Ajami in the Arabic press

Just as I wrote in Al-Akhbar English, and despite stories to the contrary in the Western media, Ajami was largely unknown in the Arab world.  I went through the Arabic press and there was one favorable obituary in the mouthpiece of Prince Salman, Ash-Sharq Al-Awsat, and another in the sleazy, soft-porn Saudi site, Elaph, and one brief one in An-Nahar (the right-wing, sectarian Christian, racist Lebanese daily which is trying to compensate for decline in its readership with pornographic news stories on its website).   But this is typical in the US: they always assume that their chosen Arabs are popular Arabs, with US armies invading.  You know that Paul Wolfowitz predicted that Kenaan Makiyya would become president of Iraq--I kid you not.  And Makiyya, so flattered, that he started to delude himself and started to write in the New Republic (the voice of the Arab people) that Iraqis really know who he is and really like him.  If Ahmad Chalabi had to ride on the coattails of Muqtada As-Sadr to win a seat in parliament, the rest is too predictable.  Yet, the Bush administration was lobbied by Zionists to appoint Ajami as its assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy to improve relations with the Arab world.  I am not making this up.