Thursday, August 24, 2006

"In the past month, say Egyptian newspapers, no fewer than 124 babies born in the city of Alexandria have been named Nasrallah. For good measure, one mother called her newborn twins Hassan and Nasrallah. The name of Hizbullah's chief also topped the list of the most popular political figures in Egypt, in a recent opinion poll, followed by two other bearded Islamists, Khaled Meshaal, the exiled leader of Hamas, the Palestinian movement, and Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. By way of contrast, when Gamal Mubarak, the Egyptian president's ambitious son, hitched a lift into Beirut airport with a highly publicised relief cargo from Cairo, text messages in Egypt's capital joked that he was “waging jihad in the cause of photography”."