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"All the Taliban," declares William Martinez, a 24-year-old barber at Le Moustache, a hair salon across the street.

"There are two types of people who use the mosque," she says, matter-of-factly. "The Arabs and the Iranians."

Many here refer to all Muslims or Middle Easterners as Turks, and seem to know next to nothing about their religious beliefs. "They pray to the god of the moon so they only gather at night," says Ms. Melendez.

Next year, the gritty tale about mafia-style murders will become the first Arabic language film to represent Israel at the Oscars.

Impoverished Israeli Arabs shooting one another in the shadow of the gleaming towers of Tel Aviv is far from Israel's preferred international image.

dark underside to the ideal of coexistence sometimes touted in mixed Jewish-Arab areas like Jaffa.

The broad experience of these programmes during the 1990s suggests that externally funded democracy-promotion projects are very good at creating institutions and structures, but less successful at producing sustainable, vibrant and engaged democratic constituencies and civil societies. In other words, they helped create a lot of NGOs, but not civil society.

oreign funding of civil-society groups led to a backlash against not only NGOs, but the very ideas of democracy and civil society. The ex-post-facto justification for the Iraq war as a form of democracy-promotion coupled with the perceptions of Washington’s “shadowy guiding hand” in the “colour revolutions” in Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004) intensified scepticism toward democracy and civil society in (among others) Russia, China, and Nigeria.

A project that has human goals at its nominal centre yet focuses on tools and technologies always runs the risk of technological determinism and indeed fetishism. Moreover, the prior history of “toolbox” approaches to political change (albeit before an era when the internet was widespread) enjoins caution over making the discovery and spread of successful technologies the key to achieving improvements in governance, development and human rights.It may be also that these technology-centred approaches tend to encourage a context-free and amnesiac attitude that ignores the experiences even of the very recent past. In any event, the extraordinary events in the middle east and north Africa fuel the liberation technologists’ euphoria.

"We felt it was important for an Arab country to join and because other Arab countries were not involved militarily, we felt we should," Gen. Mubarak al-Khayanin, the Qatari Air Force chief of staff, said in an interview Sunday at Souda."We are physically small country, but with leadership comes responsibility," he said. "Certain countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt haven't taken leadership for the last three years. So we wanted to step up and express ourselves, and see if others will follow."

The decisions by Qatar and UAE to join the coalition in Libya reflect their strong traditional ties to the United States and their desires to play a more active role internationally.

Qatar's rulers bankrolled the launch of Al Jazeera, arguably the Arab world's most influential news channel and a lightning rod for criticism from the region's autocrats. The network covered the recent Arab uprisings earlier and more extensively than Western news channels, and is renewing its push to get the channel's English-language division onto U.S. cable systems.Qatar has acted as peace broker in Lebanon and Sudan, and has sent humanitarian aid to both Chile and Haiti after earthquakes there in 2010. Qatar's capital, Doha, hosts several branches of American universities and the Middle East headquarters for the U.S. Army's Central Command.Karasik said the Libya intervention is yet another example of Qatar's desire to become "a foreign policy powerhouse."

Egyptians were promised a day off during the second election day and plenty of song and dance. So heavy was the presence of paid bands and dancers, that some commentators noted that the number of those who were employed to provide an atmosphere of entertainment near polling stations outnumbered the actual voters.

a song by a popular Emirati singer Hussain al-Jesmi calling on Egyptians to vote was welcomed by the pro-military media, which also made it sure it was more than sufficiently aired

groups that boycotted the elections felt compelled to make parodies of the song using different lyrics