Lebanon is a very complicated place.
You literally need a scorecard to keep track of all the different groups that make up Lebanon's political scene and their shifting loyalties. The three main groups are,of course, the Christians, the Shiites and the Sunnis, but each of those groups have splinter groups that may or may not be aligned with their co-religionists at any time. There are also the Druze and smaller groups, whose very survival depends on being able to anticipate which way the wind is about to blow and jump on the side of the winning team.
Add to this that these are not just political groups but they all generally were parts of militia in the 1970s and 1980s. Sometimes they have to take out their weapons to defend their towns and villages.
And add to this the entire recent history of civil war. Plus the collective memory of being effectively controlled by Syria, by Israel or (more recently) by Iran. Not to mention the French influence on Lebanese culture and the fact that it is a favorite vacation spot for decadent, rich Saudis. More ingredients in Lebanon's ratatouille is the generally liberal and Western-style of downtown Beirut compared with the poverty of the south and the traditionalism in other areas.
The resulting dish is dizzying in its complexity.
Michael Totten, in his great book "The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel ," explains it all (or at least a lot of it) in a wonderful first-person journalistic style.
We learn about Lebanon as Totten does. We follow him as he interviews Shi'ite, Maronite and Sunni leaders and ordinary people as well. We tag along as he gets threatened by people with guns and eventually finds that he is somehow safer with armed people around.
Unlike many journalists who speak as if they are omniscient, Totten lets us see his mistakes and how he learns from them.
He takes us on his journey during the Israel/Hezbollah war of 2006 and mini-civil wars precipitated by Hezbollah in afterwards. He speaks to many people on most sides, and lets us know when he doesn't believe what they say. He and his friends get into dangerous situations that are inconceivable to Western eyes - but he knows that and explains it so the audience gets it.
Totten often uses that skill to great effect. For example, he mentions that he asks Eli Khoury, a leader of the March 14th movement, "What is the solution?" Totten then goes on to tell his readers that this is a very American question, one that he soon learned not to ask, because the Lebanese know that there isn't one. However, Americans are solution-oriented and cannot grasp that basic concept that is so integral to survival in the Middle East.
We cannot solve the problems. We can only manage them as best we can, today.
One other talent that Michael Totten has is the ability to see the entire picture and relate to it. It is easy to get lost in the minutiae, especially in Lebanon where there are so many groups competing with each other and none of them are in the majority. But Totten is always there to remind us what the real danger is. It is Iran, using Hezbollah as its proxy. All of the desire to be pacifist or pan-Lebanese is doomed as long as Hezbollah, effectively an arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, has effective veto power over the Lebanese government and controls its own state within a state. No one can confront Hezbollah militarily nor politically, and as a result Iran is extending its hegemony over the region.
Totten's journalistic style is especially appreciated in the Lebanese arena. While most other journalists will meekly follow whatever restrictions their interview subjects impose on them, Totten reports on the entire context of his interviews, letting us know that if he cannot find out a piece of information it is not because he didn't try. He also lets us know when his subjects are not being entirely truthful.
Totten was not in Lebanon for all the events he covers so he relies on his friends to fill in the personal stories. Also, he didn't talk much about the Palestinian Arab experience in Lebanon outside of broad historical strokes; there is no interview with the Arabs in refugee camps and the Nahr al-Bared fighting is glossed over as a "sideshow." While this is probably true, there are about as many Palestinian Arabs in Lebanon as there are Druze, and demographics do matter. I would love to have seen him highlight Lebanese discrimination against them across the board as well as what they have done to help destroy Lebanon from inside.
These are minor points, though. The Road to Fatima Gate is a brilliant combination of memoir and journalism, and it is highly recommended.
Did Abbas recognize the existence of "The Jewish Nation"?
I reported a couple of months ago that one of the released "Palestine Papers" included this comment from the Negotiations Support Unit of the PLO:
So did Abbas goof in his Passover tweet to the "Jewish nation"?
If there is a Jewish nation, does it not have the right of self-determination?
And if there is a Jewish nation, where is its land? It is obviously in the Biblical Land of Israel, which includes the entire West Bank.
So was this a gaffe, or just another of a long line of English language doubletalk by Palestinian Arab leaders? I could not find any Arabic version of his Passover holiday wishes for this year (in 2009 he gave a more generic message to Jews worldwide, which raised eyebrows among some Islamists.)
(h/t Challah Hu Akbar)
Recognizing the Jewish state implies recognition of a Jewish people and recognition of its right to self-determination. Those who assert this right also assert that the territory historically associated with this right of self-determination (i.e., the self-determination unit) is all of Historic Palestine. Therefore, recognition of the Jewish people and their right of self-determination may lend credence to the Jewish people’s claim to all of Historic Palestine.
So did Abbas goof in his Passover tweet to the "Jewish nation"?
If there is a Jewish nation, does it not have the right of self-determination?
And if there is a Jewish nation, where is its land? It is obviously in the Biblical Land of Israel, which includes the entire West Bank.
So was this a gaffe, or just another of a long line of English language doubletalk by Palestinian Arab leaders? I could not find any Arabic version of his Passover holiday wishes for this year (in 2009 he gave a more generic message to Jews worldwide, which raised eyebrows among some Islamists.)
(h/t Challah Hu Akbar)
After Hamas wins student elections, PA arrests Hamas students
I reported last week that Hamas had won student elections in Birzeit University, which had generally been pro-Fatah in recent years despite a strong Hamas presence.
The PA apparently didn't think much about this show of student democracy, because Arabic media is reporting today that the PA arrested 12 Hamas supporters both at Birzeit as well as at Hebron Polytechnic University.
The reports say that the police broke into students houses to arrest them, damaging their contents.
Unity!
Why doesn't anyone compare Baltimore to Hamas police? (update)
Now that police beatings are in the headlines again, it is fashionable for so-called progressives to equate the police with Israeli soldiers - as if Israeli police and soldiers are the quintessential example of police brutality.
From The Guardian:
To use Israel as the standard of brutality is not only an obscene slander, but it shows how successful anti-Israel propaganda is, and how open and susceptible otherwise intelligent people are to being manipulated by the haters.
Even more absurd is that the standard for treating Gazan civilians like subhumans comes not from Israel - but from those Israel was fighting..
This AFP report from yesterday will get about 1/10th of one percent of the coverage that stories about Israel do:
It is not easy to find videos like this on YouTube in English. And coverage of daily Hamas brutality is minuscule compared to the much exaggerated, out of context and often fictional stories of Israeli law enforcement brutality.
Meanwhile, videos showing Israeli police helping Arabs - videos that completely destroy the lazy assumptions that journalists and writers like Simon make - are even more rare: This is not a coincidence. Journalists are lazy in accepting the fiction of widespread Israeli brutality, and anything that shows that to be false is naturally going to be buried because it is too hard to explain the reality to readers compared to reporting-by-meme.
This video shows an army patrol reviving an Arab in Hebron whose heart stopped after he was electrocuted.
Clearly, these soldiers are frantically trying to save the life of someone that David Simon thinks they passionately loathe.
People like Simon are well meaning - and are literally clueless that they are being brainwashed every day by an army of anti-Israel activists and a complicit media that discards even the appearance of objectivity while willing to accept and repeat the narrative of hate without question.
But when David Simon writes his own analysis for the public, he has the same responsibility as any journalist to get his facts right. His being exposed to lies for decades is not an excuse to skip fact-checking.
The irony is that much of the audience for these lazy reporters want to know the truth, even if Simon doesn't. There is a reason that the most popular video I've ever uploaded, with 400,000 views, shows IDF soldiers acting kindly towards Arab children.
(h/t Alexi, Ian)
UPDATE: Simon changed the text in his original article from Gaza to the West Bank. I suppose I could link to more videos of Israeli patrols playing soccer with Palestinian youths, but clearly he stands by his account of how Israel treats Arabs like dirt, and that turns him from someone who one could assume was duped by the media into someone who is doing the duping.
From The Guardian:
David Simon, the creator of The Wire, has again weighed in on unrest in his adopted city of Baltimore, turning his frustration from the protesters to the “army of occupation” of the city’s police.I will bet anything that the lowest private in the IDF in Gaza last summer would act with more restraint towards those trying to kill him than David Simon would. I would also bet that the same private knows more about international law and the laws of armed conflict in protecting civilians than David Simon does.
“They were collecting bodies, treating corner folk and citizens alike as an Israeli patrol would treat Gaza, or as the Afrikaners would have treated Soweto back in the day. They’re an army of occupation. And once it’s that, then everybody’s the enemy.
To use Israel as the standard of brutality is not only an obscene slander, but it shows how successful anti-Israel propaganda is, and how open and susceptible otherwise intelligent people are to being manipulated by the haters.
Even more absurd is that the standard for treating Gazan civilians like subhumans comes not from Israel - but from those Israel was fighting..
This AFP report from yesterday will get about 1/10th of one percent of the coverage that stories about Israel do:
Police in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip beat and arrested protesters on Wednesday at a youth rally in the north of the besieged coastal territory, an AFP correspondent said.This undated video shows how much restraint Hamas shows towards civilians in Gaza.
More than 400 demonstrators gathered in Shujaiyeh, a neighborhood in eastern Gaza City that was razed during a July-August war between Hamas and Israel, urging reconstruction and calling for an end to intra-Palestinian division.
It is not easy to find videos like this on YouTube in English. And coverage of daily Hamas brutality is minuscule compared to the much exaggerated, out of context and often fictional stories of Israeli law enforcement brutality.
Meanwhile, videos showing Israeli police helping Arabs - videos that completely destroy the lazy assumptions that journalists and writers like Simon make - are even more rare: This is not a coincidence. Journalists are lazy in accepting the fiction of widespread Israeli brutality, and anything that shows that to be false is naturally going to be buried because it is too hard to explain the reality to readers compared to reporting-by-meme.
This video shows an army patrol reviving an Arab in Hebron whose heart stopped after he was electrocuted.
Clearly, these soldiers are frantically trying to save the life of someone that David Simon thinks they passionately loathe.
People like Simon are well meaning - and are literally clueless that they are being brainwashed every day by an army of anti-Israel activists and a complicit media that discards even the appearance of objectivity while willing to accept and repeat the narrative of hate without question.
But when David Simon writes his own analysis for the public, he has the same responsibility as any journalist to get his facts right. His being exposed to lies for decades is not an excuse to skip fact-checking.
The irony is that much of the audience for these lazy reporters want to know the truth, even if Simon doesn't. There is a reason that the most popular video I've ever uploaded, with 400,000 views, shows IDF soldiers acting kindly towards Arab children.
(h/t Alexi, Ian)
UPDATE: Simon changed the text in his original article from Gaza to the West Bank. I suppose I could link to more videos of Israeli patrols playing soccer with Palestinian youths, but clearly he stands by his account of how Israel treats Arabs like dirt, and that turns him from someone who one could assume was duped by the media into someone who is doing the duping.
Those Jewish extremists trying to pray again
Official Palestinian Arab news agency WAFA reports:
Hamas' Palestine Times in Arabic is a bit more strident - and fanciful:
A group of Jewish settlers prayed at Joseph’s Tomb on Thursday, east of Nablus in the north West Bank, under the protection of Israeli forces.I always wonder how they know that the worshipers are "settlers." Oh, right - all Israelis are "settlers"!
Local sources said the worshippers snuck into the site under the protection of Israeli soldiers, prayed until the early hours of the morning and left, with no confrontations reported.
Israeli radio said forces stopped and arrested some 13 settlers while they were on their way to the tomb, although another group managed to enter the site despite the road blocks the Israeli army had set up.
Hamas' Palestine Times in Arabic is a bit more strident - and fanciful:
In a new level of arrogance, about twenty Zionist extremist settlers blew up a roadblock Thursday east of Nablus and stormed Joseph's Tomb, where they performed Talmudic rituals, under the protection of the Zionist army, which was spread extensively in the vicinity of the region amid flying reconnaissance planes nearby.Israeli media is apparently not aware of any visits to the tomb last night, saying only that the IDF stopped dozens of would-be worshippers.
Witnesses said that the settlers went to sabotage public utilities, destroying the electricity grid and throwing dirt and rubbish on the street nearby. They also burned tires during their withdrawal.
Al Saud al-Yahud - Iran's anti-Saudi cartoons
These cartoons have been found in Iranian media:
Notice the Saudi offering a blood offering to the Jewish Golden Calf, and the last cartoon says "Hypnosis Jewish," not "Zionist."
But Iranians insist that they aren't antisemitic,and Roger Cohen agrees, so that's that.
(h/t Gidon Shaviv)