Jordan has stood at the front-line of the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948, and in the six decades since has been de-mining battlefields where opposing armies once roamed.
Many of the country’s land mines date back to the 1948 partition of Palestine, the 1967 Six Day War, and hostilities with Syria in the 1970’s.
The amount and quality of available scientific data on the global impact of climate change, I rediscovered at a seminar organized by the Danish Foreign Ministry in Copenhagen this week, is staggering. The debate that swirled around the issues of climate change and global warming just two or three years ago has vanished. There is much more certainty now on the nature and extent of the changes to the Earth’s climate that can be attributed to the impact of human activity, mainly the burning of fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gases.
Al Kitab club members (six to 10 people) will meet in a comfortable place (someone’s home, a quiet café, or a room in a public library) once a month to discuss and reflect on a book.
Photo: Beirut by Piax. Tadamon! special edition: entire program is on-line for download.
A special edition produced by Mostafa Henaway, featuring music that spans different eras and moments in Middle East history, music composed and performed during the moments of social and political transformation. Music from the Middle East that either directly or indirectly is a reflection of these critical historical moments, from Egypt with music from the 1950’s and 1960’s that is a celebration of a new era, independent of colonialism, or more contemporary songs that present a critique dictatorship and tyranny in Egypt in the 1970’s song by Sheikh Imam.
Music from Lebanon, compositions and artists that emerged in the context of over twenty years of Israeli occupation and fifteen-years of civil-war in the country. Music from Lebanon that reflects a will of people to not be divided by sectarian politics, expressed by artists such as Ziad Rahbani in the famous song Ana Mesh Kafer, a song which asks how people of different religious faiths can condemn each other.
The Lebanese government on Wednesday rejected Israel’s call for direct peace negotiations.
“Lebanon’s position is clear to all and there is no place for bilateral negotiations between Lebanon and Israel,” Premier Fouad Siniora’s media office said in a statement late Wednesday. The statement stressed that Lebanese territories occupied by the Jewish state are subject to “UN resolutions that do not require any negotiations.”
Lebanon ended the year much as it had begun, in political limbo. In November 2006, six ministers’ resignations paralysed the government and crystallised the two-year-old split between government loyalists and the opposition. A year later, president Emile Lahoud’s term ended without a successor, leaving a dangerous vacuum at the top. As the year drew to a close, it looked as though Lebanon would drift rudderless until either fractious politicians resolved their power struggle, or frustrations spread to the streets.
BEIRUT: Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah cast a broad net on Sunday, vowing that no one could disarm his Hizbullah resistance fighters, recommending early parliamentary elections as a remedy to the standoff over Lebanon’s presidency, and warning that recent Israeli military exercises were preparation for a new conflict.
Nasrallah also reached out to Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, many of whom live in camps near neighborhoods known as hotbeds of Hizbullah support, and voiced opposition to the government’s plans to privatize the country’s two mobile-phone networks.
In a televised address to a crowded Hizbullah rally in commemoration of Martyrs Day, Nasrallah promised that no power could force his group to give up its arms.
In the context of the campaign to challenge the listing of Hezbollah as a ‘terrorist’ organization in Canada, on Wednesday, October 17th, Tadamon! Montreal hosted a major lecture at McGill University as part of Culture Shock 2007.
Upwards of 200 people gathered to hear presentations from Bilal Elamine, the former editor of Left Turn Magazine, currently living in Beirut, Lebanon and Brian Aboud, a sociologist and historian active within Tadamon!. In addition a documentary film on the 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon, “A Summer Not to Forget”, by the Lebanese filmmaker Carol Mansour, was screened for the first time in Canada.
The United Nations has transmitted messages to Israel in recent weeks that the organization’s mapping experts have determined that the controversial Shaba Farms on Mount Dov near the Lebanese border, now controlled by Israel, is Lebanese territory. The UN, which has communicated to Israel that the disposition of the Shaba Farms should be dealt with as soon as possible, has proposed to senior government officials that Israel withdraw from the area and that it be considered international territory to be controlled by UNIFIL.
