Arab World

New tune: Osama bin Laden's message of violent jihad has lost much of its luster in the Arab world. Trudy Rubin, A2.

Few of the revolts shaking the Arab world look likely to produce democratic governments in the near term. But even those states with the best chance of improving politically are facing a daunting economic challenge: Can new Arab democracies deliver the economic goods - in time? Most of the Arab rebellions - in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain - have deteriorated into civil war, or regime-led violence. But the two countries with the best shot at democracy - Tunisia and Egypt - are paying a steep economic price for their upheavals.

DUBAI - Activists among Saudi Arabia's women, who can't drive or vote and need male approval to work and travel, are turning to the type of online organizing that helped topple Egypt's Hosni Mubarak to force change in a system that they say treats them like children. The "Baladi" or "My Country" campaign is focused on this year's municipal elections, only the second nationwide ballot that the absolute monarchy has allowed. The election board said Monday that women would be excluded from the Sept.

It was too good to be true. The dream of peaceful Egyptian political reform ended Wednesday in Tahrir Square when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak sent rent-a-thugs to attack peaceful demonstrators with machetes, clubs, and Molotov cocktails. Journalists were also targets. I still have hope that the idealistic young social networkers who organized the Egyptian revolt can propel their country into an unprecedented era of representative government. But that hope hangs by a thread.

When dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia on Jan. 14, it was the first time in history that Twitter, Facebook, and other social media had helped bring down a government. With Egypt now in its third day of Facebook-organized political flash mobs, it may not be the last. Recent uprisings midwived by Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the cable news network Al-Jazeera might not be a "Twitter revolution. " But the Middle East has been shaken, and social media have done some of the shaking.

More than ever, the music of the Arab world is with us, right here in the good ol' U.S.A. The relatively unfamiliar quarter-tones and microtonal quavers of pan-Arabic music may still suggest something exotic to Western ears. But, as the sublime Sunday afternoon performance of New York-based Palestinian maestro Simon Shaheen and ensemble at the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater demonstrated, it thrives in this country. Whether imported via immigration or foreign entanglements, the culture it springs from is increasingly embedded in our own. The 53-year-old Shaheen is a virtuoso on both the violin and the oud - the pear-shaped, lutelike forerunner of the guitar - and a celebrated genre-exploring composer as well as a torch-carrying interpreter of Arabic standards.

We have a poster of a presidential candidate at a bus stop in Philly that was compared by the Daily News to be the likeness of a dictator in the novel "1984. " A reporter once compared him to Jesus without the miracles. He is half white and half black. He is part Christian and part Muslim. Europe likes him, the Arabs like him, black and white Americans love him. College students treat him like a rock star. He is the everyman. He promises to do all he can to bring peace to the Middle East.

Abdul Aziz Said is professor and director of the Center for Global Peace at American University in Washington Jim Zanotti is a research associate at the Center for Global Peace Ever since their expulsion from Granada in 1492, Arabs have been trying to reverse their retreat from history and regain influence over the global trends that affect the Middle East. Several events from the past century - the Great Arab Revolt, decolonization, the rise of pan-Arabism, the assertion of OPEC's power - convinced Arabs that their return to history was imminent.

Israel Insider http://web.israelinsider.com When does the Arab world band together? Never to offer praise and rejoice because of the good that has happened to them, only to rejoice because bad has happened to someone else. The Arab world gathers together in hatred. They gather because of the United States and because of Israel. The Muslim world is galvanized because of the story line in a movie, the lyrics of a song, because of caricatures in a newspaper. They are moved to action because of perceived insult and evil, principally insults and evils interpreted to be hurled at them by the West.

It seems a distant memory now, but only a year ago, the Arab Middle East appeared poised for a democratic transformation. Even some of Washington's harshest critics grudgingly conceded that an "Arab Spring," inspired by American support and intervention, had began to flower. Change was indeed coming to the least democratic region in the world. Lebanon had seen a "Cedar Revolution," with massive popular protests forcing Syria to loosen its grip and pull its troops out of the country in time for new elections.