Destruct and detain
It breaks my heart to walk out of my house and see the below. The destruction of some of Beirut’s oldest and most beautiful buildings is happening across the city to make way for new buildings that make more efficient use of the space.
While at the same time the demand for foreign workers is [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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
Theresa Seda fell to her death from a 7th floor balcony across the street from my home.
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.
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 [...]
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
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 [...]
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"
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
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, [...]