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Juice boxes and Persian patriots

Juice boxes and Persian patriots

Azadi Tower is one of my favorite architectural structures anywhere in the world. I’m still not sure if my attraction to it is for purely aesthetic reasons or because of the fascinating history behind it. It’s definitely a combination of the two.
Azadi Tower was built by the Shah of Iran in 1971 to commemorate [...]


Football in the Baddawi refugee camp

Football in the Baddawi refugee camp

Do you know why I love photography? Let me tell you.


Ethiopians mourn in Beirut

Ethiopians mourn in Beirut

Ethiopian women mourn for victims of flight ET409 in Beirut


Glimpses of Gaza

Glimpses of Gaza

A slideshow of images from Gaza for In These Times magazine


Plane crashes off Beirut coast

Plane crashes off Beirut coast

An Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed into the Mediterranean Sea just minutes after taking off in Beirut early this morning. Ninety people (including seven crew) were aboard the flight bound for Addis Ababa that included 54 Lebanese and 22 Ethiopians as well as passengers of other nationalities. Early reports indicate that most of the Lebanese passengers [...]


Protesting Egypt

Protesting Egypt

Demonstration at Egyptian embassy for government’s role in siege of Gaza


Speaking to children

Speaking to children

On his visit to Beirut this past week, Emory Douglas, former Minister of Culture and artist for the Black Panther Party, repeated a quote to me that he was once told in the early days of the Panthers: “speak in a language that a child can understand.” He told me that he tried to model [...]


Suicide in Lebanon

Suicide in Lebanon

Theresa Seda fell to her death from a 7th floor balcony across the street from my home.


Hizballah’s Ashura

Hizballah’s Ashura

Hizballah supporters commemorate Ashura in Dahiyeh, Beirut.


Flying eyebrows

Flying eyebrows

Palestinian children in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in north Lebanon.


Photography

Photography

It’s incredible that scenes like this still exist in an age where I can photograph them with a camera on my mobile phone.


Hizballah's call for legitimacy

Hizballah's call for legitimacy

Analyzing Hizballah’s new manifesto, their first since 1985.


Raouche

Raouche

A foreign worker picks up trash near Beirut’s Pigeons’ Rock.


Hamra

Hamra

An image from the upper class and cosmopolitan area of Beirut.


On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall

On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall

Book review: "A World I Loved"

Book review: "A World I Loved"

This is my review of Wadad Makdisi Cortas’ memoir, A World I Loved. I highly recommend this book for people outside the Middle East who wish to better understand this region’s recent history.
Book review: “A World I Loved”
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10869.shtml
“This is my story, the story of an Arab woman,” Wadad Makdisi Cortas states in the opening line [...]


THE GULF

THE GULF

A few images from my first ever (and very brief) visit to the Gulf:


Mohammad Othman

Mohammad Othman

Last Tuesday a dear friend of mine was traveling back to his home in the occupied West Bank after a trip to Europe. He had been visiting Norway where he was meeting with senior officials in his capacity as an organizer with Stop the Wall, a Palestinian non-governmental organization that campaigns against Israel’s illegal wall [...]


Venezuela pics online

Venezuela pics online

Click to see the complete gallery
Finally! After many months I’ve uploaded images I took in Venezuela back in April of this year. It was not an easy trip, I was only in the country for about a week and tried to do way too much. It usually takes me that long just to get [...]


Venezolano cat-fight

Venezolano cat-fight

Beirut rains

Beirut rains

The rains have begun in Beirut. Summer is over and in a matter of minutes the city has taken on a completely different feel. The air is fresher and the water is giving life to the dehydrated vegetation on my balcony and in the park below. I feel like this dude after a hot day [...]


"Why I threw the shoe"

"Why I threw the shoe"

Right after the famous shoe incident involving Iraqi journalist Muntadher al-Zaidi and then US President George Bush, I wrote an opinion piece speculating about the reasons behind the incident (and others involving shoes) titled “The weapon of the occupied“:
But why did Western media constantly explain that shoe throwing is considered offensive in Arab culture? Unlike [...]


Nahr al-Bared protest in Tripoli

Nahr al-Bared protest in Tripoli

Residents from the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon gathered on 16 September to protest the Lebanese government’s halting of planned reconstruction of the camp that was destroyed in 2007 in a battle between the Lebanese army and militants from Fatah al-Islam. Hundreds of refugees from the camp and their supporters gathered in Tripoli, [...]


Lebanon's communists remember

Lebanon's communists remember

Last night, hundreds of supporters of the Lebanese Communist Party and other leftist groups gathered just around the corner from my house near Sanayeh in Beirut. They celebrated the 27th anniversary of their first resistance operation in Beirut against the Israeli army after the latter’s brutal invasion of the Lebanese capital in 1982. The attack [...]