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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On Saturday 23 December a picket was organized by activists in Toronto and Montreal to officially launch a boycott campaign against Chapters and Indigo Bookstores. The campaign demands an end to the financial support offered by the majority owners of Chapters and Indigo to Heseg – the Foundation for Lone Soldiers. This is a program of financial support for former ‘lone soldiers’ in the Israeli military. (more…)

Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Jordan Times
Hasan Abu Nimah

Finally the long awaited meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has taken place. Hastily planned, it came as a surprise, grabbing headlines that suggested renewed “hope”.

While the media try to analyse it in conventional terms, as to whether it advances the “peace process”, in reality it was a show designed to shore up Abbas in his battle to usurp power from the democratically elected Hamas authority. As such, it represents the “soft” component of a two-pronged Western strategy that includes political and military support for Abbas. (more…)

In the interests of giving a wider range of readers access to commentary and opinion from the Arabic press, especially on current deveopments in Lebanon, Tadamon! Montreal has translated the following article from al-Adab Magazine, published in Beirut.

[Photo: “Because we want to live …” reads a sign on a tent at the sit-in in Beirut, now entering its fourth week.]

by Samah Idriss, al-Adab

“There will be a war next summer. Only the sector has not been chosen yet. The atmosphere in the Israel Defense Forces in the past month [November] has been very pessimistic. The latest rounds in the campaigns on both fronts, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, have left too many issues undecided, too many potential detonators that could cause a new conflagration. The army’s conclusion from this is that a war in the new future is a reasonable possibility. As Amir Oren reported in Haaretz several weeks ago, the IDF’s operative assumption is that during the coming summer months, a war will break out against Hezbollah and perhaps against Syria as well.”

This is what two journalists wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on 4/12/20061.(1) But here, in the heart of Beirut, the atmosphere seems quite different. The Opposition is in the streets, holding a sit-in until the formation of a “national union” or “national unity” government or until Fuad Siniora’s government is toppled. Sunni–Shi’a agitation has reached a peak, despite assurances that Lebanon cannot be “Iraqized” (in the past, we have heard assurances that Iraq cannot be “Lebanonized”). A martyr (whom government supporters described as having been “killed”) has fallen from the opposition ranks. The wounded number in the tens. A Western newspaper talks about new weaponary that has arrived at the Internal Security Forces from an Arab country [United Arab Emirates] in order to counter the influence of “Hezbollah” and Iran. Pictures of Rafiq Hariri are torn apart. Pictures of Hassan Nassrallah are shot at. The student representative in the Socialist Party is beaten up. The Resistance is meant to be in the alleys.

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Info-Pickets in Toronto and Montreal to Protest Indigo Books’ Majority Shareholder Support for the Israeli Defense Forces

Saturday, December 23, 2006, 12:00PM
Indigo Books at 1500 McGill College
(entrance on St. Catherine, west of McGill College)

The information picket has been called by the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA) and endorsed by Not In Our Name: Jews Against Israel’s Wars.

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Gen. Michel Aoun, a Christian, has hitched his star to Hezbollah

Megan K. Stack – LA Times

RABIEH, LEBANON — In these days of fear and distrust in Lebanon, there may be no man who inspires more venom than Gen. Michel Aoun.

Flags of different parties – including Hezbollah and FPM’s –
sewn together to show unity at the Beirut sit-in. 

Since returning from 15 years of exile to the joyful cheers of his followers last year, the Christian leader known simply as “the General” has frayed this fragile country’s intricate network of allegiances. First he formed a surprising political alliance with Hezbollah. Then he sent his followers into the streets for massive antigovernment demonstrations.

With rising religious and political tensions threatening to pitch the country into fighting, plenty of his embittered fellow Lebanese hold Aoun squarely to blame.

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Mohamad Bazzi – The Nation

Ever since Hezbollah and its allies began an open-ended protest against the US-backed government on December 1, Beirut’s gilded downtown–built for wealthy Lebanese and foreign tourists–has become more authentically Lebanese. Where Persian Gulf sheiks once ate sushi, families now sit in abandoned parking lots, having impromptu picnics, the smell of kebabs cooked over coals wafting through the air. Young men lounge on plastic chairs, smoking apple-scented water pipes, and occasionally break out into debke, the Lebanese national dance.

A car on display outside a Cartier boutique in “Solidaire”, the downtown area that has recently regained a more popular character with the opposition sit-in …

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Tadamon! is concerned with the way in which Canadian media are portraying current events in Lebanon [see press conference]. The representation reflects only one side of the complex debate in Lebanon, a debate which has tremendous implications for the entire region.

We encourage all who share our concerns to respond to inaccuracies and distortions in coverage of the crisis by writing letters to the editor.

Here are some tools for writing letters to the editor [see below]:

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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].