‘I was quite horrified to see the destruction’ caused by last summer’s war

By Nichole Sobecki, The Daily Star. Friday, April 13th, 2007

BEIRUT: Radhika Coomaraswamy, UN special representative for children and armed conflict, wrapped up her visit to Lebanon on Thursday after three days of meeting with officials and private groups to address the current situation of children in the country and the continuing effects of last summer’s war with Israel on their lives.

During her three days in Lebanon, Coomaraswamy met with Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, Social Affairs Minister Nayla Mouawad, Justice Minister Charles Rizk and MP Mohammad Raad of Hizbullah.

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By Yoav Stern, Haaretz, March 2007.

Story telling on the streets of Haifa in the early 1940’s. [Palestine Remembered]

A United Nations committee has called on Israel to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their property and land in Israel and to ensure that the bodies responsible for distributing property, such as the Jewish National Fund, not discriminate against the Arab population.

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Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, the Daily Star. Wednesday, March 7th, 2007

Three elements of collaboration between two artists who happen to be mother and son

BEIRUT: Nothing encourages artists to produce better work than competition. Last summer, for 34 days straight, two artists – one holed up in Achrafieh and the other holed up in Sin al-Fil – made drawing after drawing. When the power supply was on, they posted their pieces online, filling their respective blogs with diary-like accounts of living through the war in Lebanon.

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In recent weeks and months Lebanon has faced major political upheaval, marked by massive street demonstrations, international political intervention and a national general strike. Lebanon’s political opposition maintains an ongoing open-air demonstration in central Beirut, which commenced on December 1st, 2006, fueled by popular discontent toward the current national government.

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Rami G. Khouri, The Daily Star, February 3rd, 2007

Regardless of whether the United States’ current military surge and slight shift in tactics in Iraq succeeds or not, Washington has clearly defined and started to implement its fallback plan in the Middle East: an across-the-board battle against Iran. The US has unleashed, or unsheathed, military, diplomatic, economic, proxy, clandestine, and rhetorical means to hold the line against Tehran’s growing regional power.

This is what is called a “full court press” in basketball strategy, where you aggressively harass and push against the opponent at all points on the court, hoping to slow down his momentum and fluster him into making mistakes. As a fan, I have experienced the thrill of a full court press, but also recognize it as a desperate tactic, used when all else fails, and enjoying very mixed chances of success.

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The Independent: Robert Fisk:

Lebanon is a good place to find out what tosh the ‘terror’ merchants talk

So it was back to terror, terror, terror this week. The “terrorist” Hizbollah was trying to destroy the “democratically elected government” of Fouad Siniora in Lebanon. The “terrorist” Hamas government cannot rule Palestine. Iranian “terrorists” in Iraq are going to be gunned down by US troops.

My favourite line of the week came from the “security source” – just how one becomes a “security source” remains a mystery to me — who announced: “Terrorists are always looking for new ways to strike terror… There is no end of the possibilities where terrorists can try to cause terror to the public.” Well, you could have fooled me.

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Globe and Mail coverage of Lebanon suffers from ideological interventions

by Stefan Christoff and Dru Oja Jay
the Dominion

When newspapers send correspondents afield to report on world events, the position is fraught with opportunity and responsibility. Opportunity to share meaningful insight into current events, and responsibility to accurately report on them.

In many cases, unfortunately, other motivations prevail. For the owners and editors of the few papers that shell out for foreign correspondents, the opportunity to shape public opinion seems too tempting to pass up, even if it comes at the expense of insight and accuracy.

The Globe and Mail’s Middle East correspondent Mark MacKinnon has been publishing dispatches on the ongoing political crisis in Lebanon regularly from Beirut. It should be noted that Mackinnon’s reports are often superior to the generic newswire reports carried by many newspapers. Regrettably, this speaks more to the skewed quality of wire reports and less to the Globe’s correspondent’s capacity to promote accurate understanding of events in Lebanon.
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Corey Robin – London Review of Books

Last year marked the centenary of Hannah Arendt’s birth. From Slovenia to Waco, conferences, readings and exhibitions were convened in her honour. This month, Schocken Books is issuing a new collection of her writings, its fifth publication of her work in four years. Penguin has reissued On Revolution, Eichmann in Jerusalem and Between Past and Future. And Yale has inaugurated a new series, ‘Why X Matters’, with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s Why Arendt Matters.

Arendt would undoubtedly have been pleased by all this. She didn’t like attention, but she did love birthdays. Birth meant the arrival of a new being who would, or could, say and do things no one had said or done before. The appearance of such a being, she thought, might move others to speak and act in new ways as well. There was always a certain pathos to this notion. Whatever its promise, birth is a fact of nature. And nature, Arendt insisted, is the sphere not of novelty or freedom but of repetition and routine.

Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the centenary of Arendt’s birth should have devolved into a recitation of the familiar. Once a week, it seems, some pundit will trot out her theory of totalitarianism, dutifully extending it, as her followers did during the Cold War, to America’s enemies: al-Qaida, Saddam, Iran. Arendt’s academic chorus continues to swell, sounding the most elusive notes of her least political texts while ignoring her prescient remarks about Zionism and imperialism. Academic careers are built on interpretations of her work, and careerism, as Arendt noted in her book on Eichmann, is seldom conducive to thinking.

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A report produced by Dmitri Marine of CKUT’s Community News Collective for broadcast in Montreal. Featuring a press conference co-organized by Tadamon! Montreal, Al Hidaya Association and the Council of Lebanese Canadian Organizations [COLCO].

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