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.
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? [...]
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
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 [...]
No hate speech.
Hate speech will not be tolerated anywhere on this blog, period. Comments are moderated for this reason. Comments containing hate speech will not be permitted.
Israeli army fires tear-gas at reporter live on air
This is from Al-Jazeera English. If you don’t get the channel at home, you can download a program called livestation (for mac or pc) and stream it over the web.
Article or assassination, which one needs to be condemned?
In the wake of Israel’s demand that Sweden go against its policy of freedom of speech and condemn Swedish journalist Donald Bostrom’s article accusing of Israel of organ theft, I think it’s important to go back in time and highlight an event in 1948 when Israeli militants assassinated Folke Bernadotte. Bernadotte, a Swede, was assigned [...]
Wlad al-mukhayem/Kids of the camp
I can never accurately express my admiration for children in Palestinian refugee camps. By now I’ve been to most of the dozens of camps around the Arab world, and there is something consistent in all of them. It’s as if from day one children are born with an understanding of their family’s more than six [...]
Feedback to "baseless organ theft" article
I’ve been getting a lot of feedback from various folks in response to my recent article about a Swedish journalist’s baseless organ theft accusations. Most of it has been in good taste, but certainly not all. I’m happy to see that people are discussing it at least. One email that stuck out sent from a [...]
Israelis boycott!
Israelis have now called for a boycott of the giant furniture/home products retailer IKEA and car manufacturer Volvo. This should really put pressure on Sweden to abandon its policy of free speech and condemn the irresponsible organ theft article. Except someone might want to inform the boycott’s organizers that IKEA is actually registered in Holland [...]
Three more tunnel workers killed today in Gaza
Another three Palestinians were killed today in an Israeli strike on tunnels along the Gaza-Egypt border. The young tunnel workers are paid little to risk their lives and dig tunnels that serve as a lifeline to supply Gaza’s population of 1.5 million with food, medicines, gasoline, and other essential items long denied to them by [...]
Cabrini Green, or what's left of it
These were the Cabrini Green housing projects in Chicago. Surrounded by a tight community of mostly working class Blacks while blocks away some of the richest and Whitest areas of the city, the larger area just north and northwest of downtown highlighted Chicago’s racial segregation. Now, these projects that have been around for decades (and [...]
No healthcare, no democracy
Thank god for fucking Rush Limbaugh, because I am fucking enraged right now. I don’t even want to repeat the utter bull shit flowing out of his mouth, and I would usually just ignore it but he and others seem to be inciting a lot of people in the US right now fighting against Obama’s [...]
Been busy
…and traveling – sorry for not updating this blog in a while. If anyone has anything they’d like me to post and is relevant to … well, whatever this blog is about please email it to me. I will update with something later this evening.
Robert Fisk
Many, myself included, have been critical of Robert Fisk’s reporting in recent years from Lebanon. I spoke about him with a friend the other night who made the point that “when he’s reporting during war he’s brilliant, but in times of calm he’s awful.” It seems to be somewhat of a truth in his reporting, [...]
Robert McNamara
I’ve always listened to Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” and imagined that the song was written to people like Robert McNamara. The former US Secretary of Defense has been called the “architect” of the Vietnam war. The war lasted for more than a decade and claimed the lives of millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians [...]
"We share all that we have"
I was very moved by this article that I found on the front page of the Guardian’s website today. Criticize Cuba all you want, but an American like me can only dream of such a system where medical staff put patients’ well-being miles ahead of patients’ checkbooks. It’s quite incredible that despite the American embargo [...]
The Western media and Honduras
I lost confidence in my own intelligence yesterday when I foolishly turned on CNN International expecting to find coverage of the coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Honduras. Instead I found Al Sharpton standing next to the King of Pop’s deranged father apologizing for promoting his record company the day after his son’s [...]