Fadlallah passed away yesterday. I would have commented on it sooner but I was in the Bay area for the weekend and didn’t get around to blogging until now. Contrary to media reports, Fadlallah was not the “spiritual guide” to Hizbullah. He did not establish the group nor did he sanction all of its activities, [...]

BBC – Excerpts: “Ten years on since the withdrawal, the UN together with the Lebanese army patrol the border area. But flapping in the breeze along the fence are yellow and green flags of Hezbollah. Waving next to them is the flag of the group’s biggest foreign backer – Iran. It is Hezbollah that has [...]

BBC: In the upcoming parliamentary election in June, the main Armenian political party, Tashnak, looks set to play kingmaker. The vote of the 150,000-strong Armenian community may sway the outcome of the bitter and close race between the pro-Western government and the opposition led by Hezbollah, a Shia group backed by Syria and Iran. In [...]

Roger Cohen at the NYT: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton grabbed headlines with an invitation to Iran to attend a conference on Afghanistan, but the significant Middle Eastern news last week came from Britain. It has “reconsidered” its position on Hezbollah and will open a direct channel to the militant group in Lebanon. Like Hamas [...]

This past semester I enrolled in Professor Harvey Cox’s “Fundamentalism in Religion and Politics” course at the Divinity School here at Harvard. For the final, he gave us the option of doing a video project or a final paper. My friend and I did a video project on how Shi’ism and the story of Imam [...]

This has probably been the longest while since I’ve updated my weblog. My apologies. I’m in a 6 week intensive intermediate Arabic program and it’s been hard trying to keep up with course work while at the same time trying to enjoy Lebanon. The program, however, is coming to an end, in which case I [...]

This month marks my weblog’s 3rd anniversary. I hope you’ve found this blog useful and thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. I hope you’ve learned as much from me as I have from you. To mark the occasion, I’d like to present a delicious clip on Norman Finkelstein. My posting this clip is [...]

[Although a bit dated, I find this piece on Hizbullah and the aftermath of the '06 war very relevant.] Excerpt: It was this culture of resistance that led to Hizballah’s surprise victory in what is now being called in Lebanon “the Sixth War” with Israel . (A note on my usage of “surprise victory”: If [...]

[The 2006 Israel-Lebanon war ended more than a year ago but I want to bring your attention to the ongoing and disturbing issue of Israel's absurd and appalling use of cluster bombs.] Israel dropped over 1 million cluster bombs in Lebanon in the 2006 war. 90% of those bombs were dropped in the last 72 [...]