state has been declared. The first was on Nov. 15, 1988, when Yasser Arafat unilaterally declared Palestinian independence. Around 100 countries recognized the new Palestinian state, but the declaration had no force on the ground. Israel, cracking down during the First Intifada, maintained a tight grip on all the functions normally performed by a state: they enforced their laws, strictly controlled movement around the West Bank and Gaza, and regulated commerce and trade. The new Palestinian state existed only on paper.

I asked Ghassan Khatib, who was a member of the Palestinian delegation to the 1991 Madrid peace conference and served as the Palestinian Authority's Minister of Labor in 2002, what it would take for a unilateral declaration of statehood to actually have an impact on the ground. He made the case that many of the institutions required for a viable Palestinian state have been established in the last several years. "We have a public financial system that has been recognized by the World Bank and the IMF, and is one of the best systems in the region," he noted. "We have a security system that has been proving itself, and even the Israelis have expressed satisfaction with [its] professionalism."

Israeli officials have already threatened that a unilateral declaration of statehood would be met with an "appropriate Israeli response." They would have a number of weapons at their disposal, most notably the ability to prevent a Palestinian state from providing a viable economic future for its citizens. "[T]he Israeli occupation is not allowing us to deal freely with our natural resources, or allowing us to move freely inside the territories or to the territories outside," said Khatib. There is no airport in the West Bank - though Prime Minister Fayyad's ambitious blueprint for a Palestinian state within two years contains a plan to construct an airport in the Jordan Valley. Because Israel geographically separates Gaza and the West Bank, Israel could easily strangle trade between the two territories and cut off trade through the port in Gaza. And that's not even mentioning Hamas, which has already come out in opposition to the PA's plan.

But Mahmoud Abbas, Salam Fayyad, and Saeb Erekat appear to be gambling that they can go over the heads of both Israel and Hamas by appealing directly to the United Nations Security Council. If they can present a viable plan for maintaining security and developing effective institutions for a Palestinian state, the Obama administration may yet be convinced not to exercise its veto and bless the declaration of statehood. If the Security Council throws its support behind the plan, Israel would be hard-pressed to kill the new Palestinian state in its infancy. That's a lot of "ifs," to be sure, but there is just a chance that the Palestinian leadership may emerge from the current limbo looking as if they had a plan all along.

ABBAS MOMANI/AFP/Getty Images

Models wearing clothes inspired by murals on a portion of the remaining Berlin Wall known as the East Side Gallery pose next to the 'Brotherkiss' mural at the East Side Gallery on its official re-opening day on November 6, 2009 in Berlin, Germany. The East Side Gallery, an approximately one-mile still-exisitng portion of the Berlin Wall, has undegone a year-long restoration effort ahead of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall on November 9. The city of Berlin will mark the occasion with a big event at the Brandenburg Gate attended by European Union and former Allied leaders. The models were promoting the clothes that will be auctioned off for charity. The 'Brotherkiss' mural features former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and former East German communist leader Erich Honecker kissing.

Sean Gallup/Getty Images  

In honor of Roland Emerich's apocalyptic "2012," let's parse out a Middle Eastern doomsday scenario: the dissolution of the Palestinian Authority and the revival of the Palestine Liberation Organization as the primary governing body of the Palestinian leadership. This threat has been wielded in recent days by PA President Mahmoud Abbas and his top deputies, most notably Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, who told the New York Times that the issue surrounding Abbas's resignation "is not about who is going to replace him. This is about our leaving our posts."

In the event of Abbas's resignation, his allies in the PLO would not have much choice but to dissolve the PA. If Abbas resigns before the next presidential elections, which were delayed today because of Hamas's refusal to allow elections in Gaza, the speaker of parliament, Hamas's Abdel Aziz Duaik, would become acting president. That would be bad for Israel -- but the resurrection of Hamas in the West Bank would be disastrous for the PLO. While Abbas is trying to use this possibility to threaten Israel to freeze settlement construction, it's hard to believe he would actually shoot himself in the foot in this way.

From a legal standpoint, the dissolution of the Palestinian Authority actually makes some sense. The institution was set up in 1994 as in interim body during the planned five-year withdrawal of Israel from the nascent Palestinian state, in line with the Oslo peace process. As with many institutions in the Middle East, where those billed as "interim" prove to be permanent (for example, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon), the PA has continued even while hope for Oslo has waned. In the absence of a clear path towards a negotiated peace, and especially following Hamas's armed 2007 takeover in Gaza, the PA's authority has greatly diminished.

Nevertheless, the dissolution of the PA would be a disaster for any hopes of peace, and for the average Palestinian. For the PLO, it would likely mark a return to "resistance" over negotiations. At the same time, the ostensible reason for the PLO-Hamas division would be erased, paving the way for reconciliation between the two parties -- and, given Hamas's decreased popularity, possibly the eventual return of the PLO's dominance of Gaza. On the other hand, a PLO-Hamas rapprochement would strengthen the hardliners in Israel. Western support -- from financial aid to General Dayton's training of Palestinian Authority security forces -- would also presumably decline with the dissolution of the PA.

Now, I don't want to compare the U.S. position in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to John Cusack's in 2012, where California is falling into the Pacific Ocean and an aircraft carrier slams into the White House. But we're reaching a stage when the ground beneath the major players is starting to shift, and the traditional divides may no longer be applicable.

Saudi Arabia's assault on the Yemeni Houthi rebels along its southern border appears to be reaching a conclusion, according to anonymous Saudi officials. According to the invaluable Yemen blog Waq al-Waq, however, we should expect a tactical pause to this conflict rather than a resolution.

The Saudi war on magicians, however, continues unabated -- and the war against the al-Houthis appears to be a central front. According to the Saudi Gazette, drawing on reporting from the Saudi daily Okaz, a Yemeni infiltrator into Saudi Arabia "was arrested in his underwear with strange drawings on his back. He was believed to have been practising black magic on Saudi troops."

Nor is this the only magician that Saudi Arabia has persecuted this week. A Lebanese man was sentenced to death this week for practicing black magic on satellite television, after a two year trial. The Saudi press reports that he was "caught red-handed in a hotel room...with herbs, talismans, and some papers with strange drawings and writings."

Do the Saudis really want to get on the wrong side of the dark arts? How will this affect their success in combating the Houthi insurgency?  Only time will tell.

It's almost as if God doesn't want the scientists at CERN to fire up the Large Hadron Collider.  The world's largest particle-collider, which cost around £4 billion to construct and, by the way, might destroy the world, has run into another technical mishap -- this time caused by "an errant chunk of baguette."

Somehow, a piece of bread got lodged into an electrical unit that is responsible for cooling the collider to 1.9 degrees above absolute zero. How the bread got there is a mystery: a CERN spokeswoman hypothesized that it was dropped by a bird or an airplane. But if the investigation does suggest sabotage, the local bakers' union will likely be a prime suspect.

The United States provides Egypt with an annual injection of around $200 million in development aid -- a vestige of the U.S. wheel-greasing that accompanied the 1979 peace deal between Israel and Egypt. It is the job of USAID to distribute a portion of that money to democracy promotion programs. A recent audit offers a depressing verdict on USAID's efforts: the impact of its programs was "unnoticeable" in improving Egypt's democratic environment.  Of the programs for which USAID distributed funds, donors carried out only 65% of the activities promised and achieved only 52% of the planned results, based on predetermined metrics.

The audit lays the blame for USAID's failure at the feet of the Egyptian government.  The government, "has shown reluctance to support many of USAID's democracy and governance programs and has impeded implementers' activities," says the report. Egyptian delays are caused by a combination of resistance to democratic reforms, bureaucratic red tape, and plain old cronyism. In one example, the audit describes how study tours abroad were subverted by an Egyptian contractor who kept selecting the same people for the tours.  One particular Cairo University professor, the report states, was selected for three separate trips on USAID's dime.

Stop the presses: the Egyptian government is riddled with corruption, and hostile to democratic reform! After three decades of distributing aid in Egypt, these facts shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone -- and shouldn't be an excuse for why USAID has been flushing taxpayers' money down the drain.

Fortunately, in 2005 Congress provided USAID with the authority to issue direct grants to Egyptian NGOs, bypassing the approval of the Egyptian government. As the audit shows, USAID "achieved its greatest success" with these direct grant programs. Direct grant recipients completed 80 percent of their planned activities during the 2008 financial year, in programs that ranged from anticorruption initiatives to programs emphasizing political processes and civic participation. The Egyptian government often still found ways to stymie these programs: in one case, the government delayed distribution of the civic education material produced by one recipient, making it difficult for the material to reach schoolchildren.

However, these obstacles pale in comparison to the difficulties of working directly with the Egyptian government. It is naive to expect a regime that is preparing to elevate Gamal Mubarak to the presidency will be willing to make aggressive reforms. And it is hypocritical for the United States to preach the virtues of democracy while still devoting most of its funds to efforts which have proven ineffective. U.S. policymakers know perfectly well how to design more effective programs in Egypt. They should do it.

The New York Times published an absolutely brilliant story today about the bomb detecting wands yielded by Iraqi security forces. Though the piece is written in the even-handed language you expect from the NYT, you can still practically hear the journalist screaming about how ridiculous this whole subject is.

You have the Iraqi general who claims: "I know more about bombs than anyone in the world."  There's the description of how the bomb-detecting wand works: a human operator, who must be well-rested and have a steady body temperature, inserts cardboard cards into the device, which does not have batteries or any other source of power. The piece even concludes with the reporter's failed attempts to use the wand to detect a grenade and pistol in plain sight on the table in front of him.

When you have facts like these, you don't even need editorials.